Did you use a 4e module with an OSR game? Or a Pathfinder adventure path with 4e rules? Or the old 3.x Rappan Athuk with AD&D? What's been your actual experience doing this? Are all the games and variants of "D&D" really that far apart? How much effort does it take to use one module for a certain variant/game with another? Does it lead to satisfying game experiences?

For the sake of this discussion, I'd like to get away from theory and number crunching. What I really want is to hear from people who've actually done it, how hard/simple it was to prep and accomplish, and if you had a good time withe game.

Alternately, what could game modules provide in the way of advice to make this sort of thing even easier on the DM, short of full-blown conversions?

Back when I was giving 4E a shot and running an actual campaign with it, the adventures started around the 2E Return to the Keep on the Borderlands. My acid test was a sandbox campaign set in Mystara. If the system could handle that then it passed the test.

Converting all the npcs & monsters was a bit of work but I had the old offline monster builder that came with DDI. I could start with whatever creature in the database was closest to what I wanted, make a copy, and tweak it. AT this point only MM 1 & 2 were out, so I was lowering HP and increasing base damage on my own. Because of this, almost every creature used was a custom creation.

Eventually I had quite a few of these creations saved and used them as the base for new things meaning stat prep just kept getting lighter and lighter.

I added in my own material in and around the keep to expand adventuring options, but just the converted stuff from the module kept the group occupied for months. The long nature of 4E combat really stretched out the material.

By the time the PCs left the keep and headed South, I had already prepped Threshold and the surrounding area with some follow up stuff based on the threads which started to unravel at the keep. We played a few sessions in and around the town and then...........my computer with the CB/MB application died.

This is when I realized how much of a PITA 4E was to prep without that software. I tried prepping one session without it but anything that required stats took way too much time to write out by hand. It was at this point that I realized that I wasn't going to run anything that I couldn't prep with a pen & notebook if I needed to.

While I had access to the software, there was quite a bit of front loaded work doing all the custom stats, but the adventures actually went well and we were enjoying the campaign.

I have never tried converting in the other direction, taking a 4E adventure and running it with an OSR type system. I wonder how that would work?

I find it very easy to convert 3e/Pathfinder to pre-3e/OSR D&D; I was doing it on the fly last night running Rise of the Runelords with OSRIC as I'd forgotten my conversion notes. Converting a rather complicated NPC on the fly did slow the game down a couple minutes as I recalculated his AC, THAC0 etc, but it was definitely doable.

Converting in and out of 4e is much harder than the others, you basically have to restat from the ground up, it's not really the same game. Whereas a Pathfinder/3e Rogue-6 becomes a 1e/2e Thief-6 (or Thief-7) with minimal effort. Occasional issues around eg demi-human level caps, but really very easy.

I had little issues using 4e with an older edition. However the reverse was problematic namely because 4e combat takes so much longer to play out. As a result older modules take way longer to play.

Quote from: estar;742423I had little issues using 4e with an older edition. However the reverse was problematic namely because 4e combat takes so much longer to play out. As a result older modules take way longer to play.

Yeah, my experience running Vault of Larin Karr (3e) converted to 4e wasn't very happy. I've not tried the reverse, there's not a huge amount of good 4e adventure material out there anyway.

I used the Shadowfell with D&D Next. I used D&D Next monster stats but yanked some 4E powers to port over. I translated the gloom deck to D&D Next stats and it worked well.

All the 4e adventures I have are in the delve format, which I don't like.  Replayability would be improved if they were in a different format.

Quote from: Old One Eye;742436All the 4e adventures I have are in the delve format, which I don't like.  Replayability would be improved if they were in a different format.

The Dungeon Crawl Classics 4e ones are in regular format. Some like Sellswords of Punjar are worth converting to other systems.

At low level, you can play the older adventures with 4e adequately...it takes work, but not much. The key is to take out most of the little encounters (eg, the lone kobold, or one spider), and center the adventure around a handful of more significant encounters.

The main issue is 4e really doesn't adapt well to older D&D concepts, like "pit trap" or "you take d6 damage from one blow, then the party destroys the monster". The heroes have considerable resources at first level, and by 5th level, it's huge; by 10th, you really can't beat the players in less than a 4 hour battle, and even then you have to go way past the "recommended" encounter difficulty.

The last adventure I tried was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks...it works, sort of, but level 13ish characters in 4e have so much crazy (shooting through walls, healing 50+ points a round, straight up immune to damage, straight up immune to effects) that the monsters needed to be cranked up to stupid levels of power with extra arbitrary abilities, or else every encounter the monsters will be shut out.

I think the highlight was on one level where the characters encountered a 6" diameter glob of green slime...the party went nuts, "it must be a solo", throwing so much damage/effects onto it with encounter powers in the first round that it was all I could do was laugh at the overkill. But, seeing as it was all encounter/at will abilities, it was nothing that wasn't pulled out every fight anyway.

Going the other direction, from 4e to "old school" style of play, just doesn't seem to work. I concede I never really tried, the higher level 4e modules didn't seem so hot.

I have used modules from differnt dnd versions many times.

All I really had to do was note or print the 'monsters' as prep.

A Troll is a Troll; Just grab the stats before hand from the monster manual.

Some npc's took more attention, but I don't find it all that difficult to grab a module and use it for a different game system.

I have used '100 bushels of Rye' from Columbia games (Harn) many times for dnd.

Quote from: estar;742423I had little issues using 4e with an older edition. However the reverse was problematic namely because 4e combat takes so much longer to play out. As a result older modules take way longer to play.

This. It's not so much rules incompatibility as it is "approach incompatibility:" converting, say, a PF adventure path to 4e would be pretty easy mechanically, especially if you had the monster builder thing. Most of the skills match pretty easily and 4e has like 10,000 monsters so you can always find an equivalent. The big issue would end up being traps and other "non-combat" hazards.

But the result is really going to drag if you do it without changing anything else (especially for higher level modules) because the original campaign is assuming much faster combat and a focus on resource depletion. A lot of them just don't work pacing wise as an encounter focused game.