General Discussion

[DangerousPuhson]

Personally, I've got nothing against AI art - we don't all have the skill or money for good art, and you'll get crucified if you don't include anything. However, I only really say this because art is supplemental to adventures, not the adventure itself (MotBM notwithstanding).

AI for writing though? That's a low point. I could maybe forgive if they used it to punch up some weak writing, or if used to generate a framework that gets largely left behind... but this ain't that. They just pressed the "generate" button and then the "publish" button. The most egregious misuse is for adventure design though, the one part of a module that absolutely needs a human mind. Art can be generated without human creativity (assuming you consider AI art "art"), but module premise and execution should not and cannot - at least, not in a good way.

 

[Beoric]

IMO, "AI art" isn't art, and it's middling illustration at best. Not to mention the fact that it undervalues the work of artists, it is created by stealing said artists' IP, it uses obnoxious amounts of electricity, and it uses obnoxious amounts of water to cool the computers that do the processing.

But then I prefer to hope for a Star Trek future, where technology frees us from the drudgery of menial work, so we can turn our minds to the creation and appreciation of art and literature; to a Fritz Lang's Metropolis future, where we are slaves to the machine, so a wealthy few can enjoy a shallow and soulless life of leisure. Having computers do the fun bits (poorly) is ass-backwards.

I don't get to be too sanctimonious, because I did play with ChatGPT when it first came out, as well as Dall-E. And my business's logo was created with AI assistance, and I quite like it. And non-generative AI definitely has a place in my industry, for processing large amounts of certain types of data, in a way that frees up humans to do more interesting work, as opposed to eliminating their positions. But now that I know more about it, I try not to use LLMs or AI art at all.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I wrote off a Star Trek utopian future the day George Bush was elected over Al Gore. That's when I knew the world doesn't work on "supposed to" logic. T'was naught but a silly childhood fantasy, dashed by anyone with even a modicum of insight into human behaviour.

As to AI "art", I'll say this - I've seen some really cool shit made by AI, stuff I'd never even be able to conceive in my mind's eye. It definitely made me feel stuff, which I'd argue puts us at least half way there. Sucks that it comes at the expense of existing artists trying to eke out a living, but that's technological advancement for you - it tends to do that.

 

[Beoric]

There is a fair amount of AI art that has made me feel.... nausea.

You think I'm just making a joke, but honestly I'm not. A lot of it is super creepy. Especially anything involving people and strings - bowstrings, harps, fishing lines. And the hands and feet freak me out. I see a lot of it when I'm googling images to make VTT tokens, and it's exceedingly rare that I use AI art for those. I don't even use AI art when it's free.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I mean, you could say the same thing for regular painted art. Or film, or music, etc.

Personally, Basquiat makes me want to gouge out my eyes.

 

[Beoric]

Every once in a while I look at the many, many 4e modules from Dungeon Magazine, and think to myself, surely I can do something with this stuff. Most of them are pretty short, 1-3 encounters, but they would be useful for randoms encounters or something, right?

And every time, I realize how wrong I am. Nearly all of them have nothing useful that I can salvage. The hooks are inane, the scenarios are painfully overwrought, the choice of monsters (a menagerie clearly thrown together with no other consideration than their combat role) makes no sense in the game world, there are no area maps, and the battle maps are garbage.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Dungeon Magazine

I ran the whole Age of Worms adventure path from Dungeon in 3e - it took some HEAVY modifications, and honestly, most of the fun came from the extra stuff I was adding in between adventures. There was just a lack of clarity throughout, and extraneous information in all the wrong places. Tough to run , like it was fighting me every step of the way.

 

[Beoric]

I ran the whole Age of Worms adventure path from Dungeon in 3e - it took some HEAVY modifications, and honestly, most of the fun came from the extra stuff I was adding in between adventures. There was just a lack of clarity throughout, and extraneous information in all the wrong places. Tough to run , like it was fighting me every step of the way.

I tried several times to figure out a way to make that AP work, and also Shackled City. Just these massive walls of text. Finally I decided I needed to read Shackled City to determine the connections between the modules, and the elements that had to be kept to make the series work. And there was just... nothing. You could lose any part of it, and it would make no difference to the subsequent modules. There was some background continuity for the DM, most of which would never reach the players, but it was all optional. And the flip side of that is, nothing the players did in any module, other than the last, had any impact on the outcome. Nothing the players did mattered, they were more or less spectators, just along for the ride.

And yet they were still better than most of the 4e stuff.

 

[Beoric]

Hey, @DangerousPuhson, have you ever run 3e/3.5e/PF1? Also, @The1True, have you ever run any 5e? I'm looking for a comparison as to how each edition uses CR.

In particular, I am curious if an encounter using X creatures of CR Y, for a party of level N in 3e, would be around the same difficulty as an encounter using X creatures of CR Y, for a party of level N in 5e. I see some of the same language used ("CR X is an appropriate challenge for a party of level X"), but the actual encounter-building math seems to work out differently.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Hey, @DangerousPuhson, have you ever run 3e/3.5e/PF1?

Pathfinder, no. But I ran 3/3.5 extensively. The CRs are not equivalent between editions, due mainly to bounded accuracy which throws all the 3e number crunching out of whack. Both DMGs (3e and 5e) have sections that detail how their CR mechanic is supposed to work mathematically.

 

[Beoric]

Both DMGs (3e and 5e) have sections that detail how their CR mechanic is supposed to work mathematically.

Yes, I know, the 5e math just gets really wonky, with the multipliers for larger numbers of creatures. It makes it harder to map to 4e levels, which has much simpler, and much, much more consistent, rules for increasing the number of creatures for higher level encounters. I thought I had it figured out after another conversation we had, but I ended up with unexpected results. Hopefully I have a copy of my work from an earlier iteration, which was cumbersome but gave me results closer to what I would have expected.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Just find an existing CR creature and approximate your stats based off that. HP, AC, dmg - they need to be within existing ranges, that's it. The rest is dressing.

 

[The1True]

I havn't played 5e past 5th lvl. The CR's are fairly similar up to that point, but I can see them diverging slowly around 4-5. I havn't read the 5e DMG, but 3.5 had EL (Encounter Level) as well as CR. There's some decent EL calculators online (although, their mathematical veracity has been disputed) which do a better job than I can of showing how various combinations of CR's add up to similar EL's. I've been using more and more PF monsters in my adventures, but they're stats tend to be higher than the 3.5 average which has been throwing things off a bit.

 

[Beoric]

Just find an existing CR creature and approximate your stats based off that. HP, AC, dmg - they need to be within existing ranges, that's it. The rest is dressing.

This would be fine if I was running 5e, but I'm not, I'm converting to 4e.

I havn't played 5e past 5th lvl. The CR's are fairly similar up to that point, but I can see them diverging slowly around 4-5. I havn't read the 5e DMG, but 3.5 had EL (Encounter Level) as well as CR. There's some decent EL calculators online (although, their mathematical veracity has been disputed) which do a better job than I can of showing how various combinations of CR's add up to similar EL's. I've been using more and more PF monsters in my adventures, but they're stats tend to be higher than the 3.5 average which has been throwing things off a bit.

I have 3.5e conversions sorted, once I learned that a character of level X has a CR of X, the rest was easy.

5e is more complicated. The difficulty of the encounter is measured in the XP values. So for a party of 4 5th level characters, an easy fight would be 1000 XP and a deadly fight is 4400 XP. A CR 4 creature is worth 1100 XP, so that would be an easy fight.

A CR 1 creature is worth 200 XP, so you would think that 5 CR 1 creatures would be an easy fight, but you would be wrong, because you apply a multiplier for multiple creatures. 5 CR 1 creatures have an XP budget of (2000 x 5) x 2 = 2000 XP, which is almost double the "deadly" threshhold. The upshot if this is, assuming this XP math has an accurate relationship to CR, there is a huge difference in danger level between the fractional CRs, but once you get to the large CRs, the differences become so granular that CR starts to lose any meaning.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

This would be fine if I was running 5e, but I'm not, I'm converting to 4e.

C'mon now, you're a bright guy, you can handle this. You compare it something from 4e to make the conversation.

You say "this new thing is probably about as tough as an ogre", you open your 4e MM to "O" for "Ogre", and you copy down the hit points, AC, and damage output of the entry marked "Ogre", and there you have a new creature that's as challenging to the party as an ogre.

Special attacks and powers and immunities? Drop a few points of hp/AC/dmg to balance it out.

The difficulty of the encounter is measured in the XP values.

You've got that reversed. It might be expressed or categorized by XP value, but the difficulty of an encounter is not measured in XP values - it is measured in... difficulty (i.e. monster toughness). XP values are a direct output of a measured difficulty (i.e. this monster is this tough, so it is worth this much XP).

Difficulty is not a hard metric or formula - it is a loose approximation, meant for wiggle room (because you can't mathematically count on consistency from dice, so a CR can't account for players missing all their attacks, or monsters rolling max damage each hit, or what have you - it makes some statistical wiggle room to account for these things). Which is why adapting challenge is easy if you pin it to the hard known metrics of hp/AC/dmg and then work within the wiggle room of the system.

 

[Beoric]

C'mon now, you're a bright guy, you can handle this. You compare it something from 4e to make the conversation.

You say "this new thing is probably about as tough as an ogre", you open your 4e MM to "O" for "Ogre", and you copy down the hit points, AC, and damage output of the entry marked "Ogre", and there you have a new creature that's as challenging to the party as an ogre.

Special attacks and powers and immunities? Drop a few points of hp/AC/dmg to balance it out.

Ugh. In the face of your condescension I'm going to make one last effort to explain the problem.

The problem is figuring out what "this thing is probably as tough as". You need to know that in order to do proper conversions.

In 0e and basic, an orc and a goblin are about equivalent, whereas a hobgoblin is tougher than either.

In 1e, an orc is tougher than a goblin, but weaker than a hobgoblin.

In 3e, an orc and a hobgoblin both have the same CR, a CR of 1/2. Is that because the orc got tougher, or because the hobgoblin got weaker? Or are both at an entirely different level entirely? This is a solved problem for me.

In 5e, an orc and a hobgoblin again have the same CR, a CR of 1/2. Is that the equivalent of a 3e CR 1/2 orc or hobgoblin? No, it isn't.

• An encounter using four 3.5e CR 1/2 orcs/hobgoblins is a "Challenging" encounter for a party of four 3.5e level 2 characters, which is easier than the "Very difficult" or "Overpowering" categories, and appears to actually mean "about average". I'm taking this from the DMG, I have never played 3e.
• An encounter using four 5e CR 1/2 orcs/hobgoblins is a "Deadly" encounter for a party of four 5e level 2 characters, which is the highest difficulty category. Again, I am using the guidelines in the DMG.

Say you were converting a 3e second level module to 5e, which you are running for second level 5e characters. If you swap in 5e orcs and hobgoblins for the ones in the original module, it is going to be a very different, and perhaps fatal, experience than with the original module. You would need to tinker the stats on the 5e orcs and hobgoblins, but more importantly, you need to know (a) that the tinkering needs to be done, and (b) how much tinkering it will take.

If I am running a 4e game using 5e content, I need to know how tough to make the monsters, because the designer made certain assumptions about their toughness, and I am trying to bring the "feel" of the content as much as the name of the monster.

And the feel of the content is not limited to orcs and hobgoblins. I also need to know how those creatures compare to other monsters. How many orcs/hobs are equivalent to one troll? Is an experienced player's understanding of how tough a troll is in relation to his character's level still valid enough for him to make informed decisions? Has the tough encounter in a converted module now become easy, or has an easy one become tough?

Anyway, I now have a table that I think is going to work well enough. And in case you are curious, my assessment is as follows:

[10 3e goblins] = [8 0e/1e goblins] = [8 0e orcs] = [7 1e/3e orcs] = [7 3e hobgoblins] = [7 5e goblins] = [4 5e orcs] = [4 5e hobgoblins]

In case that isn't clear, one 5e orc is as tough as 2 0e orcs. That is going to affect any conversions.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

The problem is figuring out what "this thing is probably as tough as". You need to know that in order to do proper conversions.

4e has rules for balance, yes? Do they not have templates or guidelines for how many hp/AC/dmg creatures are expected to have? Does the 4e MM not stipulate that, no, your first level party shouldn't be trying to fight this lich, in some mechanical way? Are there no pre-existing 4e materials that demonstrate that yes, a pair of ogres is a worthy challenge for four level 3 characters? I ask genuinely - 4e is unfamiliar to me.

In 0e and basic, an orc and a goblin are about equivalent, whereas a hobgoblin is tougher than either. In 1e, an orc is tougher than a goblin, but weaker than a hobgoblin. In 5e, an orc and a hobgoblin again have the same CR, a CR of 1/2. Is that the equivalent of a 3e CR 1/2 orc or hobgoblin? No, it isn't.

If you're converting to Xe, and you look at the Xe value for an equivalent creature and adjust, you'll hit a 90% solution. I'm just saying there's enough wiggle room that these adjustments aren't feather-touch sensitive. If a 3e hobgoblin has more hp than a 5e hobgoblin, odds are good your players won't even notice in-game - a monster going down in two hits instead of one hit is hardly going to break things. At worst, you see that 5e creatures don't have as high hp as 3e ones, and you drop a couple hp here and there. Maybe at super high levels, when an 3e AC of 30 just isn't possible to hit in 5e's bonded accuracy (or whatever the heck 4e does), then it disintegrates a bit, but at low levels it's so negligible it's a non-issue. You can approximate this stuff to 90% satisfaction.

If you can't abide by such loosey-goosey rulings, you can do what I sometimes do and create some characters to do a few quick rounds of simulated combat playtest.... But all in all, I think you'll find conversions are much more forgiving than you give them credit for.

 

[The1True]

An encounter using four 5e CR 1/2 orcs/hobgoblins is a "Deadly" encounter

I suspect theory and practice may be two different things in this case, since we distinctly encountered humanoid groups of this size in the 5e introductory adventure (the well-respected "Mines of Phandelver"). They were tough but not deadly, and I believe that reflected the intent of the game design which was to raise the stakes of combat back to an old school level. So I don't believe you should be applying this level of mathematical rigor to your conversions. 4 Hobgoblins is 4 Hobgoblins in pretty much every edition, just the stakes are different (and therefor the players' approach to combat needs to be modified from edition to edition).

Possibly mathematical divergence might need to apply at higher populations (the old 0e random encounter with 600 Orcs)...

Where I would agree caution is advised is when monsters got rules overhauls (particularly demons and devils spring immediately to mind. The 3.5e Barbed Devil is a motherfucker, for example).

 

[DangerousPuhson]

So I don't believe you should be applying this level of mathematical rigor to your conversions. 4 Hobgoblins is 4 Hobgoblins in pretty much every edition, just the stakes are different (and therefor the players' approach to combat needs to be modified from edition to edition).

This is the crux, Beoric - what I've been trying to say, but 1True puts it so much more succinctly.

DM-fixation on balance is something that many players claim "sucks the soul" from the game, because the DM's goal is not to make a perfectly balanced adventure (which is essentially analogous to railroading your party's survival, ensuring they'll never meet actual dangerous threats so the game can advance at a preset pace). The DM's goal is simulation of the world and arbitration of the rules. The solution to an overpowered encounter is not on the DM's shoulders if the players are given free reign to approach or disengage at will, as all players ought to be given. The OG random encounter tables had "Red Dragon" and "3d100 Orcs" on them because it was expected that the party would pick and choose their battles when outmatched by stronger foes. Fighting 200 orcs as a party of level 2 characters isn't balanced, but those kinds of encounters are still found in some of the best, most critically-acclaimed adventures.

 

[Beoric]

I suspect theory and practice may be two different things in this case, since we distinctly encountered humanoid groups of this size in the 5e introductory adventure (the well-respected "Mines of Phandelver"). They were tough but not deadly, and I believe that reflected the intent of the game design which was to raise the stakes of combat back to an old school level. So I don't believe you should be applying this level of mathematical rigor to your conversions. 4 Hobgoblins is 4 Hobgoblins in pretty much every edition, just the stakes are different (and therefor the players' approach to combat needs to be modified from edition to edition).

Possibly mathematical divergence might need to apply at higher populations (the old 0e random encounter with 600 Orcs)...

Where I would agree caution is advised is when monsters got rules overhauls (particularly demons and devils spring immediately to mind. The 3.5e Barbed Devil is a motherfucker, for example).

One of the difficulties is guessing to what extent the designers have their thumb on the scale when it comes to encounter design; does "deadly" actually mean "chance of a character dying if the party is both foolish and unlucky"? Is an appropriate challenge for a given level really that challenging? Is an appropriate challenge for four 3e level 1 characters really one 3e level 1 character?

This makes anecdotal evidence tough to assess. When encounter design is so skewed to players never facing any real risk, beating four hobgoblins in both 3e and 5e doesn't really mean that hobgoblins are equivalent in both editions.

So I work with two assumptions. The first is that late-edition designers have their thumb on the scale to the same extent in 3e as in 5e. The second is that designers have more or less succeeded in creating an encounter design system that reflects that framework.

Going to the assertion that 5e is supposed to be more dangerous, I think to the extent that is true, it was accomplished by making the monsters tougher. I remember when Phandelver first came out, seeing some commentary that 4 goblins gave players more trouble than they expected. Well my model, based on what the designers say about their own systems, predicts that goblins are a notch tougher in 5e, and orcs/hobs are also a bit tougher.

Something similar was done with 4e, but in the other direction. 4e assumes that fights against multiple creatures are more interesting than fights against one or two. As a result, they dramatically reduced the power levels of a number of creatures, so you could have more of them in a fight. So in that system, you can't assume that a hobgoblin is the same as a hobgoblin in any other system, replacing them on a one-for-one basis would make all the encounters entirely trivial.

So my assumption is, if the designers' encounter design rules suggest that a party of a given level should be facing a greater or lesser number of hobgoblins than it would in another edition, it is a deliberate design objective.

And really, I need something if I am going to adapt material quickly. And I need a way to assess creatures that are unique to 5e, which includes a host of NPCs. And I need a way to spot when WotC has decided to change the power level of a monster; some demons and devils have varied wildly in their power levels between editions.

This is the crux, Beoric - what I've been trying to say, but 1True puts it so much more succinctly.

DM-fixation on balance is something that many players claim "sucks the soul" from the game, because the DM's goal is not to make a perfectly balanced adventure (which is essentially analogous to railroading your party's survival, ensuring they'll never meet actual dangerous threats so the game can advance at a preset pace). The DM's goal is simulation of the world and arbitration of the rules. The solution to an overpowered encounter is not on the DM's shoulders if the players are given free reign to approach or disengage at will, as all players ought to be given. The OG random encounter tables had "Red Dragon" and "3d100 Orcs" on them because it was expected that the party would pick and choose their battles when outmatched by stronger foes. Fighting 200 orcs as a party of level 2 characters isn't balanced, but those kinds of encounters are still found in some of the best, most critically-acclaimed adventures.

It has nothing to do with balance. I don't need encounters to be balanced. But I do want to know what I am creating, and I want adaptations to give an experience as similar as possible to the original. And I want to be able to telegraph to the players what they are facing, other than "There's a troll - oh, too bad, so sad, this troll turned out to be more dangerous that you thought it would be, based on your encounters with other trolls." .Plus, knowing the relative toughness of creatures has an impact on how the creatures relate to the world, and their position in it.

Anyway, I have what I need, so I'm dropping this topic now.