Why won't you switch?

[Haffrung Helleyes]

.

Query: Why weren't people as offended by SKR when he went on his spiels talking about the badwrongfun from 2E? Why were people not as offended when 3E basically invalidated their 2E books (they're basically useful only for fluff in 3.5)?

Speaking for myself only, I wasn't offended because , as a former D&D player who had quit the game for RuneQuest, I agreed with him.

This time around, I don't.

Ken

 

[Psion]

You'd think this until you tried to do the conversion. I speak from experience. I converted I3yramid (its been uploaded to ENWorld), and it was rather unexpectedly a heck of a lot of work, but then threw my hands up in dispair at trying to convert I4: White Palm Oasis as not only alot of work but really impossible to do faithfully.

I started a conversion of Ruins of Undermountain. It was proving to be a lot of work, but then, I was converting a lot of things I don't know if the players would ever encounter.

So I switched to just using RoU as-is and just pulling creatures out of the book, and tweaking numbers or adding class levels to get the challenge level right. That actually worked pretty well. I mean thematically, is an encounter with 4 orcs that different from 2, or giving the orcs warrior levels?

I also did some conversion work for Return to the Tomb of Horrors (and tapped in to already existing conversions for the rest.) The single biggest challenge there was that power levels from 1e/2e creatures to 3e vary wildly, and you really have to tweak some things to make it work. (Frex, Mountain Giants are hideously more powerful in 3e than 2e; I put a templated stone giant pulled from advanced bestiary in in their stead.)

So I can see where some challenges exist, but I consider it doable if you aren't anal about being "faithful." However, it appears 4e will change the actual concepts of many creatures (that's not a dryad, that's a treant with bewbs!). The concepts of the adventures and settings are of more value to me than some numbers, so I consider that a bigger issue.

 

[Mark Hope]

Query: Why weren't people as offended by SKR when he went on his spiels talking about the badwrongfun from 2E?

I was never aware of SKR's "spiels" when I changed over from 2e to 3e. Since then I have seen some of his thoughts on his website - some I agree with, some I don't. None of these influenced my decsion to move from 2e to 3e and they have nothing whatsoever to do with 4e. Not seeing the connection, sorry.

Why were people not as offended when 3E basically invalidated their 2E books (they're basically useful only for fluff in 3.5)?

Because 3e didn't invalidate my 2e books, basically or otherwise. Much of the 2e material can be converted over to 3e without too much hassle (having converted hundreds of DS monsters I can personally attest to this fact) and stuff like C&C only increases cross-edition compatibility. The 4e designers have been pretty clear that they don't see this as being similarly possible with the new edition, and who am I to doubt their wisdom?

Oh, and this?

Because Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is still a kick ass game. cheers

Win.

 

[The Cardinal]

I use D&D only for the D&D genre - and D&D3.5 and C&C are more than enough for that.
For any other roleplaying experience my system of choice is GURPS4e (or sometimes a bit of Unknown Armies, Storyteller, ORE, Unisystem, or HEX) - and with the advent of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy it will likely kill of D&D3.5, C&C and other d20 rules and take their stuff.

 

[Dragonblade]

Because 3e didn't invalidate my 2e books, basically or otherwise. Much of the 2e material can be converted over to 3e without too much hassle (having converted hundreds of DS monsters I can personally attest to this fact) and stuff like C&C only increases cross-edition compatibility. The 4e designers have been pretty clear that they don't see this as being similarly possible with the new edition, and who am I to doubt their wisdom?

Huh? Sorry to interrupt, but the designers have never said that you could not convert older edition creatures to 4e. In fact, given that you no longer have to build monsters from scratch, it should be EASIER to convert to 4e.

Furthermore, going 3e to 4e will no more invalidate your books than going from 2e to 3e did.

I played 2e extensively and there was really no compatibility with 3e. Despite the illusion of compatibility provided by the so-called conversion documents, a 3e character was a completely different animal than a 2e character of the same level. Feats, skill points, saves, class abilities. Everything was different. You pretty much had to rebuild your character from scratch to convert it over.

 

[RonYon]

The other posters cover the reasons why I dont want to go 4th edition.
As to why Im still here:I dis-avowed every part of the Star Wars Saga except Empire and Star Wars after seeing Episode One, but Ive seen all of them,in the theater no less.
Its hard to turn away from some thing you love, even when it feels desecrated.
I am hopeful that there will be something for me to enjoy in the new edition, but I only come here when the traffic on the Character Op board is slow or boring.

 

[Mark Hope]

Huh? Sorry to interrupt, but the designers have never said that you could not convert older edition creatures to 4e. In fact, given that you no longer have to build monsters from scratch, it should be EASIER to convert to 4e.

They've said more than once that 4e is not intended to be backwards compatible with 3e. End of story as far as I am concerned. Sorry if you don't agree.

Furthermore, going 3e to 4e will no more invalidate your books than going from 2e to 3e did.

Yes it will.

I played 2e extensively and there was really no compatibility with 3e.

Yes there was.

Despite the illusion of compatibility provided by the so-called conversion documents, a 3e character was a completely different animal than a 2e character of the same level.

No it wasn't.

Feats, skill points, saves, class abilities. Everything was different. You pretty much had to rebuild your character from scratch to convert it over.

No you didn't.

There. I have cleverly and soundly beaten your arguments with my incisive rhetoric. You are now shamed into retracting your untenable positions and slinking away in humiliation.






(More seriously, your experiences are clearly not my own and I have little interest in debating subjective points of view with you. No offense )

 

[Celebrim]

So I switched to just using RoU as-is and just pulling creatures out of the book, and tweaking numbers or adding class levels to get the challenge level right. That actually worked pretty well. I mean thematically, is an encounter with 4 orcs that different from 2, or giving the orcs warrior levels?

What you describe worked pretty well for I3, and the problems I ran into there weren't for the most part balance. A couple of things made I4 unusually difficult to convert though.

The first was that it was part of an 'adventure path', and not a stand alone module. That means that the starting expected level of the characters needed to match up with the finishing expected level of the characters from I3. So, I didn't have alot of room to play around with what level the encounters were being balanced for.

This made the second problem of balance 'outliers' that much more problimatic. By 'outlier' I mean an encounter that is when converted significantly harder or easier than it would have been in the original. Let's say the original module was for 8th level characters. Ideally, you'd want the encounters to cluster around EL 8, and certainly not be above around EL 10 or so. But if they all cluster around EL 10, well that's ok too, because you can just say that level 10 is the new level 8. No biggie. The problem comes when you have most of them clustering around EL 7, and then a few around EL 14, and/or alot of encounters that are now EL 5 pushovers that will feel tedious after a while. In I3, the only really serious balance 'outlier' was the Purple Worm on the random encounter table which had became a radically more difficult encounter in 3rd edition than it was in 1st. That could almost be ignored if you were of a mind to because it was a rare random encounter that could be ignored or ran as a non-lethal event encounter, or a 'thems the breaks, run for your lives and trip your friends if you've a mind to' sort of thing by a more RB sort of DM.

But I4 has a balance 'outlier' that is critical to the plot, namely the climatic encounter with the Effrit. By flavor, the Effrit is supposed to be an epic or near epic level foe. In 1st edition, we are all good because by the end of the adventure path (say 12th level) we are getting into what is for 1st edition epic or near epic. Certainly by 1st edition standards, the Effreeti has near god-like stats. The problem is that no matter how we choose to represent the Effreeti in 3E terms, we run into problems. If we make him 'weak', then the importance of finding the magical mcguffin in the quest is degraded and the threat represented by the Effreet thematically is lost (why do we need Superman for this job again?). If we make him 'strong', especially strong enough to reflect the theme (CR 20+), then the problem is that he'll be relatively more dangerous to the party than he would have been in the and the fight becomes essentially unwinnable without the magic mcguffin. I don't think there is a happy balance where the fight can work like it did in 1st edition. The only solution I would be happy with as a DM is to add an additional adventure to the 'adventure path' between I3 and I4, increase the expected level of the party in I4 by 2 or so, and rebalance all the other encounters for that new expectation.

The single biggest challenge there was that power levels from 1e/2e creatures to 3e vary wildly, and you really have to tweak some things to make it work. (Frex, Mountain Giants are hideously more powerful in 3e than 2e; I put a templated stone giant pulled from advanced bestiary in in their stead.)

That's an example of what I mean, though the situation in I4 was I thought unusually difficult. The thing is, I am 'anal' about being faithful. Not respecting another artists works is one of my peeves. I don't expect the numbers to be the same, but I do expect you to try to make it play the same way. The Efreet was one of a number of challenges that proved unexpectedly difficult.

Another example would be converting the original Tome of Horrors to 3E. If your goal, like mine, is to maintain the consistant tone and feel of the original, its almost impossible given changes in 3E's expectations of who solves a challenge - the player or the character - compared to 1E. Third edition is much more 'simulationist' when it comes to its approach to challenges, where as the original ToH was almost entirely 'gamist'. For example, the combats in the original ToH was mostly pushovers for characters of the level of the original, and if faithfully converted the original dungeon is in fact mostly a walkover. The traps would be discovered simply by taking 10 or 20 on the rogues search checks, the monsters will be easily dispatched, etc. If you look at the official conversion, and especially if you look at accounts of playing the converted module, you'll find that in the conversion most of the deaths are occuring in combat rather than from the traps! To me, that means that the conversion doesn't play anything like the original. Likewise, again, in 1st edition 10th-12th level characters are near epic level, and the dungeon feels like a truly horrificly epic place (consider all the mithril and adamantine lying around). The conversion in 3rd edition for 9th-10th level characters which is effectively 'mid-level' by 3E standards - something made more explicit by the fact that all that adamantine and mithril is in fact fake in the official 3E conversion.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't mean offense but you're quoting something as fact which simply is not. Sales of the LGG were quite good, and I'll quote Erik Mona on the subject:

The mind boggles. Are you saying that Mourn should provide evidence to support his statement or retract it because it's a dishonest statement?!?!

 

[Dragon-Slayer]

No need to switch here, C&C does an excellent enough job for the group. There is really nothing wrong with a simplified game that can just be played. DnD 3.x was becoming a chore to run and that takes away from the fun of the game. We switched to C&C and since then have had no inkling to change or upgrade.

I might read through the books at a bookstore and maybe buy the core books, but the game seems to be taking such an un-DnD turn that it holds little appeal anymore. I don't wish Wizards ill or think any less of anyone who gets into 4e, any game that a group can sit down, play and truly enjoy is a precious thing in and of itself, regardless of edition.