Your typical fantasy world from B/X to 5E only makes sense if you treat the world like a videogame. Shouldn't high-level NPCs and monsters dominate the world, controlling kingdoms and exclusive knowledge? Won't groups band together to "level up" all their friends and become the most potent factions?
Otherwise, the world could become imbalanced, like in the 'World of Warcraft' MMO, with zones of levels 1-10, 11-20, and so on. Maintaining balance is crucial in game design, ensuring that all players can contribute to the world regardless of their level.
Most of the time, the world "levels up" around the characters. This is the easiest way to handle it, and it avoids the headaches of leveled areas. However, "world-leveling" is not always compatible with a sandbox-style game.
One challenge I encountered in my Pathfinder 1e conversion was the ingrained levels of the creatures. However, this also sparked a creative process. I reflected on the power of some monsters as 'X times human' and attempted to translate this into my monster conversions for GURPS. This process of adaptation and creativity is one of the most rewarding aspects of role-playing game design.
You can play GURPS that way like giving monsters 50 to 100 character points per B/X hit die and roughly designing them off of that number. You could do a "realism spec" and mirror existing animals of the same size as base GURPS monsters and then tweak from there.
Yes, you can play GURPS in this sort of "leveled world," with monsters getting stronger and stronger for "video game reasons." It differs from the standard way of playing GURPS, but it can be done. The concept of "CR" never meant anything in GURPS, and it will mean even less now as 8-10 HD creatures suddenly become "boss monsters" and single 20+ HD creatures become demi-gods and almost unstoppable like epic-level superheroes.
If you want to convert HD to GURPS character points, you can do so. Your world will be a strange world where high-level creatures become epic challenges. D&D has always had this problem with monsters being "bags of hit points with a funny shape." Many D&D monsters are a little different than similar ones, like one monster being the armored brute at 3-6 HD and another at 14-18 HD being way too similar in attacks and powers; one is just the high-level version of the same archetype.
More is not more.
And I likely made a mistake with that conversion.
Pulling out the "realism ruler" and rating creatures on a flatter "skill-based" scale is always better. This is how GURPS does most everything, basing statistics and abilities on a real-world base rather than giving Naga snake people 8 hit dice just because characters are supposed to fight them around the 8th level. In GURPS, it is better to "size" a creature around something tangible, like a giant turtle based on a rhinoceros stat-block, then modify from there.
When you do a GURPS conversion it is like "X Setting: The Movie" and things look like the things in the books, but nothing is rated on some "game style" power scale. Things are more realistic, and monsters and heroes are on a flatter power curve. You can still have a dragon the size of a building, but nobody is going to be fighting it for four hours of the film's runtime.
In GURPS, take a real-world animal of similar size and ability and create your monster using that base. When in doubt, find a monster like the one you are imagining in GURPS and use that as a base. 80% of the time, you search for a beast already converted in one of the 4th or 3rd Edition books. For the other 15%, you are using something in the same ballpark and using that. The last 5% are actual conversions.
And 70-80% of the creatures in typical B/X games are already given stats in GURPS or Dungeon Fantasy somewhere, so you rarely need to convert much. Dungeon Fantasy has come a long way to defining power levels in the "dungeon crawling" side of GURPS; everything from the spells to the monsters makes sense in a way that D&D and many d20 games just guess at or "throw more hit dice at" to balance a monster.
The "old way" of the hit-die scale to put monsters on a power curve is an artificial construct of D&D.
It has been the same since D&D 3rd Edition when they introduced power and damage scaling. Suddenly, DPS per turn started going up with magic and multiple attacks. Wizards' D&D isn't even D&D, and the high-level math and scaling are all wrong compared to the original game. It is only close in the first three levels.
One of the best things you can do is ignore it all. Just use the pretty pictures of Pathfinder 1e, play in that world with the GURPS rules, and forget all the "fake" 3.75E numbers. They are all wrong anyway. Realism-base your world, ignore the math, and silly leveled this and that.
If you have played Pathfinder 1e as long as I have, it can be challenging to let go of those numbers.
You almost have to go "cold turkey" and let realism and the natural balance of GURPS guide you.
This is probably one of the most hard-to-break aspects of "mental inertia" when switching from D&D/PF to GURPS, but once you understand all this, conversions/adaptations become vastly more simple and rewarding. Aside from Hit Dice and Challenge Ratings, one of the things to look out for when adapting Pathfinder or D&D monsters is their array of spell-like abilities. More often than not, they make no sense thematically and are there just to be able to counteract typical abilities possessed by the PCs at that level or to be able to challenge them. This is why every other monster for some reason is able to cast Dispel Magic, Remove Curse, True Seeing, etc. When I adapt monsters, I often cut most of them (sometimes all of them) out. People sometimes point that out and say that I made a mistake and forgot some abilities, but I do that intentionally. I try making creatures that can be part of a game world and not statblocks or "bags of HP with different shapes".
ReplyDeleteOh, I agree. It is hard to "break out" of the vast lists that these games give you. The books are filled with beautiful art, many monsters, magic items, and hundreds of spells. They can be intimidating, but when you look at them critically, they don't make sense as a part of a game world (or even as something a creature can develop naturally). Also, all monsters are different, even within one type. The story and characters are far more important than the stats. Doing a follow-up on this idea tomorrow.
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