In the PDF age all adventures should be compatible with all editions

[Mallus]

Suppose I have a 1E copy of Village of Hommlet and my group plays 4E. I want to share that experience with them.

A capital idea! It's a good module.

All of those options are terribly inconvenient.

Sometimes gaming, like pimping, ain't easy.

They guarantee that D&D adventures have limited shelf-life and limited value. That needs to stop.

I don't mean to sound unduly, well, mean, but what needs to stop is consumers believing the marketplace should furnish them with anything their hearts desire. Either buy a product someone is willing to sell you or make it yourself.

When you had to rely solely on books it was simply unrealistic to support every edition. You couldn't print four nearly identical Tomb of Horrors books, send all of them to the gaming store and expect all of them to sell. Those days are over.

Allow me to argue this one by analogy.

"When we had to rely on printed books, it was unrealistic to publish new novels in more than a few languages. But those days are over. Thanks to e-books, we can publish books in any language you can think of; from English, Spanish, German and French, through Russian, Chinese, and Finnish, all the way to koine Greek, Church Latin, Esperanto, Klingon, and LISP."

See the problem with this? It ain't just the printing costs, it's the cost of translation. And how do you crowd-source a translation project without giving the content away?

 

[MerricB]

I've done one professional conversion of a 1E adventure to 3.5E (Maze of Zayene #4, The Eight Kings), and it was a lot of work. Far more work than would be feasible on an ongoing basis for every module created. The fact is, the moment you talk about unique monsters or NPCs in 3.5e, you're looking at an hour of work on each one, if not more.

There's also the fact that what make good adventure design is different in each edition. In 1E, it was rare that a PC's armour class would cross significantly into the negatives. (-2 was incredibly good). In 3E and 4E, very good ACs are par for the course; thus an encounter against a couple of ogres in 1E gives the potential for them to hit you a couple of times before you deal with them (barring magic), but in 3E there's no threat at all.

Encounter length and pacing? Yes, that's also different from 1E to 3E and 4E. Low level 1E and 3E track pretty well; high level (10+) are significantly different.

It is anything but trivial, and GregoryOatmeal's attempt to call the exercise trivial without even doing it himself displays the intellectual paucity of his arguments.

 

[Barastrondo]

Personally I love game prep, but looking at these boards, I see that far more GMs do not, and its part of their argument for preferring 4e. If game prep wasn't some kind of big problem, then converting adventures from one edition to another wouldn't be a big deal - anybody could do it (actually anybody can, but...)

I have to admit that I must enjoy game prep to some degree -- I run homebrews almost exclusively. But I prefer the style of 2e and 4e's prep to the style of 3e's. It's not really a binary "enjoy/do not enjoy" situation, just chemistry really.

So is changing statblocks a big deal - for me, no, but for the majority, it wouldn't be brought up again and again regarding 3e. Apparently its a big problem.

Yeah, but the real question is whether it's sufficiently big a problem that there's a large market for adventures that aren't very good with a particular edition's assumptions. If someone else converted Secret of the Slaver's Stockade encounter-by-encounter to 4e, it would be easier to run than doing it yourself. But would it be good? Would the pacing hold up at every edition? Would customers return for the next one?

I understand the OP's desire to be able to share experiences with players across editions. I'm not sure that "everyone converts everything for everything" is a sustainable goal, though. I don't believe that the majority of potential customers people would pay extra for rules they don't plan to use, which they'd have to do in order to justify the extra work in conversion. If it turns out that some of the converted adventures you purchased weren't very good in your favorite edition, there's even less incentive to keep buying copies of every new adventure in case the conversions are better this time.

As a model, it could work: but I think it'd require a perfect storm of players willing to spend more money than they were used to, adventure creators willing to devote the extra time to conversion and multiple passes of playtesting, and an overall zeitgeist shift to "playing the same adventures as everyone else". It could happen. I just don't think the odds are in its favor.

 

[gamerprinter]

Yeah, I mentioned further up thread, that I am creating adventure material for my Kaidan setting for Pathfinder. While with some minor modification, my adventures would probably work almost as is for 3.5. But having played 1e/2e, I don't think it would convert well to those previous editions - too much would need to be removed. Since I don't know 4e well enough, its difficult to say for sure, but I don't think my adventures would parse well to 4e.

As also previously stated I've been approached by a couple non-D&D publishers asking is I'd convert my game to theirs. And really, though I don't want to spend the time learning a new set of rules just to do this, my setting is strictly designed for PF and I have no desire to make the all edition version of my game.

While it seems to work well for PF, I doubt it would work well for every edition, even if I spent the time to adapt it to other games.

 

[Mark CMG]

It is anything but trivial, and GregoryOatmeal's attempt to call the exercise trivial without even doing it himself displays the intellectual paucity of his arguments.

Can you convert this sentence from 1E Gygaxian into something more contemporary?

 

[rogueattorney]

I have found, while converting various 3.x adventures to 1e and B/X D&D that the conversion effort is significant enough to be of no less effort than simply making my own adventures.

The devil really is in the details. Movement rates, areas of effect, duration of spells and magical effects, range of missile weapons are all very different, which will alter the significance of the geography of the dungeon.

 

[Jhaelen]

Suppose I have a 1E copy of Village of Hommlet and my group plays 4E. I want to share that experience with them.

You can't. Really. The world doesn't stand still and it's pretty much impossible to repeat a past experience.

It's like trying to share the experience of a world without television sets, or without the internet with someone who's grown up taking these things for granted.

There's a telling scene in "The Wrestler" movie where the protagonist is playing an old 8-bit NES video game with a 12 year old boy, who basically comments "This sucks. I currently play Call of Duty 4 - _That's_ cool!".

What you really need to do is to find a _new_ Village of Hommlet that will work for someone playing 4e. Simply converting the old module will just suck.

 

[jasper]

...Suppose I have a 1E copy of Village of Hommlet and my group plays 4E. I want to share that experience with them. My options are
- Remake encounters for 4E based on my 1E copy
- Rebuy the 4E version of what I already own for $77 on ebay
- Convince my gaming group to learn 1E or a retroclone and make characters for that
- Look for an adaptation on the internet
All of those options are terribly inconvenient. They guarantee that D&D adventures have limited shelf-life and limited value. That needs to stop.

. .....

This is such a great idea. You should put up your money, time, and research and then sell itto WOTC.
And while you at it please do conversions for the Monopoly 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, editions. Don't forget to include the option of converting Monopoly to East Money game.
No. On second thought, this is no way realistic due how different some editions are.

 

[MichaelSomething]

What you really need to do is to find a _new_ Village of Hommlet that will work for someone playing 4e. Simply converting the old module will just suck.

Ironically, there is a 4E version of Village of Hommlet that was given away as part of the LFR (or related to LFR at least)

However, converting is the wrong word here. I think "redesigning it using the old adventure as inspiration" would be a better term.

Also, I had to take 20 on that spot check Pentius.

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

I've done one professional conversion of a 1E adventure to 3.5E (Maze of Zayene #4, The Eight Kings), and it was a lot of work. Far more work than would be feasible on an ongoing basis for every module created. The fact is, the moment you talk about unique monsters or NPCs in 3.5e, you're looking at an hour of work on each one, if not more.

There's also the fact that what make good adventure design is different in each edition. In 1E, it was rare that a PC's armour class would cross significantly into the negatives. (-2 was incredibly good). In 3E and 4E, very good ACs are par for the course; thus an encounter against a couple of ogres in 1E gives the potential for them to hit you a couple of times before you deal with them (barring magic), but in 3E there's no threat at all.

Encounter length and pacing? Yes, that's also different from 1E to 3E and 4E. Low level 1E and 3E track pretty well; high level (10+) are significantly different.

It is anything but trivial, and GregoryOatmeal's attempt to call the exercise trivial without even doing it himself displays the intellectual paucity of his arguments.

This is a well-reasoned post, I'm not sure why you chose to end it in such an unconstructive way with such a petty and condescending tone.