Converting 5.0 adventures to 3.5?

[schreier]

There are a ton of good 5.0 adventures it seems ... a friend mentioned he saw threads in the past about converting 5.0 modules to 3.5 ... is anyone aware of these types of efforts?

[AnimeTheCat]

I know that Tales of the Yawning Portal (I think that's the book) actually ported a handful of 3.5 adventures to 5e. Not sure about the other way around though.

[Quertus]

Ooh - *are* there a lot of good adventures for 5e?

Is this because there are a lot of adventurs, or because the average 5e adventure is better than the average 3e adventure?

What makes them better? What do you consider a "good" adventure to look like / what are the qualities of / qualifiers for a good adventure?

I know that, as I go back through my old stuff, 2e is rife with *bad* adventures.

Is there some magic to 5e that makes the adventures better, or have adventure writers just gotten better over the years (such that they'd make good 2e modules, if they put their mind to it)?

Or, put another way, would the 5e modules lose what makes them good by being converted to another system?

[Feldar]

Is this because there are a lot of adventurs, or because the average 5e adventure is better than the average 3e adventure?

I doubt it was any of the factors you mentioned -- it was probably just a desire to capitalize on existing material to produce a bit more profit as inexpensively as possible.

I've picked up $3 mini adventures that rocked, and payed $$$$ for big adventures that wound up sucking and needing tons of rework to make viable despite promising first looks.

[Troacctid]

Ooh - *are* there a lot of good adventures for 5e?

Is this because there are a lot of adventurs, or because the average 5e adventure is better than the average 3e adventure?
Adventure design has definitely come a long way. A lot of 3e adventures are long, drawn-out dungeon crawls, which is a style that can quickly become tedious. In contrast, 5e adventures tend to be more dynamic and multifaceted. Even the ones that are long, drawn-out dungeon crawls feel like they have a tighter design. At the same time, adventures are also much more plentiful and accessible because of the DMs Guild. So, little of column A, little of column B.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Feldar
I've picked up $3 mini adventures that rocked, and payed $$$$ for big adventures that wound up sucking and needing tons of rework to make viable despite promising first looks.

Would you be willing to elaborate, in either category?

[Feldar]

Would you be willing to elaborate, in either category?

Sure. There used to be some little tiny adventure books that cost like $3 or thereabouts that had just the essentials for the adventure, including stat blocks. Some of those were excellent. If I can find them I will post names and publisher.

Likewise, I was very excited to pick up the Castle Greyhawk 3.5 version but it's really just an expensive mudge.

[schreier]

Adventure design has definitely come a long way. A lot of 3e adventures are long, drawn-out dungeon crawls, which is a style that can quickly become tedious. In contrast, 5e adventures tend to be more dynamic and multifaceted. Even the ones that are long, drawn-out dungeon crawls feel like they have a tighter design. At the same time, adventures are also much more plentiful and accessible because of the DMs Guild. So, little of column A, little of column B.

Very much this - also, the metaplot seems to be advancing significantly in the recent modules from what I'm hearing (the black obelisks sound really interesting).

Per some videos, there are these black obelisks across several adventures, and in Rime of the Frost Maiden - activating the black obelisk sets the world back 1500 years to the height of the Netheril Empire

[Calthropstu]

For monsters, it likely isn't much of a problem. Find the monster in 3.5 and field it. Humanoids would take more work though.

[Efrate]

The problem likely would be power level varience. Nearly all 3.5 adventures are utterly stompable with even just sensible choices, let alone any good optimization. 5e classes and the entire system is a lot better balanced against each other.

Also fully healing on long rest means given time attrition is non-existent, not to mention your short rest recharges. However encounter instant ending abilities are much rarer.

A party of t4s or low power t3s should likely be fine, but having to tune all the numbers up individually to still present a threat will be a headache. Also due to bounded accuracy the fact that xyz is a threat in 5e without a huge boost of easy immunities and tight numbers means most things in 3.5 after maybe level 5 with any system mastery are either not a threat or easily escapable. This is important for npcs, cause muderhoboing in 3.5 works very well if you try as far as combat and interaction goes, where's in 5e a bunch of town guards is actually a threat at virtually all levels.

Also you would need to nearly triple magic items to get close if you are just using the 3.5 version of an item. They are buyable nearly everywhere as well, so there is no reason to not have the exact item you need at all times in 3.5 with no limit. 5e 3 items and attunement will put you way behind the expected power curve of 3.5 on a 1 to 1 port.

[Fizban]

You're gonna need to reconfigure the number of encounters themselves, 'cause 5e runs on a 6 "encounter day," and the very first adventure they published ran that into the ground, with only the best possible route getting you through at that number. It also used tons of multi-foe combats, essentially requiring you to have the AoE cantrip or like six party members when it says four.

Of course, increasing the expected encounters per day is actually a potential fix for 3.x: if spellcasters have too many spells, then make the party fight until they actually run out of spells. Except at low levels they don't actually have that many spells.

I don't recall how many fights per level 5e uses, so that might also need adjusting.


As for the adventures I'm familiar with- well the first one started out interesting (Horde of the Dragon Queen), a whole city siege thing the players have to very carefully help out with, but it also reeked of fine-tuning against people who already knew exactly what to do. It latter had a pretty nice caravan thing going on, but that's about as far as I got in evaluating it.

And I watched a little of a video of a group on the first session of the Elemental Evil campaign, and it infuriated me with the usual "oh this person is creating undead somehow,"- so, either the boss of the dungeon is ludicrously overpowered, or bad guys just do whatever they want because plot, and oh hey look they're getting rolled because the dungeon is obviously way over their level with too many encounters and, IIRC, they did in fact run into a spellcaster that was ludicrously overleveled.

So if you like 3.x because the bad guys mostly run on the same rules as the PCs and the system heavily suggests that everything should have a solid mechanical reason, 5e adventures probably won't port well. Particularly skill checks, since 5e abandoned the concept of actual skill DCs, so you're going to have to fill in every single one of those- and even if they started putting DCs in modules, you'd still have to toss them to convert to 3.x skill DCs. And while the adventures being far above their own stated encounter guidelines is exactly the same thing that happened in later 3.x, I don't find that particularly good either.

Basically you'd have to take the given module as more of a suggestion of plot points, monster themes, and maybe some usable social interaction frameworks, then write the entire thing from scratch in 3.x rules.

[Quertus]

So… what keeps people from just using the 5e adventure "as is", plot wise, grabbing the appropriate stats (DCs, etc) from 3e, and then… testing it to figure out what level PCs are appropriate?

Aside from the monetary / magical rewards likely being ludicrously small for 3e?

[Efrate]

DCs are going to be really sparodic. They are either way too low or way to high. A DC 20 save on a monsters ability is something really high in 5e, something only routinely achievable by pretty high level party. Its on like what a maybe cr 7 encounter would be.

Monster saves as well scale a lot differently dc 20 fireball is not hard at all for a 3.5 caster to get, level 5 or 6 maybe. A monster in 5e would need to be like level 15 likely to pass that at a reasonable rate. Fireball is just some damage, tack that onto an actual SoL and its a pretty clear autowin vs. most of the 5e MM. At level 5.

And that is only versus a high stat monster with that stat save proficiency around that level, so that is still reasonable versus strong save monsters. If they are not proficient its virtually unmakable, though big name monsters will have advantage vs. spells which is roughly a plus 5 increase in a save. Still versus most monsters its beyond them.

Also due to the fact that an encounter vs. 10 low crs is somewhat common in 5e and is a threat levels 1 through 20, in 3.5 after just a few levels writes that off. Low levels might favor 5e pcs, but after level maybe 4 or 5 3.5 leapfrogs way past the capabilities of most of 5e, especially with wbl.

[Thurbane]

Ooh - *are* there a lot of good adventures for 5e?

The only 5E adventure I've played is Lost Mine of Phandelver, which we recently completed on Roll20. I found it to be quite an enjoyable and well written adventure.

[Zanos]

Some problems you might run into are legendary actions and resistances and lair actions. Unless you want to port those systems wholesale you'll probably run into issues converting those abilities into appropriate replacements. 3.5 doesn't really provide special rules for boss type monsters other than just making them a higher CR creature. I'd probably just remove any encounter that's against a single creature and add some minions to it. Instead of fighting halaster by himself you might fight halaster, one of his apprentices, and some golems or something, since removing legendary actions means that the boss encounters don't get favorable action economy unless you add more entities. Non legendary creatures are probably going to be relatively easy to convert because the CRs have largely been preserved, and there aren't really many new monsters. You will have to keep in mind that the levels are not identical though, a 15th level party and 15th level monster in 5e and 3.5 have wildly different competencies. No amount of CR 1 fights is going to threaten a 15th level 3.5 character, but that isn't necessarily true in 5e.

The other thing is that you're probably going to have to come up with a lot of the skill check stuff yourself, 5e is kind of light on skill use and example DCs. And you'll also have to tweak magic item and treasure rewards because 3.5 has tighter loot expectations.


Ooh - *are* there a lot of good adventures for 5e?

Is this because there are a lot of adventurs, or because the average 5e adventure is better than the average 3e adventure?

What makes them better? What do you consider a "good" adventure to look like / what are the qualities of / qualifiers for a good adventure?

I know that, as I go back through my old stuff, 2e is rife with *bad* adventures.

Is there some magic to 5e that makes the adventures better, or have adventure writers just gotten better over the years (such that they'd make good 2e modules, if they put their mind to it)?

Or, put another way, would the 5e modules lose what makes them good by being converted to another system?
WotC has moved to making adventure modules rather than rulebooks their primary product, so while there's kind of a content draught for 5e in terms of character options, there are a ton of adventures. Some of which I think are quite good.

[Gnaeus]

So… what keeps people from just using the 5e adventure "as is", plot wise, grabbing the appropriate stats (DCs, etc) from 3e, and then… testing it to figure out what level PCs are appropriate?

Aside from the monetary / magical rewards likely being ludicrously small for 3e?

Honestly, I find I have to do this with 3.pf adventures written for 3.pf. I find most adventure paths to be ludicrously easy for players with basic optimization/tactical skill except for the occasional trick encounter which threatens TPK if you don’t approach it properly and dice are bad. We start by maxing everything’s hp and swapping out monster feats.

[Calthropstu]

Honestly, I find I have to do this with 3.pf adventures written for 3.pf. I find most adventure paths to be ludicrously easy for players with basic optimization/tactical skill except for the occasional trick encounter which threatens TPK if you don’t approach it properly and dice are bad. We start by maxing everything’s hp and swapping out monster feats.

Our gm hit us hard last week in wrath of the rightous. Pretty sure it was a custom encounter, because I am pretty sure 13th lvl pcs should not be taking on:
marilith
3 glabrezu
4 babau
3 13th lvl orc wizards
7 succubi with class levels
7 goblins
2 orcs
1 ogre

all while starting in an amf with the party forced to be split, and our primary melee character started nude and unarmed.

Arguments that we may be overpowered are sounding more plausible because we won that.

[Psyren]

You'd definitely have some work to do converting bounded accuracy to 3.P's wider range, especially for higher level adventures. You'd also want to make sure to increase treasure so that the players (especially martials) get enough gear to keep up with those challenges.

Alternatively, you could convert those modules to a version of 3.P with a smaller range, like E6 or E8.

[Thurbane]

You'd definitely have some work to do converting bounded accuracy to 3.P's wider range, especially for higher level adventures. You'd also want to make sure to increase treasure so that the players (especially martials) get enough gear to keep up with those challenges.

On a related note, I don't know if I've just had bad luck, or it's the particular published adventures we've played, but I find that when I've been playing a martial, I get royally screwed on loot. If we get masterwork/special material/magic weapons/armor, they seem to be sized for the wrong type creatures, very rare, or otherwise not that useful.

In contrast, casters seem to get a bucketload of scrolls, wands, spellbooks, staves etc.

I trust the DM, and I don't think he's fudging against me, just using the loot as presented.

I guess it's up to the DM to modify loot so that no-one gets left behind.

[Zanos]

On a related note, I don't know if I've just had bad luck, or it's the particular published adventures we've played, but I find that when I've been playing a martial, I get royally screwed on loot. If we get masterwork/special material/magic weapons/armor, they seem to be sized for the wrong type creatures, very rare, or otherwise not that useful.

In contrast, casters seem to get a bucketload of scrolls, wands, spellbooks, staves etc.

I trust the DM, and I don't think he's fudging against me, just using the loot as presented.

I guess it's up to the DM to modify loot so that no-one gets left behind.
Well, that's generally why the magic market is considered a good thing rather than a bad thing.

Also, spellcasters in your games actually find spellbooks as loot? I don't think I've ever had a DM give a spellbook as loot, even if we kill a wizard it's mysteriously absent. I guess what I'm saying is I'm jealous. :smalltongue:

[Thurbane]

Well, that's generally why the magic market is considered a good thing rather than a bad thing.

Also, spellcasters in your games actually find spellbooks as loot? I don't think I've ever had a DM give a spellbook as loot, even if we kill a wizard it's mysteriously absent. I guess what I'm saying is I'm jealous. :smalltongue:

I think I'll play a gish next time, so I can benefit from either type of loot lol.

[Psyren]

On a related note, I don't know if I've just had bad luck, or it's the particular published adventures we've played, but I find that when I've been playing a martial, I get royally screwed on loot. If we get masterwork/special material/magic weapons/armor, they seem to be sized for the wrong type creatures, very rare, or otherwise not that useful.

In contrast, casters seem to get a bucketload of scrolls, wands, spellbooks, staves etc.

I trust the DM, and I don't think he's fudging against me, just using the loot as presented.

I guess it's up to the DM to modify loot so that no-one gets left behind.

My personal preference is to just use an alternate loot system - something like Grod's Chopping Down The Christmas Tree (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?357810-Chopping-Down-the-Christmas-Tree-Low-Magic-Item-Rules) or Paizo's Automatic Bonus Progression (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/unchained-rules/automatic-bonus-progression/). It doesn't replace the need to deal with loot disparity entirely but it does help ensure melee keep up at least from a baseline perspective.

[Crake]

Ooh - *are* there a lot of good adventures for 5e?

Is this because there are a lot of adventurs, or because the average 5e adventure is better than the average 3e adventure?

What makes them better? What do you consider a "good" adventure to look like / what are the qualities of / qualifiers for a good adventure?

I know that, as I go back through my old stuff, 2e is rife with *bad* adventures.

Is there some magic to 5e that makes the adventures better, or have adventure writers just gotten better over the years (such that they'd make good 2e modules, if they put their mind to it)?

Or, put another way, would the 5e modules lose what makes them good by being converted to another system?

It's because adventures are to 5e what splatbooks were to 3.5, it's where they're making a lot of their $$$. They didn't want to repeat the mistake of 3.5's system bloat, so instead of releasing new character creation content, they're just releasing tonnes of adventure paths. It's partly why the system attempts to be so tightly constrained, makes it easier for module writers to know what to expect at any given level.

[Silly Name]

On a related note, I don't know if I've just had bad luck, or it's the particular published adventures we've played, but I find that when I've been playing a martial, I get royally screwed on loot. If we get masterwork/special material/magic weapons/armor, they seem to be sized for the wrong type creatures, very rare, or otherwise not that useful.

In contrast, casters seem to get a bucketload of scrolls, wands, spellbooks, staves etc.

I trust the DM, and I don't think he's fudging against me, just using the loot as presented.

I guess it's up to the DM to modify loot so that no-one gets left behind.

Remember that in 5e wands and (some) scrolls are usable by anyone, no checks needed, no "must have the spell on your list" requirements. So that sort of stuff should be seen as consumables for the entire party, not loot tailor-made to casters.

(There are a few wands that demand attunement by a caster, though. It's a bit messy)

[Starbuck_II]

So… what keeps people from just using the 5e adventure "as is", plot wise, grabbing the appropriate stats (DCs, etc) from 3e, and then… testing it to figure out what level PCs are appropriate?

Aside from the monetary / magical rewards likely being ludicrously small for 3e?

True, I think most thinks can be played cross edition if you work at it.

Worked for 4E when playing pathfinder.
I ran Keep on the Shadowfell is for Pathfinder. Ran pretty good.
Had to change treasure, of course.