D&D 5E Official conversion guides from ALL editions are coming this fall!

It might have been a 2e to 3e guide.

I don't remember the specifics, only that it was far less crunchy than I expected. Or in less gentle terms: it only covered the completely obvious basics, and did not do any of the actual heavy lifting that would have made a real difference.

The bottom line being: if you aren't expecting much crunch, you don't need to wait - just use my guide instead.

And if you do expect crunch, also expect disappointment

I have converted material from B/X, AD&D, and 3E for my 5E campaigns so far without much problem. The only issues I see are for GMs who might want to convert material from older editions that have no experience with the system in question. The rules for those games are still available so I say play them and learn.

Conversion is one thing, it actually working seamlessly with 5E is another matter all together and is almost guaranteed not to work. Especially with bounded accuracy and the expectation of no magic items. But that should not be a big barrier for a dedicated 5E DM, because they have to stay on top of it just to get 5E to work when considering challenge ratings, allowing magic items, multiclassing, etc. Most likely the guide will strip a lot of features from other versions of D&D, and simplify it to fit in 5E.

So overall, I believe the main focus is just to release something so the developers are good on their word, versus play testing each guide and have some type of feedback mechanism. That would be opening Pandora's box for edition wars, but is necessary if they are serious.

We're working on it, fellas.

CapnZapp said:

When it comes to player characters, you're almost always better off by this three step guide.

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Spot on conversion guide!

ExploderWizard said:

I have converted material from B/X, AD&D, and 3E for my 5E campaigns so far without much problem.

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Ditto. The only real challenge has been magic items - and we ended up just removing most of them except for one or two key equivalents.

ExploderWizard said:

I have converted material from B/X, AD&D, and 3E for my 5E campaigns so far without much problem. The only issues I see are for GMs who might want to convert material from older editions that have no experience with the system in question. The rules for those games are still available so I say play them and learn.

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nerfherder said:

Ditto. The only real challenge has been magic items - and we ended up just removing most of them except for one or two key equivalents.

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Then the conversion guides arent for you guys!

In fact I'm not sure who can benefit from these. Make the guides light and thin, and only Captain Obvious will have any use for them. Make them sufficiently detailed to be of any actual use, and you're looking at a thick tome that will scare away your customers; except for grognards like us who don't need them anyway (hi Mom!)

My only guess is that they're for people who need official confirmation they're doing it right when they run a X Edition module for Y Edition rules... that, and people just wanting to tick off a checkbox in their "corporate promises" notebook...

Wednesday Boy said:

Spot on conversion guide!

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Thanks muchly!

Mercurius said:

We're working on it, fellas.

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You, sir, are my hero.

It was AD&D to 3E and I finally found a reasonably readable copy:

http://www.adnd3egame.com/dnd.htm
http://www.adnd3egame.com/documents/conversionbook.pdf

Man, what a blast from the past.

Let me first say I had forgotten about much of it. Except its overall uselessness.

It does try to summarize changes. But all it does is make my eyes glaze over. More than ever, I'm convinced I will never have the energy to use one.

Sure, the first ten or so (of 13) are exactly that kind of incredibly long-winded copy of my three-step procedure, but it does contain what I asked for upthread: magic item and spell equivalencies.

But.

It's a realization that just came to me... I now understand any conversation book like this will always fail, since they ask me to make a thousand little edits in the rules of my shiny new edition. That's like manually patching a computer game: not gonna happen.

Perhaps I'm just older by now, but what I would need is a separate edition of the game with all the little patches already entered, so I get a book that looks and reads as a whole. No references. The full text added in-sentence.
Full disclosure: 15 years ago I would have been all over the 3.5 to PF guide, obsessively discussing every atom of the procedure.

Besides, in what direction is a conversion guide useful anyway?

Like has already been stated upthread, converting player characters is the easiest part (at least if you use my three-step procedure...) and also, that most of us are past this step many months ago.

Just lists of which items or monsters translate to other items or monsters are way too work-intensive. I'd rather just go on experience and intuition and creativity.

What I would need nowadays, I realize, is a custom-made PHB, that uses all the rules language from the module I'm about to run (say an AD&D or 3.5E one) but nevertheless results in a 5E compatible game.

Meaning that I can read about the Harp of Awesome Power and get the effects from its 5E-balanced counterpart, whatever musical instrument that might be, without having to make any lookups or even realizing 5E doesn't even have Harps of Awesome Power.

I'm getting too old for this shít.