Should I Start Up My Character Conversions Once Again?

I've been creating RPG content for quite a number of years, now. I've worked for companies big and small, I've dabbled in half a dozen systems, added to existing settings, and made one of my own. However, if I look back to where it all got started, I can trace my career (such as it is) back to my Character Conversions project... something that started as a lark, but became something more.

You never know the places you'll go.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

How It All Got Started

This whole, sordid tale actually goes back to one of my earliest gaming stories, Don't Ever Field a One-Eyed Dragon. During the course of this game there was something of an arms race between myself and the GM, who had a bad habit of letting far more players than he could handle join the table, and then scrambling to come up with appropriate challenges for that many adventurers. This led to my acquiring a cohort via the Leadership feat, and I built him using one of the earlier drafts of my Incredible Hulk character conversion guide. I enjoyed the character so much (and there were so many shenanigans) that I turned the build I'd used into an early draft of that guide, and threw it online on a website called Associated Content that hasn't been around for a long, long time.

And folks really liked that guide. So much so that I was getting a dozen or more requests for other characters. That was when I realized I might have opened up a Pandora's box; I could either struggle to close it, or throw the lid wide open and see where it went.

I went with the latter option, for those who are curious.

The first thing I did was put together other members of the Avengers, such as Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Thor. I spiraled out from there, touching on characters from the DC Universe, Game of Thrones, figures from history, horror movies, action films, and toward the end of my active run, from the Warhammer 40K universe. The project currently has about 60 or so guides in it, and it spans more than 6 years. Not only that, but it was started on Associated Content, which then became Yahoo! Voices. That site closed and I started moving the guides to HubPages, but Google banned my AdSense profile, so I was no longer allowed to make money with that site. I moved them to InfoBarrel, which is also now defunct, and eventually they found a new home over on Vocal.

That was a lot of work to both move the old guides (which were updated and remastered when they went up on Vocal), but I can honestly say that without them I probably wouldn't have half the career I do today as a game designer. It was these guides that got me noticed by Azukail Games, who is the primary publisher I work with. It's also what got me a gig with Louis Porter Junior when I put together the entry Lucia Krille: Enemies of NeoExodus, which was a direct riff on the character of Absorbing Man from Marvel Comics.

One frustrating thing about this project, though, is that every time it started getting close to really building momentum, something went wrong. Just as my Gotham guides were really getting a lot of attention, Yahoo! decided to deep six the site, which sent my searchability plummeting. I got half of them back up on HubPages, and then they were no longer allowed to pay my bills. I got them on InfoBarrel, and a site update that was never fixed tanked both creator tools, and made articles almost impossible to find via a search. Then I got them all up on Vocal, and Pathfinder announced a new edition was coming out, telling me that once more the project's days were numbered.

Would Readers Like To See It Return?

While there have been a couple of updates to the project, such as my guides for The Mandalorian, or the soldiers of 40k's Death Korps of Krieg, my character conversions have more or less been in cold storage for 2022. And the reason for that has been, honestly, new installments just didn't get the views I needed to justify the time, energy, and effort to keep the hits coming. For context, I make $6 for every 1,000 reads an article gets. When guides were getting 5k reads, I was more than happy to spend the 2+ hours it takes to put them together. When they get 250 reads, though, not so much.

With that said, writing these guides is something I did long enough that I sort of miss it now... so I figured I'd ask if it's something my readers would like to see make one more triumphant return?

There are, however, some provisos here.

Before anyone leaves a comment below, or on social media where you found this link, I want to make something clear. If I do bring this project back and start adding to it once again, I will more than likely continue these write ups in Pathfinder Classic. While it's possible to write some guides for DND 5E, I do not have access to the material for that edition (it doesn't have a complete SRD like Pathfinder does), and I feel that it is much too limited, mechanically, for the sorts of tricks and tips that I feel is necessary for the deep dive into a character's abilities that is the series' main selling point. While it might be possible to start making guides for Pathfinder's second edition, I am extremely reluctant to do so. I did not care for the playtest, and while there were changes made afterward, none of them served to make me eager to create anything for that system the more I read about its finalized version.

With that said, if there's folks who want to sponsor guides for particular characters in a particular edition, I'm always happy to listen to business proposals. But I wanted to be clear about the direction that I would take things if left to my own devices so that folks know what they're supporting/asking for.

If you're still with me, there are a couple of things I would like you to do in order to help let me know this is a project you want to come back:

- Leave a Comment: Either below or on social media is fine, just put it somewhere I'll see it. Feel free to make a character request in your comment if I haven't covered them yet!

- Share a Guide: Increased traffic is what really gets my attention. So share which guide you like best, or just the Character Conversion master list to help get it seen by folks.

That's it!

I'll be reading the comments and checking the numbers. If enough people are willing to help me break the seal and take this one out of cold storage, then it's something I'm happy to do in the coming months!

Lastly, if you're someone who's been thinking about trying their hand at writing a character conversion, I'd recommend reading through Tips For Writing RPG Character Conversions. I basically boiled down my process, what I learned, and how I was able to keep things going as long as I did.

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!

Don't NERF Skills in Pathfinder (Instead, Try Using The Rest of The Rules)

I don't know how many times I've been on a Facebook group, or a subreddit, and seen a DM asking for advice on how to deal with player characters with "overdeveloped" skills. Perception is probably the most common complaint, but Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidation sometimes get a bad rep for being easily "broken" in a game. These DMs are always asking how they can maintain their game's challenge when one player (or all of them) have taken it upon themselves to buff their skills until they shine, and they are unsurpassed in the execution of this one task.

The answer is pretty simple. Crack the book, and read how skills work in their entirety, instead of just the basics of how a check functions.

Seriously, guys, you make this a LOT harder on yourselves than you need to.

The Book Already Has The Balance You're Looking For

As I said way back in my post Operator Error is The Biggest Cause of Problems in RPGs, most of the problems DMs have behind the screen come from gaps in their knowledge about how aspects of the game actually work. For skills, most of us never move beyond the DC 10 for a simple task, DC 15 for a difficult one, and DC 25 or 30 for a nearly impossible one. However, that scale is only part of how skills work in Pathfinder.

Let's start with Perception, since it gets the most hate, and seems to cause the most problems. The most common use of Perception is to counter either a Stealth check, or to notice someone using Sleight of Hand. However, it is also used to locate traps, with the base DC of 20 for mechanical traps, and 25 + the highest spell level for magical traps.

Some traps have lower locate DCs than others.

Now, if you're a DM who is constantly frustrated that your party always finds your traps, locates your ambushes, or stumbles across your secret doors, you need to ask yourself two questions. One, why are you annoyed that your players are succeeding, using the resources they invested into their characters? Two, are you actually applying any of the appropriate negatives to the situation according to the chart on page 102?

You see, Perception is not just about the DC; it's also about the conditions you're using it in. Bad conditions? That's a +2 to the DC. +5 for terrible conditions. Distance? It's +1 for every 10 feet away the character is. If the creature making the check is distracted, that's a +5 to the check. Hearing something through a closed door is also a +5. It's +10 per foot of thickness to perceive something through a wall. It's a +20 if something is invisible, and then there is the question of whether the person making the check can see in the dark, can see in dim light, or if they understand what they're hearing.

All of that is a built-in feature of the game, and it's expected you're actually applying those negatives to situations where PCs are making Perception checks.

The other major problem I find is DMs who aren't actually running a skill the way it's listed in the book, and as such are making it more powerful than it should be. Intimidate and Diplomacy are the best examples. When you demoralize a creature in combat (one of the most common uses of Intimidate) the DC you have to beat is 10 + target's hit dice + the target's Wisdom modifier. So, while it's possible for you to Intimidate the dragon, you had better have Skill Focus, a racial bonus, a favored class modifier, a trait bonus, an equipment bonus, and roll above a 15 if you expect to demoralize that thing for even 1 round. It is not a roll-off of your Intimidate versus the target's Sense Motive (a skill most monsters don't even have most of the time, which would practically guarantee your success).

Then there's the creature's attitude. You see, it's entirely possible to use Diplomacy to change a creature's attitude toward you... but you can only move them 2 steps along the chart. So, if a creature has a hostile attitude toward you, the absolute best you can hope for with a Diplomacy check is to shift it to indifferent. And that means you need to make a check that beats the check of 25 + creature's Charisma modifier by 5 or more. So, at minimum, you need to hit a 30 just to make them not care one way or another.

But what about friendly creatures? Well, friendly is often misconstrued as, "I won the check, so now they do what I want." That isn't how that works. If you manage to change a creature's attitude toward you to friendly, either using Intimidate or Diplomacy, that creature doesn't immediately become a pawn under your control. It becomes "friendly," which means it will treat you as a friend. Depending on what you want, the DC will also go up (such as a +10 increase to the DC for giving dangerous aid, or a +15 or more for aid that could result in punishment). And if you use Intimidate rather than Diplomacy to make a creature friendly toward you? Well, that's a short-lived victory. It's also only really good for interrogations, since it only lasts for 1d6 X 10 minutes, after which the target treats you as unfriendly, and is likely to do things like report you to the town guard.

Don't Take Away Their Victories (But Don't Make Them Easy)

Pathfinder is a rules-dense game, and that means it's entirely possible to go through a whole campaign without touching on big sections of the rule book. But when you're a DM, and your players want to use those rules, it behooves you to learn them, and to run them with all the positive and negative aspects they're listed with. Because while it's entirely possible for the half-orc rogue to terrify a prisoner into submission in order to find out how many men are inside the bandit stronghold, or for the ranger to hear a twig snag as ambushers approach the camp while he's dead asleep, it's important to remember those aren't flat DCs. Sometimes it's easier for a character to succeed on those endeavors, and sometimes it's harder. Especially because natural 20s are not a guaranteed success on skill checks, by the rules.

However, while a DM might lament that someone in their party regularly hits checks in the 40s by level 10, take a moment to stop and ask what they had to do in order to get those numbers. How many feat slots, skill points, attribute bumps, traits, items, class features, and even spell slots are they dedicating to making sure they have the ability to spot ambushes with eagle-eyed clarity, or to fast-talk their way past all but the most astute guards. Just like barbarians with brutal attack numbers, or wizards who always seem to have just the right spell for a situation, don't punish the player for properly investing their resources to make effective characters.

Just make sure they're following the rules, and that they understand some situations are more difficult to overcome than others. Not because you're arbitrarily changing the rules, but because the rules were built with that difficulty curve in mind.

That's all for this week's Crunch post. Hopefully it helps both frustrated DMs, and players who have been wanting to go a little more in-depth with their skills. If you want to keep up-to-date on all my latest releases, then follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. And if you'd like to help fund me and my blog so I can keep bringing you posts just like this, then head over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page. All it takes is $1 a month to make a big difference to me, and it gets you all kinds of sweet swag just for being a patron.