d20 creature conversion

[frogspawner]

Mummy...

Here we have an example of how the algorithm STR = SIZ does not work well in all situations. And also how D&D uses CHA in rather strange ways from time to time...

No need to worry overmuch in this case, since Mummy stats are given in BRP: STR 6d6, CON 4d6+3, SIZ 2d6+6, INT 3d6, POW d6+12, DEX 2d6; Move 8, HP 15, AP 3; Fist x2 70%, Grapple 25%, Shortsword 45%, Ancient Language 90%, Listen 50%, Sense 45%, Spot 50%, Stealth 50%.

(No APP - even though they're humanoid and sentient! Go figure.)

[MurfinMS]

Hiya gang,

You might be interested...

The old "All the World's Monsters" (which, I believe

might've been a Chaosium piblication) was a 3 volume

collection of triple-hole punched books that'd fif into a

3 ring binder pretty handily.

Had a mind-numbing collection of mostly homebrewed

monsters from a bunch of folks.

A really excellent resource for different critters, I remember.

Anyhow, the 3rd edition had a write-up on hor to translate

D&Desque monsters over to Runequest. Might be worth a look.

Course, its been a looonnnng time since the sands of time

blew through my collection and scattered *my* copy to the

four winds, so I can't really share anything, detailwise, except

I *seem* to recall AC was figured by subtracting it from 9 to get the creature's AP?

Maybe someone could check my recollection against their copy?

Best,

-Ken-

___________________________________________________________

"One of his tricks of persuasion was to cut open the

breast of a victim, pull out the still beating heart,

and gnaw upon it with great relish while the next

menu-object looked on in stark terror. No wonder

few withheld information from L'Olonais."

[blackbeard, AH Games]

[Shaira]

You can actually get PDFs of ATWM1-3 on DriveThruRPG. Classic stuff - there are some very cool ideas in there, and of course some totally mad ones!

Cheers,

Sarah

[frogspawner]

Thanks! That's reminded me what I should be working on is conversions from other systems...

[peterb]

Just bought all three PDFs from RPGnow, unfortunately they are first ed. and so there's no RQ conversion notes... But still the books are a goldmine of ideas.

[Shaira]

Just bought all three PDFs from RPGnow, unfortunately they are first ed. and so there's no RQ conversion notes... But still the books are a goldmine of ideas.

Check out p5 or so of ATWM3 - "How to convert ATWM brutes into RuneQuest nasties". Should do the trick. (BTW - was there ever a 2nd ed of ATWM? It sounds a bit too organised for that era! )

Cheers,

Sarah

[peterb]

Check out p5 or so of ATWM3 - "How to convert ATWM brutes into RuneQuest nasties". Should do the trick. (BTW - was there ever a 2nd ed of ATWM? It sounds a bit too organised for that era! )

Ah, great! I simply assumed any such notes where at the end of the document... (they usually are).

[peterb]

This project is almost done. I've converted almost 500 creatures from the d20 SRD. Here's a partial list of the data, http://www.rollspelshornan.se/files/BRP_creatures.htm

Is there any glaring errors in the stats that you can see?

[Harshax]

Your file is shaping up rather nicely. It's a little difficult to come up with criticism, but I think I found one:

I don't like your SIZ results. They're a little wonky if you ask me. A Hill Giant has a SIZ range of 10 to 40, with an average height of 25? A midget Hill Giant is the same size as an average adult. That's kind of funny actually.

I think you should flatten the curve just a little. I see from your formula, that you are expressing SIZ directly from STR. I wonder if you subtracted the size bonuses from the Characteristics before you computed their BRP equivalent? A Large creature, IIRC, gets a +4 Bonus to STR, and a -2 Penalty to DEX.

In any case, SIZ is probably the most difficult Characteristic to convert formulaically, but like I said before, it looks like it is really coming together.

[Harshax]

Using my own suggestion, here is a Hill Giant. Slightly less awesome, but no more or less better than yours:

STR 25 -8 = 17 ~ 4d6+3 

CON 19 -4 = 15 ~ 4d6+1

SIZ = STR      ~ 6d6+4 [based off original STR]

INT 6          ~ 2d6-1

POW 7          ~ 2d6   [used CHA as POW]

DEX 8  +2      ~ 3d6

APP 7          ~ 2d6

[peterb]

Your file is shaping up rather nicely. It's a little difficult to come up with criticism, but I think I found one:

I don't like your SIZ results. They're a little wonky if you ask me. A Hill Giant has a SIZ range of 10 to 40, with an average height of 25? A midget Hill Giant is the same size as an average adult. That's kind of funny actually.

I think you should flatten the curve just a little. I see from your formula, that you are expressing SIZ directly from STR. I wonder if you subtracted the size bonuses from the Characteristics before you computed their BRP equivalent? A Large creature, IIRC, gets a +4 Bonus to STR, and a -2 Penalty to DEX.

In any case, SIZ is probably the most difficult Characteristic to convert formulaically, but like I said before, it looks like it is really coming together.

Thanks for the comment.

When I studied existing statblocks for BRP (RQ III to be exact) I noticed that there was a very uniform STR = SIZ rule. Only very large creatures have more SIZ than STR, which I simulate by giving them a 120% increase in the fixed bonus to the dice roll. A large dinosaur with STR 10d6+30 would thus be given a SIZ of 10d6+36. Your observation that giants and other humanoids can get a bit of odd SIZ values are quite valid though.

I changed the algorithm a bit and took the creature type in consideration. If the creature is large or huge and a humanoid or an animal then I reduce the number of dices by one and add the dice type to the fixed mod. A Hill Giant now has a STR of 6d6+4 and a SIZ of 5d6+10.

I've also updated the html snapshot of my file (http://www.rollspelshornan.se/files/BRP_creatures.htm)

Edited July 13, 2008 by peterb
Corrected logical error...

[peterb]

I have now released a beta release of my Creature Generator spreadsheet. It contains, among other things, two worksheets with creature data, a lot of which is converted from the d20 SRD. The sheets to study are "Data" and "Skills".

[Trifletraxor]

Thanks for the update! Gotta check it out tomorrow! :happy:

SGL.

EDIT: After I have reinstalled Excel, that is.

Edited July 29, 2008 by Trifletraxor

[peterb]

If you already downloaded Beta 0.11, you'll probably want to download Beta 0.12, that I just released, it fixes a few bugs...

[DirkD]

I was thinking that it would be nice to make something like the "The Big Book of d20 Monsters for BRP" out of the data you produced. I could rip the description of the monsters from the d20 document and use the stats from your program...

Is there an easy way to create a file (txt/html/doc/rtf...) out of the program with a (chapter-11-like-) stat-block for each creature? The actual format isn't really important, since I want to convert it to LaTeX anyhow, but it should be in a system where every entry can automatically be identified (and therefore automatically converted to the format of my choice).

The optimum would be something like this:

line content

1. Name

2. Table with characteristic | Roll | Average (could be text)

3. Move:

4. Hit Points:

5. Damage Bonus:

6. Armor:

7. Attack:

8. Skills:

9. Remarks to stats

10. empty line/pagebreak or something else to mark the end of the block

so that I could convert it to something like this (pseudo-LaTeX-code for each creature):

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\stathead{variable with name from 1.}

variable with Description from d20-document

\characteristics{variable with characteristics-table generated from 2.}

\begin{statblock}

\textbf{Move:} variable with move-data from 3.

... same prinicple for 4.-9.

\end{statblock}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

That way I could basically generate the whole document without doing anything by hand.

[peterb]

I was thinking that it would be nice to make something like the "The Big Book of d20 Monsters for BRP" out of the data you produced. I could rip the description of the monsters from the d20 document and use the stats from your program...

Is there an easy way to create a file (txt/html/doc/rtf...) out of the program with a (chapter-11-like-) stat-block for each creature? The actual format isn't really important, since I want to convert it to LaTeX anyhow, but it should be in a system where every entry can automatically be identified (and therefore automatically converted to the format of my choice).

What about XML? It shouldn't be that difficult to export data from Excel to XML (even if I never have done so myself...). All it takes, I imagine, is defining a XML schema and map that to the data in the workbook.

[peterb]

And btw the descriptions are found not only in the d20 SRD but also in the MRQ Monster SRD and the d20 descriptions needs to edited, so the best would be to produce an editable intermediate file. Could you produce a RTF file with the help of LaTex?

[DirkD]

What about XML? It shouldn't be that difficult to export data from Excel to XML (even if I never have done so myself...). All it takes, I imagine, is defining a XML schema and map that to the data in the workbook.

The question is more like this: how do I export the relevant data for stat-blocks out of the excel-tables into (for example) a txt-file? After that, I'm good.

For example, if I wanted to export the data-table (A3-BG603) into a text-file in a format of my choice, how would I do that?

[peterb]

The question is more like this: how do I export the relevant data for stat-blocks out of the excel-tables into (for example) a txt-file? After that, I'm good.

For example, if I wanted to export the data-table (A3-BG603) into a text-file in a format of my choice, how would I do that?

Try saving the worksheet, using File -> Save As, as either a:

• Tab delimited text, or
  
• Semicolon delimited (*.skv), or
  
• Whitespace formated text (*.prn)
  

Use Excel's help search function and search for "Save As", you should find a help page with more info on the various file formats one can transform a Excel file to.