D&D 5E D&D Next Errata or Conversion

[Evhelm]

Apologies if this has already been discussed and I'm simply incapable of finding it (my forum-search rolls are usually a natural 1):

Has anyone (officially or otherwise) converted/errata'd the D&D Next campaigns/adventures from the playtest 5e rules to the finished 5e rules? Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, Dreams of the Red Wizards, and Vault of the Dracolich sound like they were encouragingly entertaining paths/adventures/campaigns, but I don't want to go through the work of converting them to "Full 5e" and prepping to run them.

Actually, I'm still running Tyranny of Dragons, but there has been some scuttlebutt at my table that maybe someone would be willing to run a pre-pub adventure and let me be a player for once (I've DM'd for the core players in this group since 2003; they've always thought of DM'ing as too scary to try despite my best efforts!). I was somewhat hoping one of these "official" adventures may have been updated or at least given errata so that I could gift it to my aspiring DM and let them see whether they want to proceed or not.

Any news on this front (encouraging or not) would be appreciated!

 

[Tormyr]

No official conversions. With the MM it is fairly straightforward.

 

[Evhelm]

No official conversions. With the MM it is fairly straightforward.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm on board that converting monsters is "easy", but I'd think that's only if you know what to look for. Watching the writers of HotDQ trying to explain what their intentions were when putting monsters into HotDQ/RoT makes me think that (if nothing else) seeing the playtest rules will add a whole bunch of confusion for monsters, adjudicating non-combat encounters, and even skill use.

I'm confident that I could navigate the waters of conversion, but I am hoping to gift one of these paths to someone without having to plumb its depths myself, and I still want them to have the work done for them already

Anyhow, if there's no official conversion, do we know if anyone has tried to run them as 5e adventures (rather than "Next" adventures) and maybe come up with a cheat sheet of what had to be adjusted?

 

[rjfTrebor]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm on board that converting monsters is "easy", but I'd think that's only if you know what to look for. Watching the writers of HotDQ trying to explain what their intentions were when putting monsters into HotDQ/RoT makes me think that (if nothing else) seeing the playtest rules will add a whole bunch of confusion for monsters, adjudicating non-combat encounters, and even skill use.

I'm confident that I could navigate the waters of conversion, but I am hoping to gift one of these paths to someone without having to plumb its depths myself, and I still want them to have the work done for them already

Anyhow, if there's no official conversion, do we know if anyone has tried to run them as 5e adventures (rather than "Next" adventures) and maybe come up with a cheat sheet of what had to be adjusted?

i think you're overestimating how different things will be. all of the printed adventures came out fairly late in the process when the core game wasn't much different than what ended up in the PHB.

 

[Evhelm]

rjfTrebor, is that really the case? I hope that it is!

With the craziness of the rules changes even from "late playtest" to publication of HotDQ there were some bizarre and ultimately significant changes to the rules (monster adjustments, "readiness", changes to what short rests could do for characters, etc.).

Has anyone run any of the D&D Next adventures that could attest to their closeness to the finished rules?

 

[Tormyr]

I have Legacy of the Crystal Shard, which I think is the best of the D&D Next adventures (at least as far as the Encounters program was conscerned). I can take a look at it and see if there is anything other than monsters that would need to be converted. My gut reaction is that monsters and magic items are the only things.

 

[Evhelm]

I have Legacy of the Crystal Shard, which I think is the best of the D&D Next adventures (at least as far as the Encounters program was conscerned). I can take a look at it and see if there is anything other than monsters that would need to be converted. My gut reaction is that monsters and magic items are the only things.

That'd be awesome!

When you say the monsters would have to be changed, do you mean the stats would have to be looked up to make them current (i.e. the old version of a "guard" has to be updated to the new version of the "guard"), or would the DM have to find "the new appropriate monster" (for example, in HotDQ in the second or third episode there are some "guards" who should be "veterans")?

...and I also don't know how magic items would need to be changed; again, is it a stat issue or a functionality issue? (Are there wands that don't function as wands, or do they just need to be updated to the correct stat block?)

 

[Tormyr]

That'd be awesome!

When you say the monsters would have to be changed, do you mean the stats would have to be looked up to make them current (i.e. the old version of a "guard" has to be updated to the new version of the "guard"), or would the DM have to find "the new appropriate monster" (for example, in HotDQ in the second or third episode there are some "guards" who should be "veterans")?

...and I also don't know how magic items would need to be changed; again, is it a stat issue or a functionality issue? (Are there wands that don't function as wands, or do they just need to be updated to the correct stat block?)

The D&D Next monsters in the later playtests were pushovers. The PCs had more work done on them at that point, and they were balanced near where they were going to be. Now that we have the PHB, the power disparity is even worse between the PCs and the Next monsters. I may have time to look at this tonight, and it has been on my list of things I have wanted to do, but I make no promises.

 

[Evhelm]

Wouldn't expect any, especially at this time of year. I thank you anyway for the thought and the intention

 

[Tormyr]

Wouldn't expect any, especially at this time of year. I thank you anyway for the thought and the intention

I have uploaded a conversion document for Legacy of the Crystal Shard. This is a project I have wanted to do for a while, and this gave me an extra push to get it done. The conversion is light on data. A DM would need the adventure, PHB, MM, and DMG to fully use this conversion document. The other option that seemed to hold true as I was converting monsters was that you could probably just multiply the hp of everyone in the D&D Next adventure by 3 and be close enough.

The conversion document is located here at EN World at http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1188