D&D 5E Difficulty of Converting Pathfinder / 3.X Stuff?

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

For me, I think conversion is easy. Not easy as pie, but doable.

I will continue using my PF/3X library with 5E. And, I'm not afraid of getting new PF books to use in my games. Looking forward to the new books, actually.

 

[Cyan Wisp]

I'd say easy, but some flexibility required in your ideas.

I've done a few 3.5e and PF adventures now and all without the MM, just using the stuff from the free PDFs - be sure to get the supplementary stuff from the Rise of Dragons, too, for added monsters - if you have no MM yet.

Monsters: eyeball XP budgets and adjust numbers as necessary. Reskin monsters as needed, even pick and mix abilities - I needed a giant goatfolk kind of thing so I just used an ogre base and added a minotaur charge action. Works a treat.

Levelled NPCs: use NPCs from the PDFs but customised, or for very special people, PC rules. I'd prefer to just tack on abilities to the NPC chassis though - think about what you want them to do and tack it on. NPCs seem to follow their own rules and that makes them mysterious and unpredictable, not just a copy of the PCs.

Traps: Just use as is with obvious adjustments like dex saves or new poison rules. Maybe even up the damage a bit.

Find traps (Search): I use a mix of Int (Investigation) or Wis (Perception), or both depending on the mechanism. I tend to give a bias to less common skills like Investigation, so it might be DC 15 Investigation or DC 17 Perception for the same trap.

Disable traps: Might be simple RP or Dex (Thieves' Tools). Might even say Int (Thieves' Tools) if its a cleverly designed trap. The skill system is flexible enough that you could use a variety of ability checks for disarming devices (Strength, for example).

Treasure: season to taste. Generally, though, tone it right down and go for flavoursome items that add new abilities, not just enhance old ones, i.e magical paints that create real things or a freaky ancient glass weapon that shatters and reforms doing shrapnel damage)

A personal taste is to find opportunities to exploit more obscure skills - Medicine, Insight, Performance, etc. Oh, and be sure to tone down the DCs of skill checks to be more in line with the 5-10-15-20 scale.

Good luck!

 

[Tormyr]

I'm curious what people have been doing when converting leveled monsters. Say, for example, there was a 3.5/Pathfinder encounter that featured a half dozen 7th level barbarian bugbears. Have you just been switching them to regular bugbears and counting on the bounded accuracy to do its thing, or are you adding something to the standard bugbear?

There are two easy ways to do it.
1. Just use the bugbears.
2. Use the berserker NPC and add the bugbear traits to it. Since Brute and Surprise Attack add extra damage, increase the bugbear berserker's CR by 1 over a standard berserker. The DMG will make assigning a CR easier to figure out, and it is only 3 weeks away.

 

[Tormyr]

We have been playing the 3.5 AP Age of Worms since April. We are now about a third of the way through chapter 4 of 12. Here is what I have found. It is straightforward, but time consuming.
1. You need to convert creatures, items and DCs. In many cases, one of the core 3 books will have it covered.
2. Encounters: Look at the Encounter Level called for in the adventure. Build an encounter of medium difficulty for a party that matches that EL and includes the number of PCs in your party. If your party has 5 4th-level PCs, and the EL for the encounter is 6, balance the encounter as medium for 5 6th-level PCs. You will then have a hard or deadly encounter for the 4th-level party. Using this method, you will get encounters all along the difficulty scale.
3. Creatures: Use a creature from the MM, Rot, HotDQ, or LMoP or whatever official 5e source you have whenever possible. It is just easier. Monster traits can be applied to NPCs as well. For the Octopins, I took the Chuul from the MM, changed its size to medium, changed its tentacle attack to the tentacle claw of the Octopin and changed the slowing gaze to an innate spellcasting of Slow 1/day.
4. DCs: The DMG will have lots of sample DCs, but scaling things on the 5e Trivial to Godlike scale, with most thing fitting in Easy (10) to Hard (20) will do fine. For traps, I let them sometimes use passive perception, but our rogue has a 19 in that (expertise, so a lot of traps are just out of reach.
5. Magic Items: From all indications, the DMG will have a lot of the magic items. It should be relatively straightforward to make any items it does not have. Magic items are more rare in 5e, but I would go ahead and give most of the treasure in the AP. Include the magic items that creatures have, but one thing I change, drop masterwork items completely (they don't exist in 5e) and any straight +x items should be adjusted to 3/5 of their original value rounded down with a minimum of 1. So +1 and +2 become +1, +3 and +4 become +2, and +5 and higher becomes +3. You will need to adjust a creature's stat block for any magic items it has.
6. If you are using an AP, drop levelling by experience, and switch it to milestones. In Age of Worms, most chapters cover two levels. I quickly realized that xp was not increasing at the same rate between 3.5 and 5e. The party was going to fall way behind the curve. So I changed it to level up about halfway through the chapter and at the end of the chapter.

 

[Nebulous]

Well one tricky thing I can foresee is when you're converting monsters with levels from 3.x to 5th edition. 5e does not have a comparable (so far) system to equate them, but i'm sure it will release one. For now, you *might* be able to eyeball the total hit points of the leveled monster, and then appropriately guesstimate how many individual monsters that would break down to. But that could be a really bad idea, so don't take my word for it

 

[Tormyr]

Well one tricky thing I can foresee is when you're converting monsters with levels from 3.x to 5th edition. 5e does not have a comparable (so far) system to equate them, but i'm sure it will release one. For now, you *might* be able to eyeball the total hit points of the leveled monster, and then appropriately guesstimate how many individual monsters that would break down to. But that could be a really bad idea, so don't take my word for it

That is why it is simpler to use the encounter level as a guide, and build a medium encounter for a party of that level.

 

[Inchoroi]

For me, at least, its just above "Easy as Pie". At the moment, I'm converting Rise of the Runelords, and just finished Chapter 2, and I've found three things to be important.

1. Choose encounter difficulty, and make monsters to fit that. I have been so helped by Surfarcher's Monster Analysis that I can't sing its praises enough. Use that to determine basic HP, CR, etc, and then tweak to personal taste using other monster's traits. Ignore the Ability scores of Pathfinder monsters, btw; they're way higher than the equivalent. Instead, choose a monster of around the same CR with a similar build and use, and use those abilities.

2. Ignore any and all XP, magic item, and money rewards. They will lead to unbelievable problems. Instead, I use the playtest's money tables (mostly), make some of my own magic items or take them from the supplements, spoilers, and basic guides, and (I, at least) use milestones to keep the PCs on the right track. Its fairly easy to fill in side-quests, if you wanted to, to fill out the levels in each chapter of the adventure, if you wanted to use XP, but I use the milestones as guidelines for when they should level up.

(Note: I admit to a bias in that I like awarding magic items, and like my players to be awesome, and go out of my way a bit to make that happen in my adventures. Pathfinder, especially, is very heavy on the magic items.)

3. Drop the majority of the DCs by 5. Save DCs are, usually, pretty decent to keep as is.

 

[Zoetrope]

I've converted the Forge of Fury adventure and the players are currently working their way through that. I had no problem just inserting the like-for-like monsters from the MM or tweaking the NPC stats to match those listed in the published adventure, dropping them into an Excel template I created for the stat blocks.

A certain amount of DM flexibility is required in case of accidentally overpowering an encounter - I typically only 'punish' players who do ridiculously stupid things, otherwise an encounter should be survivable in principle. New/unique creatures in published adventures can be recreated in 5e relatively easily by just re-skinning something from the MM, or another NPC stat block.

For treasure, I ripped out all the magic items except what I felt was appropriate to leave in. I cut all the money rewards by a tenth, as well as the value of gems, jewelry, etc. Seems to keep it all within the spirit of 5e, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Inchoroi]

For treasure, I ripped out all the magic items except what I felt was appropriate to leave in. I cut all the money rewards by a tenth, as well as the value of gems, jewelry, etc. Seems to keep it all within the spirit of 5e, as far as I'm concerned.

Cutting the treasure by a factor of ten isn't a bad idea, either, actually. (Me, personally, as a DM, however, is very, very amused by randomly rolling for treasure. It tickles me.)

 

[SkidAce]

For treasure, I ripped out all the magic items except what I felt was appropriate to leave in. I cut all the money rewards by a tenth, as well as the value of gems, jewelry, etc. Seems to keep it all within the spirit of 5e, as far as I'm concerned.

"Cut by a tenth" as in 100 gp goes down to 90 gp, or as in divided by 10, i.e. 100 gp results in 10 gp?