D&D 5E Difficulty of Converting Pathfinder / 3.X Stuff?

[Greatwyrm]

I'm a little out of the loop. Can anyone give me a general idea of how tough it is to port Pathfinder or 3.X material to 5e? I'm not really looking for formulas, but your opinion on a scale of "Easy as Pie" to "Never Again".

 

[Abraxas]

I've been converting Pathfinder adventures (Crypt of the Everflame, Masks of the Living God and City of Golden Death) and The Chaos Scar 4E adventures mostly on the fly with very little pre-planning. Overall, it's very easy and one thing I've found to be very helpful in doing the conversions is Asmor's encounter builder.

 

[Mad Zagyg]

I'm curious what people have been doing when converting leveled monsters. Say, for example, there was a 3.5/Pathfinder encounter that featured a half dozen 7th level barbarian bugbears. Have you just been switching them to regular bugbears and counting on the bounded accuracy to do its thing, or are you adding something to the standard bugbear?

 

[TheRustyOne]

I'm converting Shattered Star, and for example, I needed a wererat with a fighter level and two rogue levels. Takes about three minutes to do. Most conversions can be done in five minutes or less.

 

[The_Gneech]

In a situation like that, I'd suggest either bumping up the numbers as you say, or looking for an appropriate NPC/monster at approximately the CR you want and reskinning a bit, giving them the bugbear "signature" abilities. For instance, you could use the Gladiator on p. 346 of the MM, and just add the bugbear's ambush abilities, darkvision, etc.

Overall, 5E is a much simpler system than Pathfinder, with a lot fewer "moving parts" in the monster creation process especially, so you can easily add or remove racial abilities, class features, etc., without changing the CR of the target creature too much.

-The Gneech

 

[bolo__]

What conversion tables are people using?

 

[Jester David]

Converting adventures? Likely pretty easy. Some liberties will likely need to be taken with monsters though, as fewer beasties are currently statted up.

Converting NPCs/classed monsters. Tricky as we do not currently have the rules for this, so knowing the exact number of levels to give is less precise.

Converting mechanical options (feats, archetypes, classes, races). Much harder, much more work.

 

[Greatwyrm]

I suppose I'll need to be patient enough for the DMG to really answer that.

 

[Uchawi]

It is fairly easy to convert, but there will be big swings in creature or NPC power. So will have to apply a generous mount of DM fiat as you test the results on the players.

 

[Bupp]

I've converted The Keep on the Borderlands and the moathouse from Temple of Elemental Evil over on the fly by just replacing monster stats. Granted, it's a Basic adventure, not 3e, but it's worked well for me. As for the humanoid chieftans and shamen, I've used the NPC entries from the DM Basic Rules pdf and just giving them the racial abilities as needed.