My apologies to those who don't know 3rd Edition D&D terminology. This discussion is hard to have without resorting to it, yet difficult if we need to annotate everything. If you don't understand something, you're welcome to email me and I'll try to fill in what's missing. ---- Let's go over some of the more well-known personalities (at least as they're well known, perhaps rather than as they actually are... :-) and convert them to 3rd Ed. Below I'll be making up classes on the fly to combine certain abilities that are appropriate for the conversion. I do this with a system that gives relative weights to various capabilities that come with level advancement. That is how we know the value of a particular saving-throw progression versus a particular spell advancement. I reverse-engineered these weights from existing standard character classes, though some classes (particularly Cleric) strained the system. Those of you who were in the experimental 3rd Edition run ("Ultrawar") may still have those mechanics around. I don't want to go into them here, but just want to explain that I'm not being completely arbitrary when I trade abilities in and out of a class for the purpose of converting a character. I've given each character a conversion budget, which is the number of levels we'd like to use to convert them. This is the same as their level in their main class, unless there are two main classes with nearly equal levels. A 1st-Ed character with a roughly even split of levels in two classes is about equivalent in experience to N+1 levels in a single class, so our conversion budget is 1 level higher in those cases. ---- BECKETT (budget 12 levels) BEFORE AFTER WHY 11th Priest 11th Cleric direct mapping 8th? Fighter +8 attack bonus comes from Cleric A Cleric is lacking in combat feats, so we'll use the last level in the budget to add a Fighter level. So in 3rd Edition, Beckett is: Cleric 11, Fighter 1 ---- CEREBUS (budget 11 levels) Similar to Beckett. BEFORE AFTER WHY 8th Priest 8th Cleric direct mapping 7th? Fighter +7 attack bonus +6 from Cleric Fill out with Fighter levels, and we have a lord Cerebus: Cleric 8, Fighter 3 ---- VALDOR (budget 12 levels) The in-game background: Valdor was a caster who combined clerical (I've forgotten what religion) and secular magic, advancing enough to cast fireballs and to cure diseases. He became an atheist at some point, and his heart just wasn't in his religion anymore. (Gotta wonder how a priest of the God of Atheism can keep his mind on his religious work...) He continued his study of magic, with some study of swords on the side. He is said to be near earning the title of "Wizard" (which in 1st Edition Fivtoria meant able to cast 6th level spells, or more specifically, cast "Enchant An Item"). The out-of-game background: Valdor was a Cleric-MU multiclassed half-elf. He hit the 1st Ed limit on Cleric level for his combination of class and race, and went on in only MU. Later, I think when he was a human (and I had started allowing flexible mixing of classes), he got frustrated with how weak he was in melee (due to pre-3rd Ed rules where MUs always suck in melee), so he picked up Fighter levels, working his way up to 7th before stopping there and sticking with magic again. I think he had reached 9th MU before I made any experience-table changes for MU, of which there have been two -- each one resulting in some shifting of his XP total to keep him at the same level of progression, rather than at the same number of experience points. He is now 11th level, while it takes a 12th-level MU to cast 6th-list spells (11th-level MU in 3rd Ed). Simple levels-per-class conversion: BEFORE AFTER WHY 11 MU 10 Wizard remains 1 level short of 6th-list spells 7th Fighter +6 base attack barely past 1 attack/round 5th Cleric 5th Cleric same as before Obviously, these "after" levels for spell-casting classes add up to 15. The base attack isn't a problem if he ends up as 12th level in the Wizard class, or 11th level where 1 of those is Fighter, or a few are Cleric, or some such. So, the only problem is fitting the divine spell casting abilities in with the Wizard levels. As I think I've explained, I consider it fine to fit the background levels however they work out, regardless of what order the character really got them (and what order the in-game history still reflects those advances being made). So, I present to you a new class that advances 10/11 of a level in Wizard class and 5/11 in Clerical spell casting per level earned in this new class. So, with 11 levels of that, Valdor would end up effectively a 10th Wizard and effectively a 5th Priest (Clerical spells, but that's all). He would have 2 feats for metamagic or item creation, and 6 general feats. So, how did this conversion do? We stayed within our desired budget, he needs only to take Fighter for the remaining level to push his base attack to +6, for the extra attack. He's short on metamagic feats, and his only good save is Will, but that's a small price to pay for a conversion that the mechanics really don't take well to. The result: Character levels: 12 Wizard 10 (effective) Cleric 5 (effective for spells and turning only) Fighter 1 ---- CANUTE (budget 10 levels) Like Valdor, Canute is one of the tougher conversions. (Actually, he looks like the toughest. But then we always knew Canute was tough. :) BEFORE AFTER 8th MU 8th Wizard 8th Samurai +7 attack bonus, +4 from Wizard If we just add 2 Samurai levels on top of the 8 Wizard levels, Canute ends up about right for fighting ability (+6 base attack, instead of +7). He would have 5 feats (not including Samurai) to fill in what are class skills in 1st Edition. Wizard 8 Samurai 2 ------------ Unlike most of Cat's Paw, the characters in KV have all reached high enough level that their progression has slowed down greatly. The group of characters from my freshman year (Beckett and Valdor) would generally get converted as 12th level characters in 3rd Edition. Those characters from around the time of the next big wave of players (Cerebus) get converted as 11th level characters. Those who started later in the 1980s get converted as 10th level characters, and Jill perhaps as 7th or 8th level (need more info). Cat's Paw characters started at an advanced level, and are now generally in the 5rd-8th level range.