conversion manual?

[s.j. bagley]

apologies if this has been brought up already...
does anyone know if there's going to be an official (and printed... not pdf) conversion manual for fourth edition?

 

[Mistwell]

I believe the said no. And, they said part of the reason was that the 2nd-to-3rd edition conversion manual utterly failed.

Take your concepts, and redo them from the bottom up. That will get you your conversion better than any manual.

 

[Arkhandus]

Nope. WotC says it's not practical to convert campaigns from 3E to 4E. They insist you start fresh with new campaigns and new characters in 4E.

 

[s.j. bagley]

Take your concepts, and redo them from the bottom up. That will get you your conversion better than any manual.

i'm sure it will, but this particular question was asked from a collector's standpoint, not necessarily a player's.

 

[kennew142]

Nope. WotC says it's not practical to convert campaigns from 3E to 4E. They insist you start fresh with new campaigns and new characters in 4E.

More misinformation (I wonder what the agenda is?). No one has insisted that gamers start with fresh campaigns and new characters in 4e. This is a lie.

What has been said is that it would probably be better. If you went through the 2e to 3e conversion you know that this is probably true. The designers have also said that it should be easier to convert 3e to 4e than it was to convert 2e to 3e. WotC will not be putting out a conversion guide because such guides are next to worthless.

 

[thalmin]

The answer I got from WotC was there would be no conversion manual, for the reasons Mistwell gave above. While that was months ago, I haven't heard of any changes to that plan.

 

[Celebrim]

This is a lie.

Seems like a pretty strong charge. The wording Arkhandus uses seems very close to what I remember reading. You can quibble over the verbage if you like but, the point remains that, per WotC, you will not be able to convert from 3E to 4E.

I believe this is the quote Arkhandus is referring to.

"We learned the hard way with 3rd Edition that accurate conversion really doesn't work. Thus, we're encouraging everyone to start at 1st level and learn the new system from the ground up. While you'll certainly be able to reinvent many existing characters with the new system, there's no way a conversion guide could adequately cover the vast array of options that have been published over the lifespan of the game. We'll eventually revisit many favorite parts of the previous edition, and along the way we'll also explore plenty of new territory as well."

 

[wingsandsword]

Personally, I think that's a poor excuse for not providing conversion instructions. The 2e to 3e conversion manual didn't try to provide instructions on how to convert every AD&D 2e character, just to provide a handy manual of new terms ("prepare" spells instead of "memorize" spells for example) and rough guidelines on how to convert characters (like how to translate 1e/2e multiclass and dual-class characters into 3e levels). Any PC made with the 1e or 2e PHB could be translated with the 3e core rules quite easily. If you had kits or special classes then things could get difficult, but equivalents for races/classes (and most spells and magic items) in the core rules existed.

Then again, since a good number of 3e PC's made with just the core rules will be inherently untranslatable into 4e until later splatbooks come out (try to translate a Gnome Bard or a Half-Orc Monk when none of those races or classes even exist anymore), sidestepping the conversion instructions tries to de-emphasize how little 4e will have in common with what came before.

Like scrapping so many setting presumptions, this seems to be another choice made to intentionally divorce 4e from it's 1e/2e/3e predecessors and make it a new game that is D&D in name only.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Seems like a pretty strong charge. The wording Arkhandus uses seems very close to what I remember reading. You can quibble over the verbage if you like but, the point remains that, per WotC, you will not be able to convert from 3E to 4E.

It seems pretty clear that this:

Nope. WotC says it's not practical to convert campaigns from 3E to 4E. They insist you start fresh with new campaigns and new characters in 4E.

is fairly different than this:

We learned the hard way with 3rd Edition that accurate conversion really doesn't work. Thus, we're encouraging everyone to start at 1st level and learn the new system from the ground up. While you'll certainly be able to reinvent many existing characters with the new system, there's no way a conversion guide could adequately cover the vast array of options that have been published over the lifespan of the game. We'll eventually revisit many favorite parts of the previous edition, and along the way we'll also explore plenty of new territory as well."

Emphasis mine. According to this, WotC says that it's possible to convert from 3E to 4E by rebuilding your character using the new rules, contradicting you. They also merely encourage players to start at level 1, contradicting Arkhandus.

 

[JohnSnow]

Seems like a pretty strong charge. The wording Arkhandus uses seems very close to what I remember reading. You can quibble over the verbage if you like but, the point remains that, per WotC, you will not be able to convert from 3E to 4E.

I believe this is the quote Arkhandus is referring to.

"We learned the hard way with 3rd Edition that accurate conversion really doesn't work. Thus, we're encouraging everyone to start at 1st level and learn the new system from the ground up. While you'll certainly be able to reinvent many existing characters with the new system, there's no way a conversion guide could adequately cover the vast array of options that have been published over the lifespan of the game. We'll eventually revisit many favorite parts of the previous edition, and along the way we'll also explore plenty of new territory as well."

Fine. I'll quibble over verbage.

Arkhandus said "WotC says it's not practical to convert campaigns from 3E to 4E. They insist you start fresh with new campaigns and new characters in 4E."

The quote you used was specifically referencing a question about the conversion of characters, not campaigns. WotC hasn't said word one about how practical it is to convert campaigns. So the first sentence is a flat-out misrepresentation (aka "a lie"). To put it in simple mathematical terms:

Campaign ≠ Character

Moreover, WotC hasn't insisted on anything. They have suggested that it would be simpler and more practical to start fresh with a new campaign and new characters. They are "encouraging" people to start over with new characters at 1st-level.

Suggest ≠ Insist

That puts the second sentence in the "misrepresentation" category as well. Moreover, actual WotC designers have converted their own characters and campaigns to Fourth Edition, and told us how they did it. So, they're clearly not "insisting."

Yep. "Lie" pretty much sums it up.

But to answer the original poster, no, there won't be a conversion book.