D&D 4E How do older adventures scale in level to 4e?

DaveyB · Nov 5, 2008

For instance, if I buy a PDF of an older 2e adventure that's for levels 4-8, how would that scale with 4e, since there's a fairly large discrepancy in hit points and damage output? Under 4e, would said adventure then apply to levels 2-4 or 3-6, etc.? There are lots of old adventures I'd like to use, but am wondering about this; or would it be easier to just replace the monsters in the adventure with 4e equivalents using the DM's Toolkit in the back of the DM Guide and scaling them appropriately? Info and advice is, as always, appreciated!

Victim · Nov 5, 2008

Adventures involving monsters will generally be higher level, often much higher. For example, a lot of the old low HD humanoids gained a bunch of levels. A standard ogre is not really a good boss for level 1 or 2 characters now.

Mengu · Nov 5, 2008

It depends on what you want to do with it. I think a level 4 adventure could easily be scaled down to level 1, and a level 8 adventure could easily be scaled up to level 16. But in order to do the least amount of work, I'd look at the monsters used in the module, see what the level of the equivalent monsters are in 4th edition, and base the conversion on whatever yields to the least amount of manual labor.

For instance if the said adveture involved a bunch of troglodytes, gnolls, and owlbears, I'd scale it to around level 5-9. If it involved drow, ogre magi, and displacer beasts, I'd scale it to levels 9-13.

Gruns · Nov 5, 2008

Formula revealed!!!

So I took my TI-83 and plugged in some numbers to form a function converting old CR values with new monster levels...
Here's the quadratic formula: y=.0362x^2+.4932x+4.301 (Where x is the original module level and y is the level as it applies to 4E)
A quick glance at the formula will tell you right away that even an older level 1 module now equates to nothing less than around level 4.8304 in 4E. The r^2 value is .9246, which is lot cleaner than I expected. When graphed, the function shows a slight increase in slope as the original module level increases. This was expected as the cap increased from level 20 to 30.
You're probably wondering why I went with a quadratic formula over a linear regression: The linear regression had an r^2 value of just .6152 which of course makes it nearly useless as far as accuracy goes. In fact, the linear regression formula of y=5.3497+4.2658*LnX means that the lowest starting value a 4E adventure could have is level 5.3497, assuming there are no older modules with starting level values less than 1st. (And logically there wouldn't be as characters can't start below 1st level).
Glad I could help.
Gruns

Riley · Nov 5, 2008

Gruns said:
So I took my TI-83 and plugged in some numbers to form a function converting old CR values with new monster levels...
Here's the quadratic formula: y=.0362x^2+.4932x+4.301 (Where x is the original module level and y is the level as it applies to 4E)

Interesting. What data did you base this calculation on?

Plane Sailing · Nov 5, 2008

I think that there are a couple of options.

One is take an adventure and use its plot hooks, plot points, maps etc but populate with new creatures of the appropriate level you want to run it at.

The other is to take and adventure, swap the monsters out with 4e ones and work out the level of each encounter and the xps of each encounter to give you a good idea of the appropriate level to run it at in 4e.

Cheers

ValhallaGH · Nov 5, 2008

Plane Sailing said:
I think that there are a couple of options.

One is take an adventure and use its plot hooks, plot points, maps etc but populate with new creatures of the appropriate level you want to run it at.

The other is to take and adventure, swap the monsters out with 4e ones and work out the level of each encounter and the xps of each encounter to give you a good idea of the appropriate level to run it at in 4e.

Cheers

Another is to decide what level you want to run it at and build encounters similar to the one in the adventure. With creature design as easy as it is in 4E, there's no reason to restrict yourself to the MM if you have two or three total hours to prep the adventure. Heck, I converted an adventure over, and 3 hours of critter creation (including five "classed" NPCs) filled about 12 hours of table time (enough for three sessions if you can't afford a single marathon session like we could).

To answer the question that is the topic title, "What level do you want them to be? Because that's the level they'll scale to, with a little effort."

Gruns · Nov 6, 2008

Data

Riley said:
Interesting. What data did you base this calculation on?

Well, it was actually a joke, but the resulting formula and data are actual and factual.
I took a random array of monsters that were in 3.5 and are also in 4E and plugged in their old CR with their new level. For example, kobolds were 1/6CR and are now generally lvl 1. Ogres were 2 and now 8. Orcs 1/2 and now about 4. Etc etc. I did about 20 different monsters. A lot of the lower level monsters were a lot higher in 4E, but the mid and upper were just a little higher (ex. Bullete CR7 to lvl9), and some were actually the same (ex. Beholder CR13 to lvl13). Now I did NOT take into account Elite or Solo status(as in the case of the elite Beholder), nor did I take into account 3.5 was more or less set with a group of 4 PCs in mind, whereas 4E expects 5 PCs.
In general this won't be an accurate representation due to the fact that some lower CR creatures shot through the roof in 4E, while others did not. Therefore, you would need to plug in the exact CR of the specific monsters in each adventure to see how they compare.
Later!
Gruns