Converting adventures and knowing the chracter lvls

[Oryan77]

When you convert an older edition published adventure, does the suggested character levels change any?

I'm wanting to run the Dead Gods adventure and it's suggested 2e levels are 6th - 9th lvl. Is a 3.x conversion still going to be for levels 6th - 9th or does it change?

If it changes, does anyone know what character levels the PC's should be for Dead Gods?

 

[Crothian]

When you convert an older edition published adventure, does the suggested character levels change any?

It can. THere are two schools of thought on conversions. Keep the monsters and encounters exactly the same no matter what CR the monster now has. Or keep the levels the adventure is for the same and susbitute creatures in that have the needed CR.

 

[Oryan77]

It can. THere are two schools of thought on conversions. Keep the monsters and encounters exactly the same no matter what CR the monster now has. Or keep the levels the adventure is for the same and susbitute creatures in that have the needed CR.

I would be doing the conversion by using the same monsters. I wouldn't know how to judge a CR between the 2 versions since only 3.x uses CR's. It would be too hard for me.

So at the moment, I'm just trying to figure out what levels my PC's would need to be to play in Dead Gods.

 

[Oryan77]

Anyone played the Dead Gods in 3e yet?

 

[theredrobedwizard]

I'd suggest giving us a list of a couple of the encounters, and we'd have a much easier time figuring out if its a good challenge for the given levels.

-TRRW

 

[Delta]

When you convert an older edition published adventure, does the suggested character levels change any?

I'm wanting to run the Dead Gods adventure and it's suggested 2e levels are 6th - 9th lvl. Is a 3.x conversion still going to be for levels 6th - 9th or does it change?

If it changes, does anyone know what character levels the PC's should be for Dead Gods?

Yes, it likely does. Key issues include the following:
(1) 1st (2nd?) Edition adventures assumed a PC party of around 8; 3E assumes 4. If you take an old adventure and run it with fewer PCs, then the required level should go up by about 2.
(2) The monsters may have gotten weaker or tougher -- worst example of that are the D&D Giants (looking at you, G1-3) which generally tripled in hit points from 1E to 3E.

The straightforward answer to this is you need to convert all the encounters, calculate their ELs, and then use the average of those as your recommended PC level (or something similar). That may be more work than you want to do; maybe just compute the toughest encounter EL and use PCs 1 or 2 levels below that or so.

 

[Garboshnik]

I've actually been running this as a 3.5 conversion for a while. I was able to find some converted stats in an old post by Psychotic Jim on these forums: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=6157 . Those stats there are a very direct conversion from the old rules.

I have spaced out the adventure material with other adventures in order to stretch the adventure out over the campaign. I have a party of 5 (occasionally 6) and my experience has been that the party will blast through monsters with straight converted stats. If you play through the adventures one after another while starting at a low level this may not be true. Straight conversion also produces a very uneven level of difficulty in the encounters.

My guess is that you will need to make up new stats for all of the encounters anyways, so just set them to be appropriate to whatever character levels you want to work with.

 

[Arnwyn]

The straightforward answer to this is you need to convert all the encounters, calculate their ELs, and then use the average of those as your recommended PC level (or something similar).

The above is definitely the best way to convert an adventure (though the second 'quicker' suggestion isn't too bad if you're in a big time crunch).

I have converted a whole load of adventures (including the complete run of Dungeon), and determining the adventure's PC level is the last thing I do for the conversion. The first thing I do is go through the adventure and simply record the ELs for each encounter - this gives the best indicator of the proper PC level for the adventure. After that, you can then go in and modify any outlier ELs.

(Sadly, I haven't gotten to my PS adventures yet, so I can't help you with Dead Gods...)