D&D 4E 4E: Why now?

[The_Gneech]

Star Wars Saga can use this year's D&D adventures and other support material despite being in an entirely different genre.

I'm highly mystified by this statement. Not straight off the shelf it can't. Conversion is not difficult, true, but it's still required. And even with conversion, you're likely to find strange results popping up.

-The Gneech

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I'm highly mystified by this statement. Not straight off the shelf it can't. Conversion is not difficult, true, but it's still required. And even with conversion, you're likely to find strange results popping up.

I'm mystified right back.

Conversion is required in the sense of flipping the saves of monsters and NPCs into defenses, and adjusting the Reflex defense to account for armor and natural armor. I guess you'd have to remember that Hide and Move Silently are both opposed by Perception, too.

Finally, you'd have to address one or two special qualities or special abilities. You
need a ruling for Incorporeality because Saga doesn't have one (but 4e almost certainly will), and you'd need to decide to either use status effects as-written (no conversion required) or convert them to the damage save system.

Beyond that (which can easily be done on the fly, or in a few minutes at home), what issues do you think would crop up with running Saga PCs and rules through a D&D adventure? I seriously see no reason why, with absolutely no pre-adventure prep to account for the rules differences, I couldn't run my party of Jedi, Scoundrels, Soldiers, Scouts and Nobles through Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or The Red Hand of Doom or the Savage Tide adventure path. The result might be ludicrous in the sense of having guys with blaster rifles in a D&D setting, but it would not be unplayable due to the rules.

 

[Vigilance]

D&D has always had a 10 year edition cycle.

Subsequent games have proven fairly definitively (Hero, GURPs, NWOD, Star Wars) that 10 years is leaving money on the table.

Hence, 8 years, with a "revision" at year 5.

 

[Asmor]

I'm highly mystified by this statement. Not straight off the shelf it can't. Conversion is not difficult, true, but it's still required. And even with conversion, you're likely to find strange results popping up.

-The Gneech

Not really... I mean, if you want to do everything by the book, certainly, but it's entirely possible to have a battle between, say, a mind flayer and a jedi. The names of things are different, but they're still basically the same and the numbers are roughly in the same range. When the jedi attacks, he has to hit the Mindflayer's AC. When the Mindflayer attacks, it has to hit the Jedi's reflex defense. Force powers can be applied pretty easily to 3.x monsters, and I can't think of any 3.x abilities off the top of my head which would be difficult to port directly over to SWSE. Hell, even though the system doesn't officially support them, you can use poisons and diseases and etc exactly as written in 3.x, or you could just rule that they send you a step down the condition track.

The only thing that really requires a conversion are save DCs; either add 1d20-10 to the DC and compare to the SWSE character's approriate defense, or add 1d20-10 to the SWSE character's defense and compare to the save DC.

The point is, you can pick up a 3.x product and use it with SWSE almost as easily as you could have with 3.5.

 

[The_Gneech]

I'm mystified right back.

Conversion is required in the sense of flipping the saves of monsters and NPCs into defenses, and adjusting the Reflex defense to account for armor and natural armor. I guess you'd have to remember that Hide and Move Silently are both opposed by Perception, too.

Finally, you'd have to address one or two special qualities or special abilities. You
need a ruling for Incorporeality because Saga doesn't have one (but 4e almost certainly will), and you'd need to decide to either use status effects as-written (no conversion required) or convert them to the damage save system.

Beyond that (which can easily be done on the fly, or in a few minutes at home), what issues do you think would crop up with running Saga PCs and rules through a D&D adventure? I seriously see no reason why, with absolutely no pre-adventure prep to account for the rules differences, I couldn't run my party of Jedi, Scoundrels, Soldiers, Scouts and Nobles through Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or The Red Hand of Doom or the Savage Tide adventure path. The result might be ludicrous in the sense of having guys with blaster rifles in a D&D setting, but it would not be unplayable due to the rules.

Well, you just listed two paragraphs worth of required conversions and then said there weren't conversions required.

I did say the conversions were not difficult -- that doesn't mean they aren't needed. How well people can make the conversions on-the-fly varies wildly. You or I might be able to do them quickly and easily -- two of the other GMs in my group (who do not have 20 years of gamemastery under their belts) would have a lot of trouble doing so and give it up as not worth the effort.

And really, what is it about edition changes that gets people upset? The perception that "my old books aren't useful any more" -- which isn't strictly true. A more accurate thing to say would be "my old books require conversion now, which is an extra step and a pain in the hinder".

As for what funny results I'd foresee porting stuff between 3.5 and SWSE, they're related to skill checks, expected damage-per-round and power scaling, that kind of thing. Like running a Windows98 program in XP -- usually it works, but sometimes you get wonky results.

-The Gneech