What are the important parts of BECMI/RC D&D that have to make the transition to feel like a proper conversion?

What parts of Savage Worlds do you feel are entirely incompatible with BECMI? (And if your answer is "skills" then what specifically is jarring?)

BECMI/RC D&D had skills. They were based on ability scores, each skill was associated with one and you roll under it to succeed.

But I think the systems are far too different. BECMI had levels going to 36, then another 36 for when you were a god. Then it had a different class for every sort of monster or race. It was exceptionally magical, with rules for flying cities, airliners, biplanes, and giant robots.

Quote from: JeremyR;1043820BECMI/RC D&D had skills. They were based on ability scores, each skill was associated with one and you roll under it to succeed.

But I think the systems are far too different. BECMI had levels going to 36, then another 36 for when you were a god. Then it had a different class for every sort of monster or race. It was exceptionally magical, with rules for flying cities, airliners, biplanes, and giant robots.

Well you could parse those 36-levels into the tiers of Savage World's system. Skills in Savage Worlds technically are based on stats - they just use Stats as a cap for experience development. Mechanically they operate the same. If you rolled for a stat, it would work the exact same as rolling for a skill. Nothing says you could do away with skills altogether and just make it a stat-check if you wanted.

Nothing you listed isn't already covered by Savage World in the main book. I think, at least off the top of my head, all you'd need is the core Savage World book and do relatively very little tweaking. The issue is - it would just be mostly vanilla Savage Worlds.

If we're talking real differences - then combat resolution is not really compatible with BECMI if you're trying to emulate those things. Abstractly you totally can simply by sticking with core Savage World rules as long as you parse those 36-level progression schema into the native Savage Worlds system. For immortal rules etc you can lift the mechanics as necessary from SW:Rifts or Supers or something.

I'm not sure what you're actually getting *getting* trying to convert the mechanics of BECMI to Savage Worlds. If you're talking about settings - that's pretty straightforward.

Quote from: tenbones;1043975I'm not sure what you're actually getting *getting* trying to convert the mechanics of BECMI to Savage Worlds. If you're talking about settings - that's pretty straightforward.

This question is meant to get at what other people find important.

I personally really dig the slot magic, magic item creation rules, the domain management, and most importantly, the rules that facilitate that traditional dungeon crawl experience.

Classes aren't even important to me, but I like RC D&D as a whole, so I was going to port them over anyways.
For levels, 1-17 covers the normal advancements from novice to legendary. I'm totally willing to have level 36 be someone with 20 legendary advancements. Now, "level 1" in Savage Worlds is pretty powerful without taking away the wild die, with how I want to handle the magic system, it seems like a decent starting point. And then Savage Worlds increases in strength with advancements far less than even basic D&D does with levels. I plan to tweak the wounds system, create a "roll for stats" version of char gen, and other things to bring in what stands out to be as "essentially BECMI".

Quote from: Rhedyn;1043994This question is meant to get at what other people find important.

Roger that. As someone that has essentially moved my D&D settings to using the Savage Worlds system, largely, I'll chime in.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1043994I personally really dig the slot magic, magic item creation rules, the domain management, and most importantly, the rules that facilitate that traditional dungeon crawl experience.

Much of this stuff already exists for Savage Worlds. If you haven't met Zadmar - allow me (he's a great guy and good designer working with/for PEG I believe)

All you'd really need is the core book and maybe the Fantasy Companion. (But I'd go ahead and get everything else, Horror, Supers etc)

Quote from: Rhedyn;1043994Classes aren't even important to me, but I like RC D&D as a whole, so I was going to port them over anyways.
For levels, 1-17 covers the normal advancements from novice to legendary. I'm totally willing to have level 36 be someone with 20 legendary advancements. Now, "level 1" in Savage Worlds is pretty powerful without taking away the wild die, with how I want to handle the magic system, it seems like a decent starting point. And then Savage Worlds increases in strength with advancements far less than even basic D&D does with levels. I plan to tweak the wounds system, create a "roll for stats" version of char gen, and other things to bring in what stands out to be as "essentially BECMI".

Right! If you toss out classes (I agree they're their own unnecessary abstraction) then you're firmly in pure SW territory to tweak as you see fit. Most of their other games and supplements handle all of this stuff. I don't wanna tell you HOW to do it (obviously you need to flavor it to your tastes) - but all the ingredients are right there for you.

Vancian Magic for Savage Worlds
http://www.godwars2.org/SavageWorlds/SavageVancianMagic.pdf

I'd check out Shaintar and Hellfrost as well for supplementary content (but I warn you - both settings are *extremely* well done and it might suck you in)

I wouldn't, because I think that a system is better used in conjunction with a setting, rather than trying to alter a system to fit another system.

For example, I personally believe that Ravenloft is better suited a game like Dragon Warrior (at least the modern reprinting of it, I got.  It was perfectly dark and gritty for it) than any version of D&D.  Whereas Eberron and it's allusions to Pulp adventure is would better be used with Savage Worlds than D&D.

But that's just me.

Savage Worlds is actually 90% a very simple game totally acceptable for kids or RPG virgins who have never chucked a twelve-sider in their lives...  

Just use SW and ruthlessly strip down or throw out shit too complex or weird for your players.

...why  not just play BECMI?

Quote from: RPGPundit;1044625...why  not just play BECMI?

I can understand liking Savage Worlds. It's fast and fun to play.

I don't know if you really have to Savage BECMI. Savage Mystara could probably be run just using existing SW rules.

Quote from: Krimson;1044718I can understand liking Savage Worlds. It's fast and fun to play.

I don't know if you really have to Savage BECMI. Savage Mystara could probably be run just using existing SW rules.

Yes. I ran Eberron with Savage Worlds, and I didn't futz around with converting mechanics. I  just used the SW Arcane Magic rules for wizards, the Weird Science rules for artificers, and the superhero rules for dragonmarked. It wasn't exact, but it worked pretty well. In fact, I will back Brady up and say that Eberron is a far better SW setting than a D&D one.

One thing to keep in mind when converting D&D things to Savage Worlds is that characters have smaller, slower power curve than D&D. That actually makes sandbox play easier as you can have high and low level NPCs populating the setting without them being automatic walk-overs or instant death for the party that encounters them.

Also, because Savage Worlds uses smaller dice, you want to be careful about magic items that give bonuses. A d20 supports more bonuses than the d4-d12 range of Savage Worlds. You want to be sparing in the level of bonuses magic items have, and probably don't want them stacking. I don't really view that as an issue as magic items that give bonuses are the dullest of all magic items. Just focus more on magic items that do something interesting.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1044625...why  not just play BECMI?

My group and I really like Savage Worlds. I like the depth on combat options along with ease of use for the mechanics.

BECMI has a lot of conceptually interesting mechanics, but I'm not completely sold on the mechanical execution. Hit points and To-tables/THACO being the main issues.
For example, grappling is a really involved process in the Rules Cyclopedia mainly because monsters don't have attributes. Savage Worlds handles that example and others quickly because monsters have stats and I personally don't find Savage Worlds stat blocks to even be that much more complicated.

On the flip side, Savage Worlds tends to lack things like utility magic, magic item creation rules (as in-depth as the Rules Cyclopedia), weapon masteries, and domain management.
In addition it also lacks the dungeon crawling incentives of BECMI. I would like to run a game where people naturally want to explore dungeons to loot gold to level up, to get stronger, and be more able to survive.

That's why I'm interested in marrying the two because I like both and want to do both at the same time.

Keep in mind that BECMI is structured the way it is for a reason.

Some people nowadays just see BECMI as a weird and unnecessary extension of the slimmer and more elegant B/X to 36 levels, but the true genius of the system as it was presented at the time was to intrinsically suggest a drift of the campaign style during the course of play.

BECMI wants to be played as:

- dungeon crawl levels 1-3
- hex crawl levels 4-14
- domain management levels 15-25
- magical dimension hopping levels 26-36

and then the "I" part is a completely different game if you want to go all the way.

I'm not sure you can really duplicate that kind of structure with Savage World.

I've seen "Advanced Dungeons & Savages" over on Dragonsfoot, and it's an AD&D thing. I suspect it would be easy enough to morph that into BECMI D&D.

https://dragonsfoot.org/sw/

Somewhat like this probably:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/223242/GoldGlory-Seven-Deadly-Dungeons

Quote from: Luca;1044829Keep in mind that BECMI is structured the way it is for a reason.

Some people nowadays just see BECMI as a weird and unnecessary extension of the slimmer and more elegant B/X to 36 levels, but the true genius of the system as it was presented at the time was to intrinsically suggest a drift of the campaign style during the course of play.

BECMI wants to be played as:

- dungeon crawl levels 1-3
- hex crawl levels 4-14
- domain management levels 15-25
- magical dimension hopping levels 26-36

and then the "I" part is a completely different game if you want to go all the way.

I'm not sure you can really duplicate that kind of structure with Savage World.

I think you not only can duplicate that structure in Savage Worlds - I think out of the box SW does it better with better rules-cohesion. I fully submit that this is probably due to the age of BECMI in relation to SW.


SW Ranks *are* levels of play with more bleedover than just the conceits you've presented and have all the same conceits - but with better gameplay. You're not necessarily going to TPK as easy in SW at the low-end of the pool. I'd ballpark it like this -

Novice = levels 1-3
Seasoned = levels  4-6
Veteran = levels 7-12
Heroic = 12-15 - you'll be leveraging high-powered rules like Shaintar at this range.
Legendary = 15-God-mode Supers etc. - here you'll want to be leveraging mechanics you see in Savage Rifts/Supers/Shaintar depending on your setting.

All the other stuff - domain management, even magical dimension hopping as it relates to BECMI you can do pretty much at will in SW, it's not assumed to be cordoned off based on your Rank, just the criteria of the setting may need adjusting which isn't really an issue at all since the system scales remarkably well within itself.

SW is more cinematic in feel than BECMI is to me. And this is due to some mechanical differences like how combat plays out. Of course this is dependent on a lot of setting criteria too... so I'm speaking in general.