D&D 4E Character conversion problems for 4e (Short Essay)

[PrecociousApprentice]

Go back and read you own post. That's not what you said. You said "any" character concept.

I have. You are right that I said any. But it was in the context of "relatively" and thus means something completely different from "any with no exceptions, ever, no way". The no exceptions clause was something that was not intended. I did state the reasonable clause. It just came a little later in the post.

You're new to EN World, sure. Pardon me for giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you weren't new to forming well thought out arguments generally.

I am not not new to well thought arguments. I wasn't posting to make an argument. I was suggesting something I though was helpful. Being new to Enworld means that I am unfamiliar with the fact that people will purposly misconstrue helpful comments in an effort to make a point about something they have posted about in various other threads. I am new to the idea that a discussion board was actually a battlefield, and that maybe I should approach it as such.

I am happy that you have an appreciation for classical music, but this still doesn't detract from the fact that 4e class represents a suit of abilities and instant action possibilities that are all pertinent to combat, with a few tangentially related connections to out of combat abilities. I have never really been a fan of the bard who whips out a lute mid battle to sing a rousing song, but I did suggest that the inspirational warlord could fit the same bill. The charm and illusion stuff could potentially be ritual magic, seeing as how it is not necessarily instantaneous.

Are you a troll? It's just occurred to me you're possibly being this obtuse on purpose. It's really hard to imagine the alternative.

No troll here. Politely posited premise followed by politely posited suggestions about how things could be done. It seems your inability to imagine may be the entire crux of our issue here.

Blargh. Nevermind. I'm done here.

Sorry you feel so frustrated.

 

[muffin_of_chaos]

Yo, Inda Ranger, read this real quick:

I have concluded that converting any character from any fantasy source (whether role playing or literature) will be relatively easy to do with the 4e rules. I have also concluded that there could be many approaches to each character, and that if someone is having a hard time with the process, it is likely that they are focusing way too much on the mechanical description of their character from another edition/game...

Sweet, now you know that you aren't right, and we can all revert to a more reasonable level of hypocrisy and condescension.

 

[Piratecat]

Blargh. Nevermind. I'm done here.

A good rule of thumb: when you feel the need to quote a jillion things in one post so as to refute or answer them, you're too worked up. time to step back for a while and make sure you're still being friendly with the people you disagree with.

PrecociousApprentice, thanks very much for keeping your patience. We're actually pretty friendly here, although 4e has made some folks testy. If you run into arguments and insults in the future, feel free to report the post so we can address it.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

Thanks, I am really pleased with the discussions that go on here, and have found a strange home here despite some resistance. The number of highly passionate nerds here is somewhat amazing, and I am a medical student, so I know nerds. Fun times.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Yo, Inda Ranger, read this real quick:

I have concluded that converting any character from any fantasy source (whether role playing or literature) will be relatively easy to do with the 4e rules. I have also concluded that there could be many approaches to each character, and that if someone is having a hard time with the process, it is likely that they are focusing way too much on the mechanical description of their character from another edition/game...

Imagine instead of a new edition of D&D we were talking about a new version of Ars Magica. Would you say I was "focusing way too much on the mechanical description of their character" if I said that there was no good way to model Conan, Gimli or John Carter of Mars using the new edition rules?

Some things you can hand-waive away. Some things are just so far off the mark that it's not worth pretending that "Look at me, I've managed to model Harry Potter using Iron Heroes." It's absurd. You can surely say that "certain aspects of this character were inspired by X, Y and Z" (just like Capt. Jack Sparrow was inspired, in part, by Keith Richards), but that's a far cry from "conversion." A "conversion", to deserve the name, should result in something that's recognizably the same person.*

I realize that this is somewhat subjective. I realize that some people consider different things to be the "key conceits" to a certain character or archetype (Is Harry Potter defined by his wand, his scar, his spells, his youth, etc, etc? How many of these variables can you lose before it's just not Harry Potter by any stretch of the imagination?). The answer to those questions is subjective, but the OP's original contention was that you could literally lose all of them and it would still be a "conversion", and (I paraphrase) if anyone disagreed with him on that point then it was clealy our fault and there was nothing he can do to "help" us. That's not an honest difference of opinion.

If literally none of the key conceits are represented in the character, anywhere, how can you claim that's a conversion? Of course, you can't and the OP ended up admitting as much later in the thread, but without ever recanting (that I saw) his original contention. Honestly, it was the apparent dishonesty (not necessarily intentional mind you, but in practice if not in purpose) that bothered me more than anything.

Sweet, now you know that you aren't right, and we can all revert to a more reasonable level of hypocrisy and condescension.

(a) I don't know anything of the kind, and (b) while I was worked up before, I wasn't being hypocritical and had no intention of being condescending. I was disagreeing. If it seemed that I refused to admit that there was a reasonable difference of opinion that caused the contention, it's because that's exactly how I honestly feel.

But if you still feel I was out of line you can always PM me about it. Calling someone out as a general ad hominem like that though rarely "raises the bar", so to speak.



*If you disagree that conversions don't have to be recognizable, or even squinty-recognizable, then we've found the heart of the disagreement.

 

[Irda Ranger]

A good rule of thumb: when you feel the need to quote a jillion things in one post so as to refute or answer them, you're too worked up. time to step back for a while and make sure you're still being friendly with the people you disagree with.

That's a very good rule of thumb, since it's objectively measurable. I can only blame my lack of sleep leading to lack of self of restraint. Sorry.

 

[The Little Raven]

How would you make Haplo from the Death Gate Cycle?

I've yet to see any game that can properly present Haplo or any of the Patryns/Sartans, except maybe a tweaked version of White Wolf's Mage.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

Dude, I am not sure what happened to make you want to rain on a perfectly good parade, but you seem so intent on it that you have lost all perspective on the original meaning of the thread.

the OP's original contention was that you could literally lose all of them (referring to "key conceits") and it would still be a "conversion", and (I paraphrase) if anyone disagreed with him on that point then it was clealy our fault and there was nothing he can do to "help" us. That's not an honest difference of opinion.

If literally none of the key conceits are represented in the character, anywhere, how can you claim that's a conversion? Of course, you can't and the OP ended up admitting as much later in the thread, but without ever recanting (that I saw) his original contention. Honestly, it was the apparent dishonesty (not necessarily intentional mind you, but in practice if not in purpose) that bothered me more than anything.

So at no point did I ever state that a perfect interpretation of any character from any source was possible, or that every interpretation of every character would be satisfying for everyone. The thread title says it all, with a little reading comprehention added in to get the implied but left out meaning. The intent was to help those who will have to wait for the official class for their pet character to be realeased by WotC to have a satisfactory time playing a reinterpretation of the character that they had played in a previous edition of D&D with the rules available. (I doubt that all people will be satisfied with WotC's reinterpretation of their pet class either, so I am not sure why my suggestions have to be perfect either.) I added to that the idea that 4e would be easier relative to other games to interpret a great deal of other fantasy characters. This was all stated in what I will admit was somewhat obtuse manner, but I had wrongly assumed that all persons that were into D&D enough to be on a message board posting about it would be able to mine the text for the meaning intended, and not conflate the position taken to rediculous levels. I was wrong. I originally took a position that I knew was vulnerable, and in so doing asked for a little bit of leaway so as to have a productive discourse on an issue that I had seen in several other threads as side-track dialogue. If you don't want to, please don't.

In the end, I still feel that my OP was valid. I did not state that loss of all characteristics would be OK. I stated that there are many ways of mechanically interpreting a character, and that the rules will likely provide for conversion from the get go that are perfectly viable interpretations. I also did not state that system does not matter. It does. What I was getting at was that if you have a character that you want to convert to 4e, then it was possible with a little creativity and some flexibility, despite the fact that there will not be a 1 to 1 mapping of old mechanic to new mechanic. I assumed that if one wanted to "convert" a character, that one would be going from one edition of D&D to another, and this would be pretty easy. I expanded this to include the idea that my opinion is that 4e would be better at simulating other fantasy characters than any game I know, with points to back this up. There are areas of 4e game mechanics that are unknowns, like the amount of enchantment and illusion effects in the PHB1 or the nature of rituals and what all tropes they will cover, and these are serious holes in my premise, but I admitted these up front. No dishonesty. Really, I find it hard to understand why I am the target of your animosity. My optimism for the new system is transparent, my premise's vulnerabilities admitted, and since this is not a contract, I did not feel the need to have my lawyer look over what I had writen before I posted it. That being said, I will now go to edit my original post to better reflect your preferences for verbiage.

 

[SSquirrel]

That's why I posed it as a challenge...

Seriously though, I'm very afraid that the play style she embodies has no room in 4E.

Steal the Faen from Arcana Evolved, spend a feat to become a Spryte and you're set, size wise anyway. Should only need minor tweaking on the Faen to make their race fit the conceptions of 4E races.