Good post award point given-Kilsek
I've heard alot of comments and things around the web about how to transition a compaign to 4th edition. I've even heard several people saying it isn't possible. But here's how my group is doing our transition.
First a little background. We've been playing as a group for about 10 years. We usually get together about every other week, so we certainly don't blaze through the levels very quickly. We started a new 3rd Edition campaign a few years ago, and the players got a group of characters up to 7th level. We have really had a great time with this campaign, and the players really want to bring these characters into the 4th edition game.
There is quite a learning curve, so we decided to put our 7th level characters on hiatus for a while and everyone built new 1st level characters in 4th Edition. But the goal wasn't to try to memic the old characters just yet, the goal was just to learn the rules and to experience the different character race/classes.
Since we don't play all that often, and since we want to be able to experience the dynamics of a variety of different race/class combinations, I decided that we would cut the experience needed by 80%. So, instead of needing 1000xp to get to 2nd level, they only need 200xp.
Then, once they got their first character to 2nd level, we put those characters aside and everyone made new characters and started them at 2nd level. We did a couple of adventures and got them to 20% of the XP needed for 3rd level and then it was time to build new characters and start them at 3rd level.
This is giving us a chance to play around with different character types, learn the powers, etc. There are a lot of powers that seem really cool, but turn out to be not that useful. But there are a lot of other powers that seem so-so that turn out to be extremely useful.
As far as treasure, equipment, magic items, etc... I use the treasure bundles from the DM guide each time they start a character at the new level. For instance, the DM guide says that a party of a certain level should have about X amount of gold, so they start with that much gold. And I have them choose Magic Items per the bundle chart in the DM guide.
Once they've finished their 6th level character this way, then we are going to move back to our characters that were 7th level in our 3rd Edition game. They will build new 4th Edition characters and make them as close to their previous characters as possible. They'll know the game system, and they'll have a good idea which powers and things that they want for their characters. Once we've rebuilt the old 7th level characters, we'll go back to standard XP requirements and continue to level the characters normally. And it doesn't matter what Magic Items and things that they chose as they were building the previous characters, as those were just throw-away items to learn the game and once we resume the 7th level characters I will go through the magic items that they had from 3rd Edition and award them similarly with 4th Edition things.
Role Playing
