Advice for using OSR stuff in Gurps?

[JoelSammallahti]

I'm starting a 150-point sword-and-sorcery campaign in the old-school picaresque mold: adventurers hiring themselves out as muscle and looking for treasure in ruined temples and wizards' towers, etc. There's a lot of cool rough-and-ready material in the OSR scene that I'd like to adapt. Has someone done this and written about it? I've got a lot of experience with Gurps but next to nothing with old D&D, and while for the most part off-the-cuff conversions don't seem hard to pull off, I'd like to hear from people who have done this kind of thing before.

[AmesJainchill]

I haven't done it myself, but I think GURPS and the OSR can work together, you have to be aware of the usually caveats when converting D&D adventures--the PCs being outnumbered matters much more, the PCs heal slower than in D&D, and can be permanently debilitated, and so on. Mundane equipment is actually worth something. Things like that. Dungeon Fantasy would obviously be great for this kind of thing.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by AmesJainchill

Mundane equipment is actually worth something.

I can't endorse this one. My experience doing a long campaign of D&D conversions to Gurps (off the cuff) is the opposite. Mundane equipment is only worth something to people who can't get magic stuff and the D&D source material is rife with magic.

It's also full of gold pieces that PCs can normally use to buy magic.

[AmesJainchill]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I can't endorse this one. My experience doing a long campaign of D&D conversions to Gurps (off the cuff) is the opposite. Mundane equipment is only worth something to people who can't get magic stuff and the D&D source material is rife with magic.

It's also full of gold pieces that PCs can normally use to buy magic.

Yeah, I mostly meant for re-sale value.

[seycyrus]

I've been running a version of Keep on the Borderlands with Gurps 4e, and balancing encounters can be difficult. It helps a bit if you re-craft the setting with a bit of common sense (the humanoids that fight each other do NOT live in caves that are barely half a minute away from each other - for example)

You do need to keep control of the magic items, and tune them accordingly, +1 items become fine, lighter etc.

There's a GM who runs a couple of games in Mystara, http://darkpathsandwanderedroads.blo...s-mystara.html, which is the known world of the very original D&D setting. I find reading through his blogs very helpful. I only wish that he gave a listing of how he statted out his monsters and encounters.

[JoelSammallahti]

Thanks, guys!

[mr beer]

Most of my RPG work is D&D setting with GURPS engine, yes it works well. Old school dungeon bash is combat heavy and GURPS is objectively better at combat than D&D.

When converting, my advice is to to go for capturing the flavour rather than the minutiae.

[JoelSammallahti]

Originally Posted by mr beer

When converting, my advice is to to go for capturing the flavour rather than the minutiae.

Do you have any advice on handling magic? It's very different in the two systems. If a dungeon refers to a spell, for example to disarm a trap or overcome an obstacle, do you think beforehand about how your players would handle that? Or wing it on the go? (I don't know if you use off-the-shelf dungeons, but I'm interested in doing so.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

Do you have any advice on handling magic? It's very different in the two systems. If a dungeon refers to a spell, for example to disarm a trap or overcome an obstacle, do you think beforehand about how your players would handle that? Or wing it on the go? (I don't know if you use off-the-shelf dungeons, but I'm interested in doing so.)

I did use modules from various D&D sources (Hackmaster, 2.0, 3.5). I eventually used up pretty much everyone I had.

Magic was one of the harder areas but Gurps Magic actually does have spells that mimic most effects from D&D. The exception is complicated oddities like Evard's Black Tentacles.

Don't be afraid to shrink the scale of some spells. Gurps is played in 3 foot hexes and 3.x in 5 foot squares but a lot of AD&D 2- modules were mapped in 10 foot squares. You generally don't need areas as big as the original had.

Magic items can be complicated but if there isn't a spell that directly duplicates the effect there's probably an Advantage that does. For example, Gauntlets of Ogre Power grant Arm ST from characters p.40. So at least you have rules to use when GMing the thing.

One perhaps not obvious point is money. I started out with a conversion ratio of 10 $ Gurps equaled 1 GP but mostly ended up using D&D prices especially for magic items.

[JMason]

I can't say that I used a lot of OSR stuff, but I have run 3.5, 4th, 5th, and Pathfinder adventures converted to GURPS with success. I chunked a lot items and values, and instead just used the GURPS equivalent. Money found was converted down for 1 GP (d&d) = 1 silver (GURPS DF).

For monsters I either used the conversion on the GURPS repository or did my own. The guidelines here were very useful, but I would tweak things when it didn't "feel" right:
http://gurpswiki.wikidot.com/d20-conversion-guidelines

I'm not totally sure how well this would work on pre d20 monsters.