Advice for using OSR stuff in Gurps?

[Stormcrow]

Converting pre-D20 monsters:

Don't expect to convert numbers to numbers. The strength of GURPS is that it uses real-world measurements for most things specifically so that you can use any system's stuff without having to know the other system. Just think about what the monster is like and use the GURPS equivalent. Only generate the stats you actually need to use.

Ignoring special abilities for the moment, consider a hobgoblin in first edition AD&D. Equip the hobgoblin however the module equips them, or use the defaults listed in the Monster Manual.

Hit Dice do not convert into GURPS Hit Points; they convert into weapon skills, or DX and Brawling for animals and monsters. Don't try to convert percentage chances to "hit" between systems; in AD&D "hitting" means causing damage to abstract hit points over a one-minute period, while in GURPS "hitting" means potentially doing damage to strictly physical hit points, which might be mitigated, over a one-second period. Instead, look at the job descriptions. a level 1 fighter is a "veteran"; give him an "expert" weapon skill of 14. A level 8 fighter is a "superhero," and corresponds to Conan at the height of his fighting prowess; maybe give this 25 as the maximum of "master" level as per page B172. Now choose a right-ish value for the weapon skill.

A hobgoblin has 1+1 hit dice, so that's one combat level above the bog-standard veteran. Give the hobgoblin a weapon skill of 15.

Need to know the hobgoblin's HT? There's nothing in the description of a hobgoblin about being especially hardy; HT is 10. Need its IQ? The Intelligence stat is Average, so give it an IQ of 10. There's no damage bonus to a hobgoblin's attack, so ST is 10, and no mention of dexterity, so DX is 10. (Hobgoblin leaders and bodyguards are different, and would get better stats than this.)

[Rindis]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

Do you have any advice on handling magic?

Fred already has very good advice, but if you want to go further afield, Sorcery uses a 'spells as powers' approach that costs more, but doesn't generate mages with a really long list of spell skills.

Also, I've been working on making it act even more D&Dish.

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by 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 done it for years with my Majestic Wilderlands campaign. Basically I jumped from AD&D 1st edition to Fantasy Hero and then to GURPS. The primary impetus was a more "realistic" combat system and more options for character customization. However the campaigns were about the same stuff the players did when I was using AD&D.

The thing I didn't do is try to run "D&D" with GURPS. By that I mean duplicating the D&D magic system and how character classes function. Instead my approach was treat 125 points characters (2nd and 3rd edition) as people existing the fantasy setting and following through on the consequences.

With AD&D character had endurance so to speak because of hit points in regards to spells. Higher level Magic Users and to a lesser extent Clericshad access to spells that had an outsize impact on mass battles. The classic example is fireball.

In GURPS in contrast the players could dominate lesser skilled opponents and develop enough skill to take on tougher monsters but they always had to be smart about due to the occasional hit (critical or otherwise). Above all have a rally points to bug out too if things got rough. Combat became more about gathering information to setup ambush rather than just plowing into rooms or encounters.

With mages, GURPS Magic is much more "personal". GURPS mages were just as effective in small scale battles as their AD&D counterpart but had to watch it as the number of opponent escalated.

When I ported over D&D adventures. I pretty much ran them 'as is'. Either the players did their homework and made steady progress or they rushed in or died. With AD&D and hit points it was possible to survive the first one or two rounds of a bad decision to regroup and reorganized. With GURPS that was rarely the case.

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

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.

Because I became a published OSR authors, I started running classic D&D again. Instead of returning to AD&D 1st edition, I opted to go back to using OD&D. Because of out of the various classic edition that was the easiest to port the stuff I did with GURPS too. The main reason is that OD&D power curve was much flatter than other editions. Plus outside of a few special class features characters could roughly could all do the same thing equally.

The adventures and supplements targeting, White Box, Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, Delving Deeper, Lamentation of the Flame Princess would work well with GURPS fantasy.

And to toot my own horn, my Scourge of the Demon Wolf adventure that I published started out with GURPS for 125 pt characters. The mages that are part of the adventure were built using GURPS magic, the NPCs using the templates from Historical Folks. The Demon wolf a generic demon buffed a little, and lots and lots of wolves. Just multiply the level by 25 pts for the point total the characters was in GURPS.

For an account of the last GURPS campaign I ran you can check out my blog post here.

http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/search?q=Nomar

Also I uploaded one of the rosters I used for an adventure here

http://www.batintheattic.com/downloa...n_2_Roster.pdf

The original summary I wrote for Scourge of the Demon Wolf when I ran it for GURPS.
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloa...mon%20Wolf.pdf

It doesn't have stats because I have a folder of standard NPCs that I use.

My take on a anti-paladin which in AD&D terms was Lawful Evil
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloa...20Template.pdf

A character from a mid-90s Majestic Wilderlands campaign using 3rd edition
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Dracolindus.pdf

A handout for the Nomar Campaign
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloa...n%20Rebels.pdf

Hope this helps.

[robertsconley]

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.)

At the personal level it not too much different. In fact mage using GURPS Magic is usually more capable than the classic D&D equivalent.

The big decision is on the buying of magic items. What people forget about classic D&D is that there is customization but it finding and sometimes buying the magic gear that just as important.

The same is true with GURPS fantasy and magic items except for PCs who mages. There the mechanics of spells as skills means the player using focus more on learning the right spells than obtaining the right magic items.

I am a referee who treats magic items as a luxury trade. So MIs are there for PCs to buy once they have the cash.

[robertsconley]

A further comment on GURPS Magic. I am going to be running a new GURPS campaign this fall. For various reasons the point level has been set at the DF level (250 points) rather than my usual 125 points starting.

Three of the players really like to break system and made characters that have outlandish build by my usual standards. None of it a problem per say because I know this would happen when I agreed to the ground rules of the campaign. And I agreed to it because this campaign a special one off tailored to this group.

However the builds the players came up with got me wondering about the previous campaigns I ran where GURPS Magic didn't seem so broken. Looking over the PCs and NPCs sheet I can see that most of the spells were used were the ones found in GURPS 3rd Edition Magic. That the problem spells stem from the expansion through Grimoire and 4th edition.

So my recommendation is that GURPS Magic for 4e is fine but go through each college and nix problematic spells. Using the list from Dungeon Fantasy or GURPS Magic 3rd edition for a guide.

Or just use the list from GURPS Lite 3rd edition as the starting point.

[weby]

Originally Posted by 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.

I am running a long fantasy campaign(so far 281 sessions in soon 7 years) the adventure locations are based mostly on maps, magic items and monsters from Paizo adventure paths(very similar to SRD 3.5).

I actually run the monsters and such almost directly as they are with the attack bonus indicating the deceptive amount any attacks with saves are the required DC-10, their armor+natural armor bonuses as DR and the dodge/deflection bonuses halved and added as DB, SR become Magic resistance at -10, the enmey skills are 10+the bonus and so on.

Currently the characters are 2800-3300 points so they are kind of super heroes.. So as example a recent boos fight they faced a balor:
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/b...ml#demon-balor

That translates to:
things like:
4 attacks at 31/26/21/16 deceptive with 2d6+13 damage with vorpal on crit and 3 attacks at 30/25/20 deceptive with (1d6+6 plus 1d6 fire and entangle) with vorpal on crit
DR is 31 against most attacks, 16 vs cold iron and good
It can cast spells like the dominate monster that is will -17 to resist.
it has magic resist 21 and so on..

The same thing has worked from the early days with things like goblins:
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/b...in.html#goblin

It attacks with short sword at 2 deceptive, doing 1d6-1 damage on hit.
Has DR 2 armor, is easy to sneak up on with a Perception of only 9 and so on.

Magic items: I basically use the stats as they are, with the exception of attribute bonus items giving only half the bonus.

I decided to use the magic item rules from there instead of the GURPS ones as the GURPS rules are kind of weird with really low and really high prices depending on what side of the 50 point limit they land on. So instead of trying to work something strange I just used the OSR/PRD rules and items.

So basically the PCs can buy the normal magic items http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/magicItems.htm but the basic item is a GURPS item,
Thus the +1 magic bastard sword is GURPS bastard sword with a +1 to hit and damage and the +1 breastplate is a Low tech breastplate with +1 magic DR and so on.

The cost of the magic items depends on your view of the balancing, I use 1 D&D/Pathfinder gold piece is $10 GURPS for magic items.

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.)

As for magic: We started with fairly close to basic GURPS magic and it worked fairly well for low point values but at around 500 points it started to break and after some tries in the middle we currently use power based magic(sorcery+divine favor+chinese elemental+psions+few custom), but at the point values you plan on the standard magic should work well enough. One change we did was make all ranged spells use standard range table instead of -1/yard.

The systems are different but there is usually a similar enough spell in GURPS magic for when you need a spell for enemy spell caster or to bypass a thing or similar.

I used to think more of how to bypass it, but now I just wing it.

[mr beer]

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 generally go through and convert as needed. GURPS spells sometimes convert eg Flight and sometimes not. I don't try to be very exact eg if the module says a Wall of Fire is needed to overcome a particular obstacle, I'm not going to insist on the party doing that. Maybe a Create Fire works fine, maybe any fire damage, maybe any clever thinking will work (rule of cool). The systems are mechanically too different to try for exact matches.

One tip, I strongly suggest using some kind of Mook rules for encounters with lots of monsters e g One hit, one kill or auto dies at 0hp, something like that. Otherwise keeping track of numerous opponents at various stages of the GURPS death spiral is a nightmare. Reserve the ability to make death checks for boss monsters. This is only an issue if you convert encounter numbers literally eg 25 orcs with 4 ogres plus orc warlord plus 2 shamans kind of thing. I do but you can also cut numbers instead.

[dripton]

Originally Posted by 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.

Lots of good advice in this thread, but to answer your direct request for written info about conversions, check out the *oldest* posts on https://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/ (Keep on the Borderlands) and https://d20to3d6.blogspot.com/ (Temple of Elemental Evil).

Lots of classic D&D monsters already have a GURPS equivalent, either in an official GURPS book or on a web page. So my biggest conversion tip is to search before you convert, to save time.

Learning to balance GURPS encounters is a skill that takes a while to develop. I suggest erring on the side of too easy rather than on the side of total party kill, at first. You can gradually up the challenge as you figure it out.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by 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?

Well, for starters, check out my blog (link in .sig). What you describe is pretty much my campaign: Dungeon Fantasy at 125 points.

You should also go to the GURPS Repository and look at the monsters and other crunchy bits therein.

[Pragmatic]

Just an FYI, if you want to port Ritual Path Magic in, there's a thread where someone has been translating GURPS Magic spells over to RPM rituals.

Link to thread on SJ Games forum where it all started