Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6672554" data-attributes="member: 996">In the case of Temple of the Frog, the module was uneven, in it's native system.  You could encounter a few 1-4hp 'killer frogs' or giant constrictor or some Trolls.  You might open that room containing medusae.  The BBEG at the end was fairly brutal.  &c.  I went through found closest matches to all the monsters, and, with the exception of the frogs, which I made into minions & swarms, the low-level guards (also minionized), and the BBEG (whose 0e write-up did not follow the usual monsters format, at all, but adapted surprisingly well, including a 'bloodied' trigger kicker) everything existed in 4e & fell into a level range of about 4-13.  That's a wider range than you might consider for 4e, but an 8th or 9th level party* fits right in the middle of it.  And, it worked.  It just wasn't a typical 4e experience:  you had periods of wandering around an puzzling over stuff, punctuated by very short combats, and, with little warning, the occasional surprisingly deadly encounter.  I did let the party try to 'map' for a bit, and switched to a must quicker to resolve Skill Challenge when they gave up. Between SCs streamlining exploration, and the level-4 & lower combats, the whole thing progressed very quickly, with only the Medusae, the BBEG, and some magic-user henchlings putting up a fight.I might also add that I ran it on a bare tabletop (no grid), laying down pencils and dice for the walls and contents of corridors & rooms, and using a tiny pocket tape-measure to figure range & area.   The 'filler fights' pass very quickly, actually, and they do break up an otherwise monotonous routine of exploration.  One standard monster or 1d4 minions vs a party just doesn't take that long to resolve.  Some of the old-school dungeons were /huge/, even if the individual rooms where encounters supposedly happened might be tiny (a 10x10 room?  really?).  You might, for instance, get a larger combat by starting an encounter in one of those tiny rooms, but then the battle attracts guards from an adjoining room, and wandering monsters from two different directions... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Actually, I think you gain more than lose.  Most monsters in an old-school dungeon, for instance, might be little more than a notation of AC & d/a and a list of individual hps, while the corresponding 4e monster will be more interesting, even in level-5 rollover.  But, no, you can't go translating stats.  You can't say, well, this monster is AC 4 and 13hps, that translates to AC 16 and 39 hps, not even close (conversely, in 5e, AC 16 and 13hps would work just dandy).  But you can find closest-match monsters, 'giant snake' to crushgrip constrictor and so forth.  You might occasionally have to level something down (4e /did/ need to fill those Paragon and Epic encounters with something, and some classic monsters ended up having a higher than ever paygrade), but that's as bad as it gets. I guess when it comes right down to it, D&D has been trying to do D&D better for a very long time.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification