Planning to convert? (not just upgrade)

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I'm not sure. Currently we're playing through the Age of Worms Adventure Path. We're 16th level and have three modules to complete before the end. Unfortunately we've had quite a few setbacks and such so that our weekly game over the last year is lucky if we get two full sessions a month.

Which isn't anything wrong with the campaign, I'm having a blast. But we had planned, I think, to be done with the AP already and onto another campaign. With the outages and delays we're seeing, I have a feeling we may get around to wrapping up AoW in 5-6 months.

We're somewhat up in the air as to the next campaign. There had been some talk about doing the Savage Tide campaign next but I don't want to start a year-long campaign four or five months before a new edition hits the shelves. Especially since, at our current level, we're really seeing problems with the way we work and the way 3.5E works that it looks like 4E may solve (in particular that we tend to get about five minutes of fun out of the typical "D&D Day" before we have to rest). In the last combat, for instance, one character took something like 600 damage in one round for lack of a single spell, while another character took no damage because of immunity. Instakill effects are terribly common in this campaign at this point and I think we're getting tired of "losing" one or more PCs every fight when what we enjoy is the storyline and the RP interactions.

So I'm hesitant to try and convert the whole of STAP. But I think folks would want to convert after seeing 4E, as well.

--fje

 

[Nebulous]

I've really been wanting to run Red Hand of Doom ever since i bought it, but we just wont' have time. Come this summer i thought about using the 4e rules and running it anyway, but that may be more work than i want to put in to it. If there was a conversion of the enemy stats somewhere i would be all over that.

 

[Asmor]

An encounter balanced for Basic D&D, or 1e, or 2e was never necessarily balanced for 3e to begin with. And 4e and 3e sound like they are going to have very different balancing mechanics, so a straight conversion will probably be an unbalanced mess.

Well, yeah, if you just swap a goblin for a goblin and a troll for a troll... But you can't do that, just like you can't just take the English equivalents of all the words of a sentence in Japanese and call it a translation... That's transliteration, and it results in a barely-legible mess.

Translation is all about intent... Figure out what they were trying to say in Japanese, and then figure out how to say the same thing in English. Similarly, if you're converting adventures, you need to translate encounters across the edition gap. What used to be 3 goblins in 3rd edition might be 8 goblins in 4th edition. What used to be a troll might be better suited by 4 ogres.

The important part of an adventure isn't the combat encounters... Anyone can grab a couple monsters from a book and toss them at players. It's the story, the puzzles, and the roleplaying encounters which make an adventure unique, and all of those things are 99% system generic.

 

[Jhaelen]

The important part of an adventure isn't the combat encounters... Anyone can grab a couple monsters from a book and toss them at players. It's the story, the puzzles, and the roleplaying encounters which make an adventure unique, and all of those things are 99% system generic.

Well, it depends on the adventure. I've started converting the first three Eberron adventures for use with the Earthdawn rpg. I soon realized, though, that there was almost nothing that survived the translation:
After replacing all of the monsters, locations and organisations the adventures became completely unrecognizable. Basically, the only thing that remained was the character hook and some of the 'scenes'.

There's a second, completely different kind of adventures: For these it's possible to replace all combat encounters without changing anything else, because they are pretty much generic. Many of the adventures available online for free are of this kind.

However, I'd argue that an adventure with combat encounters that are completely interchangable is not a particularly good one. Good adventures make extensive use of special monster traits and preferred tactics. In those adventures the environment is shaped by the choice of inhabitants, not the other way around.

IMHO, if too many aspects of an adventure have to be changed to make sense in a different setting/system/edition, it's not worth the effort.