EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Does this mean edition doesn't matter? Or does it mean that adventures don't matter? Or maybe that for some people, conversion-on-the-fly is a perfectly functional thing for any system they're passably comfortable with, and for other people it's really, really not. (I'd consider myself in the latter camp. Converting a PF module to 4e, or a 1e module to 5e, or stuff like that--all sounds nightmarish to my ears.)I know the original post seems like the distant past for this thread but I finally watched it and have some thoughts.
I mostly agree with the video.
I've run 1e adventures in 5e without meaningful prep, just converting them on the fly, without players noticing.
I've run PF1 adventures in 5e without meaningful prep, just converting them on the fly, without players noticing.
I've one 2e adventure (an edition I never played) in 5e without meaningful prep, just converting them on the fly, without players noticing.
There are minor tweaks here and there that you need to do, but none of those tweaks is super meaningful to the game experience. The systems are all flexible enough that the system they were built on has a lot less meaning to the play experience, at least based on our results.
The only edition where I looked at an adventure and decided it would take longer to tweak it to fit a 5e game was a 4e adventure. And that's because the premise of encounters in 4e was meaningfully different enough from 5e assumptions that I would need to take more time to tweak that. Not a LOT more time though, just enough that I didn't want to try it on the fly. Maybe I could. But my first blush reaction was I'd want to spent a tad more time prepping that to try it. I still hope to do that some day (it was Madness at Gardmore Abbey, a good adventure). Though there is a conversion doc online to convert it to 5e I need to check out.
I just don't think "this means edition is completely irrelevant most of the time" is the correct conclusion to draw from "Mistwell is very good at adapting adventures across editions on the fly."