d20 creature conversion

[Shaira]

Originally Posted by peterb

Just bought all three PDFs from RPGnow, unfortunately they are first ed. and so there's no RQ conversion notes... But still the books are a goldmine of ideas.

Check out p5 or so of ATWM3 - "How to convert ATWM brutes into RuneQuest nasties". Should do the trick. (BTW - was there ever a 2nd ed of ATWM? It sounds a bit too organised for that era! )

Cheers,

Sarah

[peterb]

Originally Posted by Shaira

Check out p5 or so of ATWM3 - "How to convert ATWM brutes into RuneQuest nasties". Should do the trick. (BTW - was there ever a 2nd ed of ATWM? It sounds a bit too organised for that era! )

Ah, great! I simply assumed any such notes where at the end of the document... (they usually are).

[peterb]

This project is almost done. I've converted almost 500 creatures from the d20 SRD. Here's a partial list of the data, http://www.rollspelshornan.se/files/BRP_creatures.htm

Is there any glaring errors in the stats that you can see?

[Harshax]

Your file is shaping up rather nicely. It's a little difficult to come up with criticism, but I think I found one:

I don't like your SIZ results. They're a little wonky if you ask me. A Hill Giant has a SIZ range of 10 to 40, with an average height of 25? A midget Hill Giant is the same size as an average adult. That's kind of funny actually.

I think you should flatten the curve just a little. I see from your formula, that you are expressing SIZ directly from STR. I wonder if you subtracted the size bonuses from the Characteristics before you computed their BRP equivalent? A Large creature, IIRC, gets a +4 Bonus to STR, and a -2 Penalty to DEX.

In any case, SIZ is probably the most difficult Characteristic to convert formulaically, but like I said before, it looks like it is really coming together.

[Harshax]

Using my own suggestion, here is a Hill Giant. Slightly less awesome, but no more or less better than yours:

STR 25 -8 = 17 ~ 4d6+3 
CON 19 -4 = 15 ~ 4d6+1
SIZ = STR      ~ 6d6+4 [based off original STR]
INT 6          ~ 2d6-1
POW 7          ~ 2d6   [used CHA as POW]
DEX 8  +2      ~ 3d6
APP 7          ~ 2d6

[peterb]

Originally Posted by Harshax

Your file is shaping up rather nicely. It's a little difficult to come up with criticism, but I think I found one:

I don't like your SIZ results. They're a little wonky if you ask me. A Hill Giant has a SIZ range of 10 to 40, with an average height of 25? A midget Hill Giant is the same size as an average adult. That's kind of funny actually.

I think you should flatten the curve just a little. I see from your formula, that you are expressing SIZ directly from STR. I wonder if you subtracted the size bonuses from the Characteristics before you computed their BRP equivalent? A Large creature, IIRC, gets a +4 Bonus to STR, and a -2 Penalty to DEX.

In any case, SIZ is probably the most difficult Characteristic to convert formulaically, but like I said before, it looks like it is really coming together.

Thanks for the comment.

When I studied existing statblocks for BRP (RQ III to be exact) I noticed that there was a very uniform STR = SIZ rule. Only very large creatures have more SIZ than STR, which I simulate by giving them a 120% increase in the fixed bonus to the dice roll. A large dinosaur with STR 10d6+30 would thus be given a SIZ of 10d6+36. Your observation that giants and other humanoids can get a bit of odd SIZ values are quite valid though.

I changed the algorithm a bit and took the creature type in consideration. If the creature is large or huge and a humanoid or an animal then I reduce the number of dices by one and add the dice type to the fixed mod. A Hill Giant now has a STR of 6d6+4 and a SIZ of 5d6+10.

I've also updated the html snapshot of my file (http://www.rollspelshornan.se/files/BRP_creatures.htm)

[peterb]

I have now released a beta release of my Creature Generator spreadsheet. It contains, among other things, two worksheets with creature data, a lot of which is converted from the d20 SRD. The sheets to study are "Data" and "Skills".

[Trifletraxor]

Thanks for the update! Gotta check it out tomorrow!

SGL.

EDIT: After I have reinstalled Excel, that is.

[peterb]

If you already downloaded Beta 0.11, you'll probably want to download Beta 0.12, that I just released, it fixes a few bugs...

[DirkD]

I was thinking that it would be nice to make something like the "The Big Book of d20 Monsters for BRP" out of the data you produced. I could rip the description of the monsters from the d20 document and use the stats from your program...

Is there an easy way to create a file (txt/html/doc/rtf...) out of the program with a (chapter-11-like-) stat-block for each creature? The actual format isn't really important, since I want to convert it to LaTeX anyhow, but it should be in a system where every entry can automatically be identified (and therefore automatically converted to the format of my choice).

The optimum would be something like this:

line content
1. Name
2. Table with characteristic | Roll | Average (could be text)
3. Move:
4. Hit Points:
5. Damage Bonus:
6. Armor:
7. Attack:
8. Skills:
9. Remarks to stats
10. empty line/pagebreak or something else to mark the end of the block

so that I could convert it to something like this (pseudo-LaTeX-code for each creature):

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\stathead{variable with name from 1.}

variable with Description from d20-document

\characteristics{variable with characteristics-table generated from 2.}

\begin{statblock}
\textbf{Move:} variable with move-data from 3.
... same prinicple for 4.-9.
\end{statblock}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

That way I could basically generate the whole document without doing anything by hand.