Converting d20 into Torg Terms

Since the number of Torg adventures are few, and getting rather long in the tooth, the adventurous GM's might try converting various d20 adventures into Torg Terms [or vice versa if you really want to.]

The attempt to try and do a conversion is always fraught with inaccuracies and error. The attempts to model the real world in RPG's has less to do with converting metric to "English units" and more with converting Escher to Van Gogh. A lot gets lost or gained in the translation. In order to make this translation somewhat believeable (or at least so I don't get tired of writing it before its done.) we will try to work easy to hard.

At first blush, the easiest conversions are the bonus numbers, while trying to convert hit points to torg rules are going to be the hardest.

D20 Generalities.

The d20 owes many of its "real world models" on its heritage from the ChainMail and D&D® games of the 1970's. To create probability curves it uses multiple forms and numbers of dice. To model damage and skill advancement it uses hit-points and levels. Even the names of the six attributes and the basic range are the same as they have always been.

However with the 3rd edition of D&D® much of the underpinnings have changed and been updated to rules that have been found useful and popular in other games. The skill and attribute system now uses logs (though it only tells you that in small type deep in the back of the book.) There seems to have been some work to extend this other parts of the game, but either due to the writers running out of time, juice, or just thinking it was too different from original D&D®.. it didn't get done.

On a side note, the current editors and writers of D&D® do seem to listen to what players are saying, and have been making updates for future editions that seem to maintain playability but add new things. Other game authors could take a lesson from this.

Converting Bonus Numbers

Our first task will be to make a general conversion table from D20 attributes to bonus numbers to Torg attributes. Normally this would require a lot of multiplication and division but due to some flukes of nature (and possibly that some of the authors worked on a LOG 100 system before), it is just straight addition.

A big help in converting points is that by some sort of co-incidence the maximum bonus number a d20 character can normally have (+5) is equivalent to the difference between the maximum human Torg attribute minus the average (13-8=+5). Using these numbers we can make a first stab of converting d20 to Torg's log attribute system.