D&D 3E/3.5 Converting From 3e-ish to 5e?

[Argyle King]

I was looking through some of my old rpg books today, and I became curious about converting some old material to D&D 5E. With that in mind, I have a few questions.


1) How difficult is it to converting 3rd Edition material to 5th Edition? (I am aware there are conversion guides, but I have not attempted to use them.)

2) How difficult is it to convert not-exactly-3rd-Edition stuff to 5th Edition? For example, Pathfinder is similar to 3rd Edition; I also have the Munchkin* rpg books which were somewhat based on 3rd Edition. Likewise, I own Ptolus.

*I'm particularly interested in figuring out D&D stats for the Floating Nose.

 

[Quickleaf]

Mark ( [MENTION=6670944]Kryx[/MENTION] ) made a Pathfinder to 5e Monster Converter tool: http://marklenser.com/5econverter/

Most of my conversion is from AD&D to 5e, but I've converted a little 3e to 5e. It takes some effort, but the conversion guide put out by WotC is pretty good, and there's fewer abilities/powers (compared to, say, AD&D) that are stumbling blocks for converting.

 

[hastur_nz]

It's as difficult as you make it. I'd advise doing enough for 1-2 sessions, and doing as little change as possible; that might take a couple of hours, assuming you know the 5e rules and have the monster manual(s) to flick through and find roughly equivalent monsters...

Personally I've run a whole Adventure Path, level 1-20, Age of Worms, which I personally converted from 3.5 to 5e. That was a fair bit of work, especially at first, because I found myself statting up a few of new monsters. Although as I got further along, I did my best to just use something existing from the MM, and re-skinning that, maybe with a minor tweak (e.g. change fire damage to poison damage on a 'devil' which was used something else completely). Apart from stat blocks / monster substitution and re-skin, the other main thing is converting number of foes, maybe overall composition of a fight if you're so inclined. Oh, and loot - 5e doesn't need anywhere the amount of loot 3.x throws at PC's.

Stuff like traps, DC's for skill checks, etc, can actually mostly be done on the fly, if you like, especially once you get the hang of 5e.

I've also converted from AD&D to 3.0, from 3.5 to 4e, and from '80's Basic to 5e. Basically, it's about the same no matter what - find monsters that are close enough to the original, check the numbers of foes in a fight compared to what you want for potential difficulty, then the rest you can easily convert on the fly.

I tend to do a 'just in time' approach, as part of my overall prep - I scribble conversion notes on the adventure (or a photocopy of it), and keep a little Word document for any specific monster stat blocks I might want to create / heavily mod.

Personally I'd recommend AGAINST using a conversion guide, or tool, wherever possible, because different Game Systems i.e. Editions, have very different frameworks in terms of how monsters and PC's work e.g. 3.5 is heavy on feats, magic items, and other options, whereas 5e is more streamlined and also has a different 'encounter building' approach (like 4e, but different again). You risk creating overly complicated monsters, compared to what's in the 5e monster manual, which is a lot of wasted effort. Once you understand how 5e works as a DM, conversion is pretty simple.

 

[Argyle King]

I'll admit that, from the DM side of things, 5E doesn't mentally click for me yet. (I have no explanation for why. It just doesn't.)

As far as the converting, I was mostly curious about how well the conversion guides work and whether or not they still work when trying to use them on things which are based upon an older edition of D&D, but not exactly D&D. I've converted a lot of things in my library to completely different games, and I feel comfortable doing that, but I do not feel comfortable enough with the 5E rules to build things from scratch without a guide yet.

 

[ccs]

I tend to run older stuff/PF stuff pretty much as written.
But all I REALLY need is the AC, HP, attack bonus, 6 stats, & the prof. Bonus. Oh, and an idea of what the creature or whatever was supposed to do in its native edition (especially concerning any feats).
My stat blocks take me about 3 minutes to write up.

 

[Tormyr]

I posted a conversion for Age of Worms. Chapter 0 may help as it has tables for quickly converting traps and DCs. http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1254

Most of my converted creatures are MM creatures with a couple small changes or just the 5e version of a monster. The biggest change I have noticed is that you cannot have the same number of enemies in an encounter in most cases. You could stack a whole lot more enemies in a 3.5 encounter, and solos have a chance to be overwhelmed in 5e.

 

[Flamestrike]

I was looking through some of my old rpg books today, and I became curious about converting some old material to D&D 5E. With that in mind, I have a few questions.


1) How difficult is it to converting 3rd Edition material to 5th Edition? (I am aware there are conversion guides, but I have not attempted to use them.)

2) How difficult is it to convert not-exactly-3rd-Edition stuff to 5th Edition? For example, Pathfinder is similar to 3rd Edition; I also have the Munchkin* rpg books which were somewhat based on 3rd Edition. Likewise, I own Ptolus.

*I'm particularly interested in figuring out D&D stats for the Floating Nose.

In literally 99% of of cases you can directly convert monsters from third edition to 5th edition. The only thing that you need to keep your eye on is the fact the fifth edition favours multiple monsters where as third edition often fell into the trap of solo monsters. That's easily remedied by simply plonking down half a dozen mook type lesser monsters around the big monster.

Skills are ridiculously easy to convert on-the-fly as well.

You could pick up a third edition adventure and run it as is with no prep time at all, simply winging it.

 

[Argyle King]

In literally 99% of of cases you can directly convert monsters from third edition to 5th edition. The only thing that you need to keep your eye on is the fact the fifth edition favours multiple monsters where as third edition often fell into the trap of solo monsters. That's easily remedied by simply plonking down half a dozen mook type lesser monsters around the big monster.

Skills are ridiculously easy to convert on-the-fly as well.

You could pick up a third edition adventure and run it as is with no prep time at all, simply winging it.

That's what I figured.

Though, my question is whether this is still mostly true when converting things that are based on 3rd, but not quite 3e. For example, I have some Iron Heroes stuff. It's more or less 3rd, but a few things work differently.

 

[RhaezDaevan]

Rather than focus on the theoretical, how about we get something concrete going? Give us an example of something 3e-ish you would like converted and then we'll help you do it. Then maybe one or two other things can be converted after that and you'd hopefully see how it's done and get use to the various ways of converting. Keep in mind that there's no one-true-way to convert mechanics from one edition to another.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

In literally 99% of of cases you can directly convert monsters from third edition to 5th edition. The only thing that you need to keep your eye on is the fact the fifth edition favours multiple monsters where as third edition often fell into the trap of solo monsters. That's easily remedied by simply plonking down half a dozen mook type lesser monsters around the big monster.

Skills are ridiculously easy to convert on-the-fly as well.

You could pick up a third edition adventure and run it as is with no prep time at all, simply winging it.

This. My rule of thumb is: if it's a d20 roll or DC, change it to ability bonus + proficiency bonus. If it's an AC, look at the PHB armor table and pick one that seems comparable. If it's anything else, you can usually leave it.