Conversion

We're just barely into Fifth Edition -- still without the Player's Handbook, Dungeonmaster's Guide, and Monster Manual -- but I'm eager to turn the page on the previous era. Henceforth, I'm a one-edition kinda guy, and that edition is 5e. (Oh, and sorry, Pathfinder. You're really special, but I was just using you to make D&D jealous.)

This means that I've got some conversion work to do. All of my notes for Front Porch multiverse settings assume a 4e system, or at least a system based on 4e (such as the modern Gamma World game). My first order of business will be to update these notes so that any new multiverse campaigns (for example, something set in the Shattered Realm world) will be playable using 5e rules.

The Druid Cycle campaigns present a more difficult problem. Not everyone has a strong opinion about which rules we're using, but I know that some folks like the way their characters work in 4e. I don't want to mess with that. I don't want to pressure people into abandoning a build they enjoy, only to have them find that rebuilding the character in the new edition makes it less fun to play. (Side-note: Are there faint echoes of Obamacare here? "If you like your character build, you can keep your character build!") We probably won't know until the new PHB comes out whether it will even be possible to create a 5e character that closely mimics a given 4e build. It's going to be hard enough to turn a 4e fighter into a 5e fighter, to say nothing of the fact that quite a few races and classes from 4e simply do not exist yet in 5e -- and may never exist, for all we know. We have a couple of guys who converted their 2e and 3e/3.5e clerics into invokers. Now what? Do they convert them back into clerics?

Aside from the character quandary is the matter of expense. A lot of us (including myself) have invested our hard-earned cash in numerous 4e books. I haven't heard directly from any of our usual gang on this subject, but I expect there may be reluctance to sink money into another set of rulebooks so soon after 4e came out. (Indeed, 4e is younger than my six-year-old kid. I first saw the announcement that 4e was in development on the day after he was born.) Basic D&D is free (and I applaud Wizards for that bold decision), so the availability of Basic may mitigate this problem somewhat, but Basic includes only the fighter, cleric, rogue, and wizard classes -- not exactly a vast array of options.

So where do we go from here? How do we handle the conversion of existing Druid Cycle characters? Let me know what you think.