Shadowdark Shadowdark General Thread [+]

[Velderan]

Link to it and all past monthly monsters in case anyone is missing any of them.

 

[Xenolith234]

Well....I don't think it can't be done, but I do think there will be tradeoffs, and you may end up having to make alterations to the system you're converting to in order to retain flavor.

Again without knowing much about OSE or Dolmenwood, I do know that Dolmenwood has its own playable species, and I'm guessing each of them has more features than the single feature given to Shadowdark ancestries. When converting, what kind of choices do you make? If you strip them down to a single feature are you losing "flavor"? What happens when parts of the adventures explicitly invoke the features you are leaving behind? Is that lost flavor?

It might be blasphemy, but…what if you just give the SD ancestries the same features as in Dolmenwood? Will the game break?

I’m genuinely asking because I haven’t done any homebrew for SD, but if those extra features are mostly ribbons, I don’t see a problem with it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It might be blasphemy, but…what if you just give the SD ancestries the same features as in Dolmenwood? Will the game break?

I’m genuinely asking because I haven’t done any homebrew for SD, but if those extra features are mostly ribbons, I don’t see a problem with it.

Shadowdark ancestries typically get one thing of consequence, a language or two, and then maybe ribbons.

I would have to see the Dolmenwood races, but if they get more than one thing of significance, they will instantly be better than the Shadowdark ancestries. If I were converting Dolmenwood, I would just end up homebrewing conversions of the races and classes, just to keep things from getting weird.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It might be blasphemy, but…what if you just give the SD ancestries the same features as in Dolmenwood? Will the game break?

I’m genuinely asking because I haven’t done any homebrew for SD, but if those extra features are mostly ribbons, I don’t see a problem with it.

I mean, sure, that works. But Kelsey didn't give ancestries a single feature because she's lazy; it was an intentional design choice. So you would be altering a feature of the target system in order to retain flavor. It's a tradeoff.

Multiply that by what I imagine are many such choices, and I'm left wondering why one would bother to port rather than just playing OSE.