The D&D Monster Conversion Thread

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by Edges

It sounds like dragons have been nurfed quite a bit since I played D&D.

Here you have the largest black dragon being 1 SM larger but 10 ST weaker than your average elephant. That sounds like a pushover for the 1000+ CP DF combat monsters that it should be built to face.

The biggest black dragon in 2nd ed. was around SM +8. If the SM +2 dragon in Basic were scaled up to SM +8 using the rules in Fantasy p. 51, she would have 250 ST. Or if you want to not include the tail and fudge the size a little, you could call it SM +7 and go with ST 170. That seems about right. A claw will do around 28d.

The SM +5 black dragon you're talking about is more like what 2nd ed. would call a young adult. Using Fantasy's method, he'd have about ST 80. I guess they don't make editions like they used to.

Hypothetically, if a man-sized dragon has 8-13 ST, then a scaled SM +5 dragon should have 54-89 ST.

Realism and consistency aside, if you just want to create stat blocks that are meant to serve as a certain challenge, I' think you still need much higher ST values on your epic monsters. Things like the largest dragons are not meant for 250 point, or even 750 point, DF characters IMO. Depending on the dragon color, I'd expect PCs to be in the 1000 - 1600 range to deal with great wyrms. Otherwise, what are those epic level characters going to do? It's the name of the game after all.

Hmmm... good points - looking at the animals in the Basic Set, high D&D Strength should result in even higher GURPS ST values, instead of the 1:1 conversion.

Any suggestions for a formula? Perhaps increasing ST by +25% per size category above "Medium"?

Thus we would get:

Large: +25%
Huge: +50%
Gargantuan: +75%
Colossal: +100%

Also, what SM ranges should these D&D size categories represent?