Celebrim said:
"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."
Yeah, that's the one I remembered, and I think they've mentioned it another time too. I just don't like trying to search through reams of old threads/posts (without the Search function myself, cuz I can't afford a CS account) every time I want to support a point.
"Encouraging" doesn't mean they're saying they just don't want to bother with a conversion document, it's more like telling us that it'd be a lot of work to try and that they encourage us to just start new so as to avoid all that work (and to avoid bugging them to make a huge-arse conversion document or something).
If it was something that'd be fairly simple,
don't you think they'd make up a short conversion PDF? If it was relatively simple,
there wouldn't be any reason for them to avoid it, since they know many people would love to have such a document, so they could continue their ongoing campaigns with the characters they've spent so much time developing.
No, they've told us it's best to just start over from level 1 with the new rules.
The only defensible reason why would be that it's impractical to convert most 3E material to 4E without a lot of time or hassle, and that they just don't want to bother with that; they've got to work on the 4th Edition books and the Digital Initiative and all.
And since they're just planning to re-hash and drastically change lots of 3E material
eventually for 4E, they'd rather not bother anyway.
Also, I seriously doubt it'll be any easier to convert material from 3E to 4E than it was to convert 2E to 3E. There were very few things to 'convert' between 2E and 3E; some item stats, which wouldn't've taken long to figure out; replacing some spells since it would've taken a long time for all the old ones to be updated for 3E (2E had many spell compendiums and such); and replacing kits/nonweapon proficiencies with the appropriate skills and feats, which usually wouldn't be very hard in most cases.
Only the Player's Option stuff would've likely caused a bit of difficulty in converting, but I recall several options from that material that really would've just been directly handled as feats in 3E, probably because several 3E feats were based on old 2E options.
