PeteN said:
And that's only the start. Most d20/Pathfinder scenarios are sequential series of combats and traps designed to atrophy huge Hit Point buffers, something alien to adventures designed for RQ. You can convert the material, but even if you mook-ify all the combat encounters, eventually the NPCs or monsters will roll an unopposed crit. Then its game over for that PC until they do some R&R, unless you give them obscene amounts of specialised healing.
This is a very important point - combat in Legend is not a war of attrition. A single lucky hit by a minor NPC can quickly take a PC out of the battle. And due to way Combat Actions work in Legend, being outnumbered is very bad. A seasoned adventurer can quickly be taken down by a group of poorly-trained mooks if they seriously outnumber him, unless the adventurer has a positional advantage that helps to counterbalance the weight of numbers.
So if D&D stuff is going to be converted, its best to put a very different emphasis on it. Conversion of sandbox-style adventures is fine, provided that the emphasis is on exploration rather than combat. In an ideal 'Dungeon Crawl' for Legend / RQ 6 , there should be plenty of alternate paths through the 'dungeon', plenty of opportunities to interact with the environment (puzzles to solve, traps to disarm, inscriptions to decipher, etc), and a range of environmental hazards to keep things interesting. What should be avoided is the common (but lazy) D&D adventure design trope of chokepoints with combats that characters
must win to proceed. Generally, whenever you put a 'monster' in the 'dungeon' you should try to put in a few ways that characters can avoid combat - either by using stealth, disguise, negotiation, or simply by avoiding the area entirely and seeking a different path. Players won't always take the hint, but they will do so often enough that they might stay alive for long enough to escape with a tale to tell. Use combat sparingly - two or three combat encounters per adventure is more than enough for even experienced parties!
In Legend / RQ 6, the environment where an adventure takes place should give them many opportunities to use their
non-combat skills - part of the challenge of adventure design for these systems is thinking up interesting ways for characters to use skill rolls. Some of these are obvious - clues need to be found (Perception), locks need to be opened (Mechanisms), heavy objects need to moved (Brawn), obstacles need to be climbed (Athletics), and potential loot needs to be appraised (Evaluate). But don't forget some of the skills that are rarely used in play - maybe the characters need Boating to steer a raft they found down that treacherous subterranean river, maybe Track warns them about the number of creatures up ahead, or maybe Survival warns them about a potential environmental hazard. And don't forget Disguise - there is a good reason why heroes infiltrating enemy strongholds in disguise is a common trope in adventure fiction.
Also, don't forget to make use of Difficulty Levels and Opposed Rolls between PCs and NPCs to keep things interesting. Environmental hazards are the GMs best friend - use them frequently to require Opposed Skill Rolls against Evade, Resilience, and Persistence.
There should always be a few points in every adventure where social skills such as Influence, Insight, Courtesy, Oratory, or Seduction can avoid combat or provide an advantage. Maybe give the adventurers a bonus to these skill rolls if they roleplay the encounter well. Even bloodthirsty monsters may try to negotiate if they are badly outnumbered by seasoned adventurers. And try to build in a few puzzles or dilemmas that challenge the
players rather that their
characters - things such as riddles and moral dilemmas work fine.
Above all, remember that you are designing a place of mystery for the characters to explore. And the emphasis should be on exploration rather than slaughter. I can't emphasize this enough. As noted above, there should always be multiple
meaningful paths through the environment that players can choose between and many opportunities to interact with the environment using non-combat skills. Don't forget to scatter frequent empty rooms and vacant areas along the way - these aren't just a waste of time, but rather an opportunity to establish the atmosphere of the environment through evocative descriptions.
The sense of mystery should be maintained as much as possible - try to evoke awe, wonder, and dread in equal measure. Try to give the players a sense that the aventure location has an existence independent of their presence. There is an old-school sensibility at work here that is sorely lacking in modern D&D and Pathfinder adventure design - in those games the design aesthetic seems to be that every encounter should be meaningful to the plot and most of them should lead to combat. But if you look at some of the classic adventures for old-school Runequest, it is remarkable how many incidental encounters occur that are not directly connected to the main plot and the high percentage of them that can be resolved without drawing a sword. Due to the sheer deadliness of the combat system, fighting is often the last resort when negotiations or stealth fail.
PeteN said:
So my advice to you guys is to write adventures from scratch, properly tailored to the rules, rather than converting d20 stuff. It'll save you a lot of time and headaches in the long run.
That would be ideal, but Mongoose seems to be interested in converting selected items from their d20 back catalogue at the moment. Hopefully the conversions will be performed with sensitivity to the differences between the two game systems.
