OSR D&D 5e OSR backwards compatibility

[jrowland]

I think everyone should review the use of "I" statements vs "You" statements HERE. (yes, I know its not perfect, but with respect to internet forums I think it is very good advise) (see what I did? lots of "I" statements)

Oh, and yeah, I think converting to 5E should be just fine. WotC has already done it in the playtest with mixed results (mud sorcerers tomb, against the slave lords, Isle of dread). Considering it was a work in-progress, I think it will be easy enough once the rules are fixed. Dausuul summed it up well.

 

[the Jester]

Additionally, since you are going to 20th level and all spell casters are capable of making permanent magic items by their mid-teens, it was also possible for a character who did manage to lose the item lottery to acquire them through their friends and associates.

It's a lot harder than just making an item, actually.

I know this is a response to a pretty early comment, but I just feel obliged to point out that in 1e, it was very expensive and time-consuming to make magic items, and in addition, you risked Constitution loss for permanent items. Not only that, not all high-level casters could enchant items; a magic-user needed the right spells (and back in those days, you got very few spells as you advanced, so it was by no means a sure thing that you'd have Enchant an Item and Permanency).

EDIT: My 1e books are at my girlfriend's house or I'd look up time and cost, but I think it's days to weeks to craft an item, and generally pretty expensive to boot.

Anyway, on another subject:

The author wanted to find out if he could grab a module and run it without writing up a conversion document. (Something I've been doing for Goodman Games modules in Pathfinder for a while).

Short answer: probably not.

Longer answer: See post on why the math doesn't align well.

Well, I'm not so sure, given either:

A. A willingness to quickly swap in the 5e stat blocks of monsters; or
B. A simply, easy-to-remember numeric formula for monsters-by-level like 4e had.

The same argument seems to imply you can't just pick up a, for instance, Basic D&D module and run it off the cuff for a later edition, but I've done just that with B4: The Lost City, in both 3e and 4e. Thanks to 4e's easy monster formula, I had no trouble winging appropriate stats for monsters not in the 4e books (oil beetles, freaky hallucinating cultists, etc).

I ran several other modules the same way in 4e, including Box of Flumph (a 3e adventure) and little bits swiped from other modules. I would say that 4e 'changes the math' more than any other version of D&D from Basic, so it's fair to compare and say, "I could do it then; if 5e works well, it should be easy enough to do it in a couple of months."

 

[Henry]

Personally I'm quite happy with the "bounded accuracy" of 5e - I used to make comments long ago about going back to playing 1e adventures at conventions and such, and marvelling at "to hit" numbers in things like Against the Giants, and how much more "controlled"the number progressions seemed in just mid level characters compared to their (at the time) 3rd edition counterparts. What I was seeing at the time was the Bounded Accuracy argument in action - that as the total die bonuses begin to approach the size of the die itself, the more pointless the roll itself was, to the point where the warriors, compared to other classes, made certain target numbers in excess of 20s to 30s pointless. You either missed on a one or others only hit on 20.

To that end, bring on the bounded accuracy! I'm kinda tired of adding +25 to my attack rolls or saves while my buddy is adding +4.

 

[Nagol]

It's a lot harder than just making an item, actually.

I know this is a response to a pretty early comment, but I just feel obliged to point out that in 1e, it was very expensive and time-consuming to make magic items, and in addition, you risked Constitution loss for permanent items. Not only that, not all high-level casters could enchant items; a magic-user needed the right spells (and back in those days, you got very few spells as you advanced, so it was by no means a sure thing that you'd have Enchant an Item and Permanency).

EDIT: My 1e books are at my girlfriend's house or I'd look up time and cost, but I think it's days to weeks to craft an item, and generally pretty expensive to boot.

There are straight-up costs, but 1E typically doesn't suffer monetary shortages at high levels.

The biggest cost was opportunity -- it took a lot of time to arrange the required resources (I think the commissioned belt of Giant Strength took 3 adventures to acquire all the materials), a fair amount of time to perform the enchantment, and even more time to recover.

We saw it done occasionally though typically by clerics unless time is a pressing matter.

 

[Uchawi]

The comparison in general is based on scale, because BA has tighter bounds than previous editions. So in that sense 4E should be included on the chart, since it is not foreign to that concept or more complicated. That already demonstrates a bias against a specific version of the game.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Oy. Skipping past a few pages ...

So what do we think of the basic premise?

Personally, though the amount of work varies a bit, I find that adventures from editions are relatively interchangeable. Some are easier to eyeball and "run off the cuff" than others, but I don't find any of them so far to be completely incompatible. I don't expect 5E to be any different; from what I've seen it will probably still be simple to run it on the fly particularly with BECMI and 1/2E conversions. 3E and 4E I expect to require a bit more effort to convert.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think Agamon is correct based on that the guy is actually asking for others to see if the higher level monsters and modules can be ported over fairly easily. He isn't sure because he isnt an expert. I think that it is clear he isnt trying to mislead people or edition war if you actually read his post and not just the tagline posted here. Why not be nice and help the chap out?

I don´t think I was rude. And I just pointed out, why people reacted that way. Note that I used "I think" in my post. I did help him out and he changed the word "efficacy" to "progression" which made it clear, that he is only comparing BAB progressions. I didn´t attack him on a personal level, just tried to explain what was "wrong" in his choice of words that "provoked" those heavy reactions. If offense was taken by my post, I want to apologize.

 

[Agamon]

Personally, though the amount of work varies a bit, I find that adventures from editions are relatively interchangeable. Some are easier to eyeball and "run off the cuff" than others, but I don't find any of them so far to be completely incompatible. I don't expect 5E to be any different; from what I've seen it will probably still be simple to run it on the fly particularly with BECMI and 1/2E conversions. 3E and 4E I expect to require a bit more effort to convert.

I agree, as Henry said, they've already shown examples of conversion. And would say even 3e shouldn't be too hard. 4e would require a bit more effort with the Milestone concept baked into 4e adventures. But any adventure can be mined for plotlines, NPCs and maps.

 

[TerraDave]

...
B. A simply, easy-to-remember numeric formula for monsters-by-level like 4e had.

The same argument seems to imply you can't just pick up a, for instance, Basic D&D module and run it off the cuff for a later edition, but I've done just that with B4: The Lost City, in both 3e and 4e. Thanks to 4e's easy monster formula, I had no trouble winging appropriate stats for monsters not in the 4e books (oil beetles, freaky hallucinating cultists, etc).

...

Agree and also did some of this in 4E (including for 4E products with the old math).

Basically you just have a "cheat sheet" with typical monster stats, and occasionally look stuff up in in MM.

With PDFs of the adventures, and we have those, you can also copy them over and then insert stat blocks, at least from the Basic Game PDF.

In any case, with the flatter math and faster pacing, should be easiest edition of the last 3 to run with old material. And, maybe in some ways, easiest edition overall.

 

[Remathilis]

Well, I'm not so sure, given either:

A. A willingness to quickly swap in the 5e stat blocks of monsters; or
B. A simply, easy-to-remember numeric formula for monsters-by-level like 4e had.

The same argument seems to imply you can't just pick up a, for instance, Basic D&D module and run it off the cuff for a later edition, but I've done just that with B4: The Lost City, in both 3e and 4e. Thanks to 4e's easy monster formula, I had no trouble winging appropriate stats for monsters not in the 4e books (oil beetles, freaky hallucinating cultists, etc).

I ran several other modules the same way in 4e, including Box of Flumph (a 3e adventure) and little bits swiped from other modules. I would say that 4e 'changes the math' more than any other version of D&D from Basic, so it's fair to compare and say, "I could do it then; if 5e works well, it should be easy enough to do it in a couple of months."

I think his intention was "can I replicate the phenomenon of using AD&D 1e, 2e, or Basic D&D modules interchangeable?" Yes, there was differences in monsters, magic items, and NPC stats, but overall I could run Keep on the Borderlands in 2e without conversion and things would be just fine.

This is not something 3e on has allowed for. 3e required at the very least stat-block swap outs and items converted. (Some DMs would even rework encounters to keep them within the modules EL). 4e conversions required a lot more "rewritten in the spirit of" than direct conversion (again, due to how encounters and treasure is handled in 4e).

I think its a fair question to ask "So will 5e require re-writing, or can I run things with the AC inversed?" The answer he saw was "No". At the very least, you'll need to swap or convert stat-blocks. I feel (based on the playtest) that bucketfuls of gold is also going to be toned down, so DMs will need to trim down treasure. So as you said, if you don't mind doing the legwork to rework things, its fine. If you wanted to run Against the Giants straight from the 1e module in Next, you are going to experience some disappointment.