[sladethesniper]

Wow, a lot of traffic.

Going from post to post…

I will be writing up the basics for BRP Star Wars, if anyone is interested. It seems a lot of people are. Of course, I still have my BRP Sharpe scenarios sitting on my hard drive. They need working on too! I'll post up the files on PDF, once I've worked on them.

Please do.

Yes! And hopefully there'll be a big demand for this particular conversion very soon.

I feel like I've been doing not much else for the last 10 years or so and would like to hear more details. Is your D20>BRP conversion theoretical, or have you actually been using/living/breathing it?

I am hoping that 4th Edition will have a huge effect with people finally seeing that BRP is far superior to 2nd, 3rd for 4th Edition of D&D.

As for using it…I made this conversion for my BRP game so that all those folks who played D20 and didn’t want to “learn a new system” could “easily convert” their prize characters to my setting. They all said that it was easy, and made them all “respect combat” again, which seemed high praise considering a 24th level Dwarf Fighter Barbarian (or as he called him, a Berserker) who had killed dragons before was now quite thrilled with simply fighting a NecroTech squad (think techno zombies)…the wizard characters weren’t too happy that magic wasn’t 100% reliable, but it made them use weapons and tactics in addition to magic, so I was pleased the standard mage action of “stay back and lob spells” changed to “be useful and use magic for big effects”.

The Allegiance system is a nice replacement for alignment.

I am not familiar with that system…I have been using CoC 3rd-5th Edition and MRQ for conversions. I want Zero Edition, but I’ll probably just wait till 1st Edition comes out…I have no more room for games…

Be careful of that one - Palladium tends to get system conversions pulled off the Internet.

I know and I’ll probably call it the Platinum Conversion…for RIPS or something…

EDU should be modified by level. This would help represent characters who have higher levels having more general knowledge, keep the max at 18 or whatever, but it should be worked into the equation.

I like that idea… I’d still use INT+WIS/2 as the base score modified as shown.

level	EDUcation bonus
1-4	+0
5-9	+1
10-14	+2
15-19	+3
20-24	+4

But it does have professions. Classes should deteremine what skills are available for starting characters, much like professions. I have been looking at Fading Suns D20 and doing just that, using the SRD and OGL to translate those D20 skills to BRP.

As for professions, using them for initial skill selection is how I would do it, but since professions are only covered in the MSRD, some people may not have them, although they could use the Class Skills as an analogue. So Class Skills or Professions, it is.

Seems kind of low %, by that logic most fighters will have two skills at 20% to start with. Seems weak and boring. Try x10% and leave ability score modifiers in the game at +3% or +5% per +1.

I got around that with 2 rationalizations…for fighters, their BAB counts as their “weapons skill” and since they get ALL simple and martial weapons AND all armor and shields…they come out of it with several hundred % worth of weapons skills.

The second rationalization is that I count “levels” beginning from the age of *ahem* 16… Basically, your age is coincidental with your “level”…if you didn’t do anything…So I basically said a 1st level fighter, commoner, thief are 16 years old…both to account for the “average” adventurer of 20 years old being 5th level (with the attendant skills built up to an appropriate level) and to account for the fact that in medieval times, people became “adults” much earlier…with the attendant shorter lifespan.

would use SIZ+CON and leave it at that. Perhaps (SIZ+CON)/2 for non-consequential NPCs and thugs, but named characters should get an edge. Reduce damage accordingly for spells and what not, afterall with no real level system in BRP the best a character really does is crits and impales, so the higher the spell ability the better the chance of crit or impale.

The reason I went with that is so combat is deadly…if a melee combat lasts longer than 10 rounds, I tend to get bored…it’s a peccadillo of mine.

This implies a 1st level caster could never cast a 1st level spell.

Yeah, that ties into the whole age thing. When converting pre-existing characters, they were usually 5-15th level, and it wasn’t really a problem, but if you are converting a 1st level character…I would say that is what 0 level spells (cantrips) are for.

I have a big conversion/kit bash for magic, but I was trying to keep the conversion simple…I’ll post up here in a bit.

I would look at the d20 character concept and transfer it to brp. That means a high level fighter who uses a longsword and spends nearly all of his feats to be better at combat would be something similar in brp. Just make a really good fighter and round him out with some background skills that seem to fit. It's faster and you get better results - the systems are too different for an 1:1 approach.

I agree, but I initially made the rules to convert based upon D20 fanatics not wanting to learn a “new complex system”…so I made the conversions simple and formulaic so that I could get them playing BRP without them having to “make a new character”.

The main trouble with any of these methods is the uncertainty they bring to spell-casting. In D20, you try to cast a spell and it happens. Replace that with one of the above systems (where a spell might only have an 80%, or even 50%, chance of working in the face of an onrushing enemy) and quite soon the wizards are dead.

I prefer magic to be a skill with a percentage for one simple reason…if magic was that reliable…why is everyone NOT a spellcaster? Magic would simply have replaced technology and with fantasy timelines extending thousands of years…why is magic not the overwhelming choice for everyone and everything??? If it was that reliable, it would be better than swords (which break) or anything natural (which degrades over time). I prefer magic to be powerful, but all in all, just another way to do something…
If you want magic to be certain…then I’d say just convert the spells to skills with a 99% base chance.

Now some things are more tricky as said above, spells dont convert 100%. Are they skills? If so, dont they have skill % for success? Actually Id just make the margin you fail by the bonus the victim gets to resist the spell.

I say spells are skills and on a failed roll, it just doesn’t work right or misses the target, etc. For a crit failure (a 00%) then you can let your imagination fly…I’m fond of magical mutations myself.

Sorry, but that's not converting D20 characters to the BRP system - it's the other way around! (Basically, though, I agree with you. Apart from combat modifiers, I use those D20 rules in my own BRP-like system. But we are supposed to be doing D20>BRP here...)

My bad…

should "Saving Throws" be handled this way?

I use ability checks (Ability x 5%) instead of saving throws (since they have this tendency to improve over time…which is odd…in D&D, you would live in absolute terror of your elders)

I understand that you want an easy system as a guideline and it could work pretty well for archetypes and low-level characters. Most of the data in a d20-stat-block can be converted straight forward, the only problems I see are skills, feats (abilities), spells and the attack boni.

For skills I personally would prefer two tables. Table 1 contains the d20-skills and the corresponding brp-skills. Table 2 contains the total d20 skill bonus (including feats and boni) from 0-30 and the percantage in brp. That way you can look at your d20 stat block and have a result by looking in the tables without the need to calculate anything. Additionally you can ignore all feats that give you a bonus to skills.

For weapons you can use a similar table, so that you can ignore feats that give attack boni.

For the remaining feats it is a little more complicated - instead of endless descriptions of feat-conversions you can either make some examples for common feats like power attack or a general guideline that each feat should give the equivalent of a 5% skill bonus (or whatever seems appropriate).

The spell-systems are different in a lot of d20 systems (you could use the skill conversion for star wars d20 for example). I think it would be best to just provide a table with the d20-level and corresponding brp-data like the number of spells, the total percentage to distribute on the spells and the max-percentage per spell.

Ack….I’ll see what I can do…anybody want to help?

Glad to see that this generated some discussion!

Anybody got any other homebrew conversions they want to post?

-STS