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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4057168" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.</blockquote>

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