Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Playtest - Combat Discussion

 

Initial discussion in the previous post.

OK let's look at some of these new combat interactions. First up the general Degree of Success chart:

A critical hit here (Nat 20) adds one degree of success
A critical miss (Nat 1) adds a degree of failure

• Hits and misses are determined using a d20 + your relevant attack bonus vs. a DC of 10 + your Defense score. As long as you get a success - meet or exceed the target DC - you have scored a hit on the target and now you need to check for damage.
• An extra success here adds 5 to the Effect rank
• An extra failure here, if it somehow still hits, gives the target a +5 on their Resistance check
  
  
• Damage is handled by rolling the d20 + your toughness rank vs a target of 10+ damage rank. That's a change from the 15 + damage of 3E. Then Degrees of Success enter the fray:
• Success (two or more degrees): If the target has Hardened, Impervious, or Impenetrable resistance against the attack and this degree of success, they receive no damage conditions. Otherwise, this is the same as one degree of success.
• Success (one degree): The target receives the Hit condition. For each Hit condition, apply a –1 penalty to the character’s further resistance checks against Damage.
  
• Failure (one degree): The target receives a Hit condition, and the Dazed condition. If the target already has the Dazed condition, it becomes Stunned instead.
  Compared to 3E this adds Dazed - in 3E this was just a -1 to future Toughness checks
• Failure (two degrees): The target receives a Hit condition, the Stunned condition, plus the Staggered condition.
  In 3E this was just Dazed & a -1
• Failure (three degrees): The target receives the Hit and Staggered conditions, plus the Incapacitated condition. If an Incapacitated character fails a Damage resistance check, their condition becomes Dying. If a Dying character fails a Damage resistance check by any degree, they are Dead.
  In 3E this was just Staggered and a -1, and an additional Staggered result went to Incapacitated which could then go to Dying and then to Dead in the same way.
  
  Some significant changes here: From 3E the target number has dropped by 5, but the table has bumped everything up a notch for starters. Then we add in Hits being cumulative so even resisting the damage to a degree means they are still piling up. I like this as it puts more of a clock on the combat. 3E had a similar condition but it was only applied on a failure. Now with it applying to at least some successful saves it will accumulate that much faster. It also adds a benefit to doing really well on a Toughness check as you avoid this cumulative penalty. Players tend to be disappointed when they roll really well and there is no additional benefit to it so this feeds right into the drama of each roll. 
  
  (Also, this is starting to look like Savage Worlds' system a bit - "Hit", or "Hit and a Raise to add damage", failing the save by more causes a worse effect, etc. Lot of parallels there.)

Let's talk about Conditions real quick. Beyond "Hits" the damage table can make you:

• Dazed - One standard action, no reactions, still get free actions. 
• Stunned - No actions at all and Dodge rank is halved. I'm wondering if this is correct or if it's supposed to affect Defense scores as well? In 3E it was just the "no actions" part so I don't know. 
• Staggered - Dazed and Hindered (that means half movement speed)
• Incapacitated - Stunned, Unaware, Defenseless, and usually Prone. This is the KO you're looking for in a fight.
• Dying - Incapacitated and making death saves ala D&D 5E. 

Characters might be Resistant to a particular attack - that means they cut the effect ranks in half before making the roll. Immunity means you make no roll at all - so you won't be accumulating hits from those attacks. Susceptible means you have a penalty to resistance checks of half the incoming effect rank. Weakness is that plus your best result is one degree of failure on the check.

With the basics out of the way, let's say our Battlesuit faces off against their evil twin - how does that go?

• Evil Battlesuit flies up and blasts Justice Battlesuit:
•  Evil shoots with a d20+8 (Their Attack of 8 is the modifier here) against a Defense Class of 18 (the target's Defense of 8 + the basic 10). Needing an 18, an average roll will get them a 10-11 and so they hit!
• To resist damage Justice will be rolling a d20 + 12 (their Toughness) with a target of 22 (base 10 + 12 for the Rank 12 Force Beams). Another average 10-11 roll here will match that target for a success and while it is Hardened it is Rank 11 while the force beams are Rank 12 so no extra roll and Justice will take a Hit even with the success. 

This could go on for a while but at least those -1's will be piling up until someone gets lucky.

Let's say Justice has been rendered Vulnerable by some other attack or event. The Vulnerable condition reduces Defense by half so he would be a DC14 to hit - you just need an slightly better average roll of 11 + 8 (Attack Bonus) = 19 which is 5 over and so an added success on an attack check which increases the Blast Effect by 5.

Now the resistance target will be 27 (base 10 + 12 + 5) and an average roll for Justice will give us 11 + 12 (Toughness) = 23. That's a failure so he will be Hit + Dazed.

Clearly Vulnerable is a good thing to have on your side and outside of any powers it comes up when one is Surprised: "A surprised character is Stunned and Vulnerable, caught off-guard and unable to act. Surprised normally only lasts for one round." So there's one way to set things up in your favor.

It looks to me like combat could go on a bit but with those Hits stacking up on most attacks it should go quicker than 3E's combat. I do wonder about the effect of numbers now, both with a team of PC's attacking a single villain and with a group of mooks ganging up on one PC, and will that make for a significant impact in a fight.

Final point for today: One of the long time debates in 3E is over Defense versus Toughness. Many players thought Toughness was just better, as far as game effectiveness in 3E, and while that's not everything it did come up fairly frequently. Here's why: 

• Toughness is not reduced by Vulnerable or Defenseless Conditions
• Toughness is not ignored by Perception or Area Effects
• Toughness increase is 1/2 the PP cost of Dodge/Parry increase 

Most of these are still true. The only exception is that while an overall Defense is still 2 pts to Protection's 1 pt, you could raise either ranged or close defense for 1 pt per level. Despite this list remaining true I feel like the other adjustments to the way damage works alongside the Defensive Roll update should help balance this out. Against area effect attacks the 4E version of Evasion gives a +5 to avoid with 1 rank and "no damage on a success" with 2 ranks so there's another way to mitigate that. 

Defenseless is just bad for everyone, and Vulnerable is still mainly bad for Defense-shifted characters. The other consideration is that Vulnerable is still a first degree condition for the Affliction power so it's not too hard to land on someone. I'd say until I see a problem in-game that it's just something you need to be aware of.

That's all for now but I do want to try out some more combat examples. Look for that down the road a bit. Please feel free to check my math and thinking here too and let me know if you see something off.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Playtest - First Impressions

 

Alright I've read it. I haven't tried to run it yet or make a new character, I just compared some old ones and looked at possible changes but I need to dig in a little more and have some of my players update their old characters too, just to give it a workout. My short take is: it's an evolution, not a revolution.

It's more like 3E in my opinion than 3E was to 2E. I was thinking the loss of the Fighting and Dexterity stats was an indicator of larger changes but I don't feel like it turned out that way. There are a lot of smaller changes and adjustments and tweaks but the basic structure of the game and of characters is very similar. 

4th Edition Battlesuit Archetype

3rd Edition Battlesuit Archetype

Comparing the two you can see that it works pretty much the same way - both provide enhanced Protection , flight via boot jets, life support, radio comms, a sensor suite, some combat computer enhancements, and then a two-power array to throw power into either blaster beams or enhanced strength. Many of the point costs are quite similar and many of the ability scores are the same (and if you're wondering the number after the slash is the "out of the suit" number). The game is still a d20 + modifiers vs a target DC or a contest of rolls so the basic framework of the game is the same as well. You still have power levels and there are still limits related to it like Defense & Toughness needing to add up to PLx2. 

Now there are some differences:

•  Right up front Fighting and Dexterity have been shifted over into a different set of stats: Attack and Defense. Instead of a built-in split between Melee and Ranged capabilities here the default is now that you have one number for both. You can certainly split those up through various means to have a lower default and then a bonus on either Ranged or Melee or unarmed or a specific weapon type to have more of a focus for your character, but you don't have to. I actually do like this change as it will be simpler for someone new to see and I think it's just a clearer label overall. Who knew you could have a superhero game with one Offensive Combat Value and one Defensive Combat Value? 
• The defensive numbers are rearranged a bit. Toughness is still your damage save, and Fortitude/Dodge/Will are now strictly your other "saves". Parry goes away as you just use your Defense for your to-be-hit target now.
• Advantages have changed in many places too. 
• There are more types of advantages and each type can have some limitations or conditions. For example Heroic is a new class of Advantage and characters are limited to half Power Level in ranks of these - because they are more powerful.
• In 3E there was a set of combat maneuvers one could do - Accurate Attack to trade damage down to increase attack bonus, All-Out Attack to trade Defense for an attack bonus, its opposite Defensive Attack to trade hit bonus for improved defense, etc. - and these gave a +/-2, but if you took the related Advantage gave a +/-5.
  In 4E these maneuvers now just grant a straight-up +/-5, no Advantage needed, so these moves will be more consequential. Note that this is "up to +/-5", not automatically the maximum bonus. So the maneuvers are better and the Advantages related to them are gone.
• Defensive Roll is better now as it still adds +1 Toughness per rank but also gives the "no effects with a 2+ degrees of success" like Hardened (see below). You lose that extra when Vulnerable or Defenseless but keep the Toughness - unlike 3E. You do lose all of it when Stunned though so it's not a perfect replacement for pure Toughness which makes sense.
• Finally let's talk about Improvised Effect. This is a new one that is really the gateway to the variable power effects so many players love and so many GM's hate. The description is innocent enough: You can use a technical skill to prepare and use Improvised Effects. Now it's tied to one skill like Technology or Magic but you can take it more than once to cover more skills. This is a Heroic advantage so it is limited by PL but this is your gadget pool or magic crafting ability right here. Looking it over again I don't believe it requires any additional power points, like a pool, but it does calculate the points required and that does affect the skill roll needed to create and use the effect, plus they are only good for one scene, so this might be OK after all. That said, it's potentially a lot of flexibility for a highly skilled character for all of one point.
  
  

  

  Absolutely love this artwork

  
  
• For Powers the degree of change depends on the power. Some changed a great deal, some barely changed at all. You can see here that even the point costs are very similar for most of this character's powers. One significant change is with Protection and the options one can apply, so let's look at that one more closely:
• Protection itself is still a Permanent Defense so the default assumption is "armor" of some kind and it's +1 Toughness per rank. You can make it sustained instead if you want a more force-fieldy power, etc. But for Extras we now have Hardened, Impervious, and Impenetrable.
• Hardened: If the damage coming in is at or below your ranks of Hardened resistance then you roll two dice and take the highest - so basically our Battlesuit here in 4E has advantage on damage saves at rank 11 or less. I like that this is now an option. There is a second clause though: If you get two or more degrees of success on the save then you take no damage conditions including Hits, which is a new thing I will discuss below. I like this though -  something better than standard protection but not immune to a bunch of stuff.
• Impervious: This continues much like it did before where a character is just immune to incoming damage at or below their Impervious Protection rank. Note that last part - equal to or less than ... not half! Now it is capped at Power Level and it does cost 2 per rank instead of 1, but ridiculously resistant Bricks are certainly back! This one also has the "no effects with a 2+ degrees of success" like Hardened.
• Impenetrable: This is the same as Impervious but ignores Penetrating. Alright, let's look at that.
• There are several levels of defense in M&M. One of those is "Resistant" which means you take half of the damaging effect. "Fire Blast 10" is effectively "Fire Blast 5" to a Fire Resistant target.
• "Immune" means you are unaffected by attacks based on whatever you are immune to. If you are Immune to fire then "Fire Blast Whatever" means nothing to you.
• Except ... ranks of "Penetrating" ignore some of this. If our Battlesuit with Force Beams 12  shoots them at Dr. Impervious (Impervious Protection 15) he does nothing. If he upgrades to Force Beams 12 with 6 ranks of Penetrating and hits then Doc Impervious is going to be rolling to resist rank 6 damage - so a DC16 Toughness check. Penetrating doesn't add anything to your attack - it just ensures some of it gets through. Unless the target is Impenetrable  - then you are out of luck.
  
  You can add these modifiers on to your normal Toughness too -  you don't have to buy Protection to unlock them.
  
  Now you're not going to take all 3 of them on one character as they overlap. If our Battlesuit took Impervious 11 on their Protection then Hardness becomes redundant as it's giving you Advantage on a roll you're never going to make. Same with Impenetrable - it's the highest level of defense.
  
  Now you might take more than one to represent some kind of layered defense. Say, Protection 11 with Impervious for 6 ranks and then Hardened for 11 - that would mean you don't even have to roll against the smaller stuff, then you get Advantage up through the remaining ranks. I don't know that it's cost effective but it would still help against Penetrating attacks with the extra roll. Say you get hit with a Blast 5 (Penetrating 3). The Impervious 6 would normally stop it but Pen 3 means you have to roll against a DC13. Hardened would give you the extra d20 for that.
  
  By wording it would also give you the "2+ degrees of success = no damage conditions) as Penetrating specifically mentions negating only Resistance and Impervious but I'm not sure that's the intent.
  
  It's interesting. I suspect my Battlesuit player will be digging into all of this a lot.
  
  

  

  No not him ...

  
  
• Regeneration is one I've seen people complain about with 3E and in 4E it's a lot simpler. There is a table that lists what it does for each rank and I do really really like the clarity:
• Rank 1 is "Recover your least Severe Damage Condition every 10 rounds". 
• This improves by 1 round per rank until at Rank 10 you're dropping one every round, then it goes to multiple conditions removed per rank.
• Then at 15 you start recovering from being Dead in ever-decreasing increments of time up to Rank 20 where you recover from everything every turn. Nicely done Green Ronin! 
• Yes there is still a Variable Power, there are about two pages of discussion on it, and the described way of handling it is excellent. Unlike the Advantage this one is based on a pool of points. That said I will leave this one with the last sentence in the sidebar discussion for this power: In short, Variable is a “last resort” in power design, and the GM should treat it as such.

So lots of interesting changes without too much being drastically different. I do want to check on the Defense-is-inferior-to-Toughness debate as I'm still not sure about that one so let's work through a combat example tomorrow and see how it works now.

Super Saturday - Bad Takes on Some Super Systems

 

First up: yes I did get the M&M 4E playtest and yes I'm working my through it. More to come next week on that.

That said in the lead-up to its release I re-read the 3E rules and then that spilled over to Champions as well and I spent a lot of time seeing where people stood on 4th vs. 5th vs. 6th edition for that game as I had really not paid attention to it up until now as an online discussion. Doing that led me to some other items of potential interest like the Spectaculars game. I was vaguely aware of it but had never really studied it and I don't own it yet.

Now Spectaculars looks interesting so I spent some time poking around for reviews and actual play reports of it and that led me to a now-defunct blog where the writer wrote up some articles about older superhero games leading up to a report on Spectaculars. Now I don't want to turn this into a dispute with an individual so I'm not linking to the blog here but I want to use it as an example of how some of these games are perceived by some people in a more general sense and how some internet groupthink seeps in and how time screws with perceptions as well.

The writer in question started with Marvel Super Heroes - nothing wrong with that, a lot of people did. He credits it with being easy to understand for young players - sure, totally agree. He then turns and says there wasn't much of a character generation system with it being a lot of random rolling and making a few limited choices ... and this is where I veer away hard from this take. 

Hmmm, random rolls and limited choices? Sounds a lot like D&D! The dominant RPG at the time! And now! Also Runequest, Traveller, and many other games of the time! We made a bunch of characters with it and played for several years. I wasn't going to but I have to insert a quote here:

"For me it did also set out the fundamental template for superhero RPGs – all fun in different ways, but all having different and significant flaws."

I could not disagree more. This mostly ignores the revolutionary take on task resolution with the color chart system among many other things and the more general fact that superhero RPGs are where you find a lot of the innovation and fresh thinking that happens in RPGs. They have to, because they have to encompass the widest range of possibilities, the widest scope for a game.

"Overall the Marvel RPG was simple and fun, but really lacked any depth and longevity."

I just ... how does one get to this point? It so lacked longevity that people have been maintaining websites for it  for almost three decades after it went out of print. It is regularly referenced as an important game and served as inspiration for everything from retroclones to Icons. I played in long loose campaigns with friends and I would run it tomorrow if someone asked. It's a bad take. 

I will note that the author does not appear to have gone back and picked up a copy, looked back through other peoples notes on it, or played or run it anytime recently - this was strictly memories of it from the 80's.

He moves on to DC Heroes, calling it "much more technically polished than the Marvel game" - was it? It was more complex but that's a take I haven't seen if we're talking 1st edition DCH. I think it was perceived as a more sophisticated game at the time as in "not aimed at kids as much as the Marvel game" so I'll agree if that's the real take.  He seems to like it better than Marvel but then we get to  points, gadgets, and this take:

"This would highlight a design pattern bug in most superhero systems involving points:  if your super widget can be lost/stolen/damaged then system designers seemed to think that they should always cost you less of your character points during generation otherwise a gadget hero would always be disadvantaged.  Then again if this discount is too high then gadget heroes seem to have an advantage over others."

Yes ... a power that can be taken away easily are less valuable than one that cannot. That seems incredibly obvious to me. Yes, it does depend on the kind of system and campaign one is running but it's a fairly common thing in comics. Characters with inherent powers get a points break for things like being vulnerable to green rocks or needing to be immersed in water every other day to retain their powers. That's the flip side of the gadget guys.

He then mentions Golden Heroes which I admittedly have very little experience with. He doesn't like the random rolling for powers much and mentions "power imbalance" within a group"  - isn't that exactly what points systems do extremely well? - and "it didn’t give you much scope for crafting a coherent group around a specific sub-genre of superhero themes" - a group theme? Like the JLA? What's their group theme? The X-Men? The Avengers? I think the theme there is who is popular right now or who do the writers like and want to include. Is "we're all mutants" enough of a theme to call a group coherent?

Finally (for the early years part of the review) we get to Champions 4th edition and he seems to have liked it then but he says he wouldn't go back to playing something like it now because character generation is too nitpicky, there are too many acronyms, and combat is slow (the one truly legit complaint in my eyes) but then he goes here:

"It does tend to encourage players with munchkin tendencies to spend ages optimising their characters for specific offensive or defensive abilities at the expense of playability.  Also it can make it really hard to balance a party of players unless you lay out specific parameters in advance to discourage anyone from being too highly skewed in any one particular direction."

Any superhero game can result in players going nuts without GM advice and intervention. The 4E Champions book has a section with multiple examples of ridiculously overpowered characters that could break a game with specific advice to not let people do that. And if party balance is a big concern any point-based game will do a better job of it than a random roll creation type game - that's what the points are for! Plus this was written in 2020 - are we still concerned with "munchkin" players in 2020? Who are you playing this with? 

Of the early games there's no mention of various editions of these or any mention of Villains & Vigilantes and it's player-based character stats plus random generation so I'm assuming he never played that one.

For later games he discusses Aberrant, M&M, and Savage Worlds via Necessary Evil:

• Aberrant seems to have been one of his more-liked options though he seems put off by player character potentially being really strong or really charismatic - I mean, this one is not my favorite but it is a superhero game so ...
• Mutants & Masterminds he describes as less crunchy than Champions but with less flavor and then describes the setting as very generic and bland. He used a picture of the 1st edition M&M cover so maybe that's what he played and I wouldn't completely disagree there but that was over 20 years ago and the game grew tremendously, as did the setting.
• Necessary Evil he praises for the concept, calls it very setting-specific, then mentions that he didn't actually play the campaign as-is because he wanted to build up to it and then ends with this:
  "We played 11 sessions in the end which actually makes it one of my longest RPG gaming runs..."
  
  Ah - that explains a lot, actually. About all of this. 

Some of these things are takes I've seen before:

• Marvel is simple and for kids
• DC is more complex, which is a benefit until it gets too complex apparently
• Champions (and point systems in general) are too hard, prone to abuse, and make it difficult to actually run a campaign
•  Aberrant is mostly liked for its concept and metaplot more than for it's mechanics or ability to emulate comic books
• M&M ... not sure what to say about this take. I see it get lumped in with Champions as "point systems bad" most of the time and I've never seen the setting described as bland but OK.
• NE - Most people who become aware of it fall in love with the concept instantly because 20 years on it's still damn near unique. People who have tried to play or run it tend to have more mixed opinions, for several reasons in my experience:
• Like this blogger, the GM tries to complicate things by creating an extensive prequel pre-campaign - just run it! It's great! You don't need to play out what the villains did before, the day the heroes died, how they got to the city - at most include a single session of buildup, maybe as part of a session zero, and then get into the campaign! 
• GM's also sometimes complicate it by moving it to a different city or setting (guilty here at least once). This creates a bunch of extra work, potentially, and how much does it really add to the campaign if it's happening in Freedom City, or Millenium City, or Paragon City really? Again, just go with the setting! The fun is in playing the game, not making everyone wait to get into the core of the thing.
• It's also a rough introduction to the Savage Worlds system. SW is different enough from most other RPGs - especially today when 5E is the big game - that it takes some adjustment for most players. I think the concept pulls a lot of people in - because it's awesome - and then you get damn near Maximum Savage Worlds with aliens, robots, and superpowers as part of that whole new system to learn. It makes that learning curve steep.

This mostly seems to be a case of looking for flaws rather than seeing the awesome with superhero RPGS. The idea than random roll character generation leads to an imbalanced party and make some feel less connected to their PC than if they had hand crafted it but then turning around and describing point-based character generation as prone to munchkin behavior and being too nitpicky ... well, what do you want? Those are two almost opposite approaches with a lot of positives on each side so if you can't get excited about either one I'm not sure what to tell you.

Fortunately now we have a third approach with the more narrative games like Marvel Heroic and Sentinels of the Multiverse (whatever the official state of the game may be the books are still out there), and ICONS and the various PBTA and FATE-based games. He seems to have completely missed MHR and SotM but he does mention the latter two. 

• FATE gets dismissed as requiring a lot of homework and having books built around specific settings. Alright that's a new take on FATE but OK. I'm pretty sure you just need FATE core or FATE light + a super book of your choice and you're good to go and if you're running FATE yo ucan really use any book as a setting - you don't really need a ton of specific mechanics. 
• PBTA he mostly describes Masks and while he likes the system he's not thrilled with the setting - yeah, I don't play supers games to focus in on teen drama either. Not my thing but it's not like they don't tell you that up front.

To wrap this up I feel like I see some of these opinions quite a bit when it comes to superhero roleplaying games and while some of them are just personal taste some of them are just opinions molded by years of internet-fueled standard takes on them: Champions is hard, Marvel was just a kids game, etc. I also think some people when looking back at things have their opinions bent by today's common knowledge as if it was yesteryear's common knowledge. We liked Marvel. We liked DCH. We loved Champions. We liked V&V. Sure, they're all different but they all have some really cool elements that stand out and they established a lot of the "standards" that are just kind of built-in today. Maybe no single ruleset was perfect but that's the beauty of RPG's - change it! Stick with a game and tweak it to fit your group!

I feel like a lot of RPG opinion these days is fueled by very thin experience levels. When I see criticism of a game  - new or old - I always want to know:

• Have you read it? All of it, not skimmed it?
• Have you made some characters for it?
• Have you run a test fight?
• Have you played it?
• Have you run it? 
• And for either of those - for how long?

This stuff matters. From forums to blogs to YouTube there are so many new games coming out that discussion tends to max out at "I read the book" and you have to dig to find people really getting into a game and not just theory-crafting stuff from a first impression. The Necessary Evil comment about 11 sessions being one of the writers longest RPG runs just has me shaking my head as yes that's enough to get a feel for things but how much did you play or run all of those other games? Yes, I ran an original Rifts campaign for over a year and I can tell you the system is a huge pain and if you are looking for balance it is absolutely not the game for you but it is completely playable. Not easy all the time but you can run it. Having run some sessions of Savage Worlds Rifts I can tell you it's a much better game for me and something I am far more likely to run now than OG Rifts. That's the benefit of experience.

I'm seeing it a lot now with M&M 4 and I expect it will continue. The playtest book just came out and people are already making declarations about the game because I suppose we live in a hot-take world now. I expect there will be a lot of  "playtest" feedback without a lot of actual playtesting but that's a risk you run with a public playtest. When we get to running it here I will post about it because I think it helps to get some actual play time experiences out there. That's one reason I talk about our Tales of the Valiant game here - approaching 40 sessions now we know a lot more about it than we did before.

That's more than enough for now - more to come on M&M4, Spectaculars, and Hero in the current day.

Supers on the Brain

 

All the M&M 4E talk sent me down a rabbit hole last week. Besides starting a re-read of the 3E rulebook and looking back through all of my other M&M books I started feeling the urge to check in on Champions, started poking around online and I ended up picking up the Hero Designer software and the Old School Enemies book that just came out which collects all of the entries from original Champions and Enemies I, II, & III and stats them up for 6th edition. This is just the kind of thing that lights the fires for sketching out a new campaign. I'm feeling pretty fired up about it right now. My players mostly haven't touched Champions since 4th edition so now I get to figure out whether it's smarter to go with 5E which is very close to 4th, or just go with the latest and greatest and use 6th.

For a short version of where Hero System/Champions stands there are roughly 4 generations ...

• Champions 1st-2nd-3rd pretty much were just building on the same framework and tweaking one design. This was before the concept of "Hero" as a system, not a set of similar but different games, had arisen. It's more loose, there are some holes and weird rules interactions here and there but it is totally playable as many of us ran many games back then.
• Champions 4th came out in 89 and was the big blue unifying rulebook that took many of us through the 90's. I suspect that popularity-wise this was the high water mark for the game as I knew multiple groups playing it then and there was a ton of support for it. One version even came with a character generator on a floppy to expedite character creation. I would run this today if someone wanted to. This is also where the game became part of the "Hero System" and the rules got unified. Some people did not like the changes here and stuck with the older editions and whatever house rules they had created - the first schism.
• Champions 5th and 5th Edition Revised (2002 & 2007) was a big black book that was very similar to 4th but with a lot of things more defined and more definitive language in general. It was less "fun" in some ways as a read and while it's a tighter ruleset it comes at a cost that was too much for some and this is a second break point among fans. This version was very well supported though - lots of cool and interesting books. The revised rulebook mainly added in examples - lots of examples.
• Champions 6th edition (2010) finally grew too large to be contained and was split into two books. I'd say this one has the biggest breaks from the past as it drops all figured characteristics - a signature feature of Champions in my opinion - the comeliness stat, certain powers - at least as separate powers, and just rearranges a lot of classic Champions features. Now I don't hate it but if you had been playing for 20+ years when this one came out it brought a lot of changes that not everyone was asking for - the third break among fans. 

So nowadays if anyone talks about a Hero or Champions game one of the first questions has to be "which edition?" and then the real conversation starts. Hero Designer thoughtfully includes both 5E and 6E so there is support for the two latest versions. If it did 4th I'd probably jump back there out of sheer nostalgia. Since I don't have a working floppy drive any more it's probably smarter to go with 5th or 6th so I can use the current application.

That leaves coming up with the actual campaign outline, regardless of mechanics. I think a short campaign is better to start but Champions takes enough initial investment that a one-shot would be kind of pointless so I'm thinking something with 3-6 sessions of "go" in it. Start small and expand as we go. I have a vision of a campaign with short bursts in the 40's, 60's, & 80's timejumping forward to each in turn to set up some history for the current day where the longer campaign would sit. It's probably too ambitious but I'm noodling on it for now. If I'm finally going to commit to a long term superhero game, why not make it something ambitious?

Even came with documentation right there in the book

This is also ignoring the imminent arrival of the M&M 4E playtest rules this weekend which will probably fire up this cycle all over again.

I just need more time! 

More to come. 

40K Friday - Trying out World Eaters in 10th

 

Well I finally had a chance to try out my far-more-painted-than-the-used-to-be World Eaters force. I had picked up the  codex a while back when it came out in the spring so I was actually ready to go when Boom Gun Brandon announced at one of our D&D sessions that he wanted to have Guilliman fight Angron, primarch vs. primarch. I said, ok 2000 points next week and the wheels started turning.

Now this was not some tournament type match - this was a rusty World Eaters player vs. a still very new Ultramarines player so we took about six hours to set up and get through 4 turns. 

First up - the loyal good guys:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+ FACTION KEYWORD: Imperium - Adeptus Astartes - Ultramarines

+ DETACHMENT: Gladius Task Force

+ TOTAL ARMY POINTS: 1995pts

+

+ WARLORD: Char2: Roboute Guilliman

+ ENHANCEMENT: 

+ NUMBER OF UNITS: 14

+ SECONDARY: - Bring It Down: (3x2) + (1x4) - Assassination: 5 Characters

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Char1: 1x Lieutenant Titus (70 pts): Astartes Chainsword, Heavy Bolt Pistol

Char2: 1x Roboute Guilliman (320 pts): Warlord, Hand of Dominion, The Emperor's Sword

Char3: 1x Captain in Gravis Armour (80 pts): Master-crafted Heavy Bolt Rifle, Master-crafted Power Weapon

Char4: 1x Captain in Gravis Armour (80 pts): Master-crafted Heavy Bolt Rifle, Master-crafted Power Weapon

Char5: 1x Captain in Terminator Armour (95 pts): Storm Bolter, Relic Weapon

10x Assault Intercessor Squad (150 pts)

    • 1x Assault Intercessor Sergeant: Heavy Bolt Pistol, Astartes Chainsword

    • 9x Assault Intercessors: 9 with Astartes Chainsword, Heavy Bolt Pistol

3x Aggressor Squad (100 pts)

    • 1x Aggressor Sergeant: Twin Power Fist, Auto Boltstorm Gauntlets, Fragstorm Grenade Launcher

    • 2x Aggressors: 2 with Twin Power Fist, Auto Boltstorm Gauntlets, Fragstorm Grenade Launcher

3x Aggressor Squad (100 pts)

    • 1x Aggressor Sergeant: Twin Power Fist, Auto Boltstorm Gauntlets, Fragstorm Grenade Launcher

    • 2x Aggressors: 2 with Twin Power Fist, Auto Boltstorm Gauntlets, Fragstorm Grenade Launcher

3x Bladeguard Veteran Squad (80 pts)

    • 1x Bladeguard Veteran Sergeant: Master-crafted Power Weapon, Heavy Bolt Pistol

    • 2x Bladeguard Veterans: 2 with Heavy Bolt Pistol, Master-crafted Power Weapon

5x Terminator Assault Squad (180 pts)

    • 1x Assault Terminator Sergeant: Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

    • 4x Assault Terminator: 4 with Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

5x Terminator Squad (170 pts)

    • 4x Terminator

    3 with Terminator Squad, Chainfist, Storm Bolter

    1 with Terminator Squad, Chainfist, Assault Cannon

    • 1x Terminator Sergeant: Storm Bolter, Power Weapon

1x Ballistus Dreadnought (140 pts): Armoured Feet, Ballistus Lascannon, Ballistus Missile Launcher, Twin Storm Bolter

1x Redemptor Dreadnought (210 pts): Redemptor Fist, Heavy Onslaught Gatling Cannon, Heavy Flamer, Twin Fragstorm Grenade Launcher

1x Repulsor Executioner (220 pts): Armoured Hull, Heavy Onslaught Gatling Cannon, Icarus Rocket Pod, Ironhail Heavy Stubber, Repulsor Executioner Defensive Array, Twin Heavy Bolter, Twin Icarus Ironhail Heavy Stubber, Heavy Laser Destroyer

Yeah he had to have the Executioner - it has the biggest gun in the marine army so ...

The rest was a grab bag of what he has built and what he could borrow from my Crimson Fists since they are at least blue.

Then we have the Evil Chaotic Villains:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+ FACTION KEYWORD: Chaos - World Eaters

+ DETACHMENT: Berzerker Warband

+ TOTAL ARMY POINTS: 1990pts

+

+ WARLORD: Char1: Angron

+ ENHANCEMENT: 

+ NUMBER OF UNITS: 13

+ SECONDARY: - Bring It Down: (5x2) + (1x4) - Assassination: 3 Characters

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Char1: 1x Angron (385 pts): Warlord, Samni’arius and Spinegrinder

Char2: 1x Master of Executions (60 pts): Axe of dismemberment, Bolt pistol

Char3: 1x Master of Executions (60 pts): Axe of dismemberment, Bolt pistol

10x Khorne Berzerkers (180 pts)

    • 9x Khorne Berzerker

    4 with Bolt pistol, Chainblade

    1 with Icon of Khorne, Bolt pistol, Chainblade

    2 with Chainblade, Plasma pistol

    2 with Bolt pistol, Khornate eviscerator

    • 1x Khorne Berzerker Champion: Chainblade, Plasma pistol

10x Khorne Berzerkers (180 pts)

    • 9x Khorne Berzerker

    4 with Bolt pistol, Chainblade

    1 with Icon of Khorne, Bolt pistol, Chainblade

    2 with Chainblade, Plasma pistol

    2 with Bolt pistol, Khornate eviscerator

    • 1x Khorne Berzerker Champion: Chainblade, Plasma pistol

5x Chaos Terminators (185 pts)

    • 1x Terminator Champion: Accursed weapon, Combi-bolter

    • 1x Combi-bolter, accursed weapon: Accursed weapon, Combi-bolter

    • 2x Combi-bolter, power fist: 2 with Combi-bolter, Power fist

    • 1x Heavy weapon: Heavy flamer, Accursed weapon

3x Exalted Eightbound (160 pts)

    • 2x Exalted Eightbound: 2 with Chainblades

    • 1x Exalted Eightbound Champion: Chainblades

3x Exalted Eightbound (160 pts)

    • 2x Exalted Eightbound: 2 with Chainblades

    • 1x Exalted Eightbound Champion: Chainblades

1x Forgefiend (150 pts): 2x Hades autocannon, Forgefiend jaws

1x Forgefiend (150 pts): 2x Hades autocannon, Forgefiend jaws

1x Maulerfiend (150 pts): Maulerfiend fists, Lasher tendrils

1x Chaos Rhino (85 pts): Armoured tracks, Combi-bolter, Havoc launcher, Combi-bolter

1x Chaos Rhino (85 pts): Armoured tracks, Combi-bolter, Havoc launcher, Combi-bolter

I have 5000+ points of World Eaters so I had a decent set of options to pick from but the problem now is that I haven't played with them so much recently and everything looks good. Early versions of the list had a Lord of Skulls in the list but it and ANgron eat up almost half of the points so I ended up dropping that to work in more units. The forgefiends were originally intended to join the Iron Warriors but I have a lot of tanks there already and since this army now has a chance to have some actual fun shooting I have decided to make them join the red and brass.

The plan, such as it was, was rhinos full of berserkers and the maulerfiend moving up with Angron, exalted eightbound moving up as well looking for vehicles and monsters to fight with the terminators in deep strike awaiting opportunities. The forgefiends will be fire support and distraction carnifexes to hopefully let the melee monsters get in close.

Every time I do one of these I am reminded that this terrain should really all be painted by now ...

We drew the hammer and anvil setup so we started on long edges here on our ruined city board. I screwed it up by drawing our setup zones only a foot deep instead of the 2' they should have been which put a much bigger gap than normal between us. Ah well. We had the "extra points for getting characters onto the no mans land objectives" primary mission and the Ultras went first.

Advancing up the board ...

I'm not going to do a nitty-gritty turn by turn recap so let me hit the high points:

• Turn 1 was fairly uneventful - the executioner shot one of the forgefiends for 6 damage and scored 3 VPs on a secondary. I scored zero but the 'fiends shot up both the Redemptor and the Executioner for some feel-better damage
• Turn 2 The executioner managed to finish off the damaged forge fiend and he scored 3 more VP's for 6 total. For the bad boys Angron charged into the assault intercessor squad and killed them all, leaving Lt. Titus to run for his life. Then the maulerfiend charged and killed Guilliman ... but he did get back up for the next phase. This led to me scoring 15 primary and 9 seecondary for 24 total VPs. It was a good turn for the boys in red.
• Turn 3 saw G-man charge into the maulerfiend and kill it  (it was on 1 wound from the previous fight and a bunch of shooting damage) and the Ultras scored 12 altogether to get to 18 total VPs. Then Khorne's Own got to start really charging things and killed the Redemptor, both aggressor squads, and the gravis captain that was in one of them as well, scoring 19 more points to get to 43 total. 
• Turn 4 was a much-thinned board but his thunderhammer termies finally managed to catch up to Angron and take him down - very satisfying for him - and he scored 6 more getting to 24 VPs. I killed G-Man again and scored 23 more points ending up at 66. We called it there because it was late and both primarchs had fallen but we had a lot of fun getting there.

Beatdown!

A few more thoughts coming out of this:

• The blessings of khorne army rule in the new book is pretty damn handy - you roll for random buffs but it's a pool of dice that can be manipulated to some degree by various chartacters and gear so you will usually have two buffs that you like - it's a smart way to do a random table in this kind of game. 
• The berzerker detachment is great as it affects all units, not just certain ones like some other detachments do. 
• G-man is a force multiplier more than a direct force - that's Angron's schtick. Having him fight an un-damaged Angron is a good way to be rolling for that stand-back-up ability. he's not bad in melee and he's not without defenses but Angron is still a monster on the offensive side.
• The Exalted Eightbound did nothing but get shot up until they ran into the bladeguard who jumped out of the Repulsor and stabbed them right off the board. I'm sure they could have done some damage if they had gotten into combat but 3-man units walking up the board is not super-durable. They can't fit in Rhinos so it's really land raiders, deep strike (and need a 9" charge), or hoof it, and I'm not sure any of those are great. 
• The terminators were actually useful as they can deep strike and have enough shooting and durability to be useful. 
• World Eater guns get a bunch of rapid fire at close range and it's actually fun - Rhinos can get off 8 shots from their storm bolters (if you take two of them), Forgefiends with the Hades Autocannon get 20 shots total, and even the land raider lascannons get something like 4 shots apiece. Sure, they hit on 4's but it really does work and it really does feel like that's how they ought to be. I've never liked the simplistic "World Eaters = melee only" approach of recent years because I remember Epic where there were all kinds of interesting daemon engine contraptions that had significant shooting and the attitude was "yeah, Khorne likes guns too" and it was a much more interesting army than all-chainswords-all-the-time. I mean, it still has a lot of chainswords but now the guns actually contribute too.

So yes it was a blast and I have incentive to get this half-painted force more painted now to try and get in some more games this summer.

Really need to finish those Rhinos too ...

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Announced

 

Well I suppose it was inevitable. It has been 15+ years since M&M 2E became M&M 3E (well, "DC Adventures, -then- M&M3) and that's a ridiculously long run for one edition of an RPG.

I thought Cam Banks' comments were funny so I left them in

I am happy to see something new that's big for M&M as it's been slow to quiet for a long time in the new product department. Some renewed activity should be a lot of fun. I am also very happy that Steve K is running it. I am a fan of his work.

That said I am heavily invested in 3rd Edition and I am not all that excited at buying a 4th iteration of the Freedom City sourcebook, or an expanded powers book, or a villain sourcebook if it's just a reprint of all the villains we already have and know. I have everything they printed for 2E and 3E and both of those are flat-out comprehensive rulesets for running a superhero campaign. I'm not sure what a new edition is going to improve and I hope they have some good new ideas to share and we are not going to see the same set of books we already have with some slightly tweaked mechanics.

There were some mechanical things in 3rd that could benefit from some adjustment - the effectiveness of Toughness versus Defense is a big one. I always thought a "revised 3E" rulebook could have probably taken care of those kinds of wrinkles. I recall SK stating years ago that if he did ever do a new edition that he would go back to pre-built powers in the core book and save the power building for a separate book - like 2nd Edition - and agree with that choice. It's bound to be confusing for people looking for an Energy Blast power or a Web power being directed over to the "Damage" or the "Affliction" powers. From a design perspective it makes a lot of sense but from the "intuitive" sense it's a little trickier. I've seen a rumor that they are doing away with Dexterity and Fighting as separate stats and presumably going back to Agility as the baseline? That would be a move back towards the D&D standard ability spread which is probably smart in the "D&D is everything" environment we live in now and it worked for 2nd Edition so it's probably fine.

I guess that's at the heart of any trepidation I have over a 4th edition: Are we doing this because we have some great ideas to make the game better after 15 years of publishing and tinkering with it? Or are we looking for a cash flow bump? There's nothing wrong with that in general but it's not a great reason to reboot a game line - for the players, anyway. For now I will trust this team, based on their excellent track record, that they are doing this for the right reasons.

Oh look, there are some notes going around the internet:

... and one more interesting bit of news:

Ongoing projects like the Event Horizon and the Vigilantes Handbook are still launching for 3rd Edition, serving as the final curtain call for a long and beloved era. Event Horizon will even offer GMs the opportunity to end their 3E campaign with a Crisis on Infinite Earths-style cataclysm or a seamless pivot into 4E.

For me this does add some urgency to getting that next campaign going. I've worked in a fair amount of superhero gaming the last ten-twenty years but it's mostly been short runs and one-offs with M&M, Icons, Marvel Heroic, Marvel Superheroes, and Marvel Multiverse. I haven't run a sustained super-campaign in a long time and I feel like this is signaling to me that this is a good time to really get my hands dirty with 3E for an extended time before the new version comes out. Now to figure out how to incorporate Time of Crisis into this ...

One last early plea: Put the Knockback rules back in the core book as a standard thing - it's too iconic of a comic book thing to make them optional! 

The Tales of the Valiant Temple Campaign - One Year In

 

It kind of snuck up on me but our current campaign started a year ago this month. We had a Session Zero and then our first two warm-up sessions in July of last year, heading into Hommlet with the full group at the beginning of August. We have had 36 sessions at this point and should hit 37 before the month ends. That's pretty good, especially considering we took a month+ off in Nov-Dec last year. That's with a base plan of "weekly" subject to various schedule interruptions now and then. 

(And yes, I know I need to catch up on the session recaps)

Looking back my old Scarred Lands campaign ran for 3 years on a biweekly schedule from 2005-2007 and managed 54 sessions with 6+ PCs.

More recently my Deadlands game managed 33 sessions from 2021-2023 with a six-month gap in the campaign while I packed up and moved so figure a year and a half there. That one started on a bi-weekly schedule and then ended up pretty much weekly.

So pacing-wise we are getting more done more consistently. It's good to have a group of committed players and having 6-8 of them is pretty amazing. I had thought with the kids out of the house that scheduling would be even easier on my part and it is to some degree but maybe not quite to the degree I had imagined. The fact that one of them is still playing in the campaign does make me feel good though. 

The party is 7th now with a few of them hitting 8th last session. I do like this method of tracking individual XP as it rewards regular attendance and it feels more like the old days with mixed party levels. This campaign is giving us a chance to explore a wide range of the ToV system from 1st level on up and thus far everyone is very happy with it. 

As the DM though I have to say these characters are very powerful and I am typically dealing with 6 of them at once so keeping things at some level of challenge is a real ... challenge. I am swapping out monsters regularly and increasing numbers as well and this is in an old school adventure not recalibrated to the 5E encounter standards. If I had left it as-written they would be blowing through things with very little effort. I am running it as-is regarding treasure and if you are under the impression that old adventures were magic-light I can assure again that they were not. Also with gold as XP in those days these things were not gold-light either. My party is ridiculously wealthy and festooned with magic items. It's not an insurmountable obstacle but it does add a little to the challenge and it's a good refresher that yes, our AD&D characters were absolutely loaded after running a few published adventures in the old days. 

Looking ahead I suspect we will finish this one by the end of the year. Based on where they are I'd guess another 10-15 sessions and that puts us into November-December territory. Assuming we do this will be the first time, running or playing over the last 40 years, that I have run this adventure start to finish all the way through and that's going to be a pretty good feeling. I have some fun stuff planned for them as they approach some of the big milestones of the Greater Temple and the Nodes and I figure they will finish up 10th or 11th. Right now they are running about a level ahead of where I projected they would be, mainly due to wilderness and wandering monster encounters. Assuming they go scorched earth the rest of the way and definitely if they find and defeat the big bad of the place I suspect 11th is in sight. 

What's next after that? Could go several ways. The base plan is to roll into Against the Giants which I suspect will need to be beefed up as this party at 11th level is going to be doing some ridiculous things by then. Beyond that my dream would be to go ahead and finish out the D-series and enter the Demonweb Pits for the finale - though Lolth may need to bring Iuz or Orcus or someone else along to help by that point. 

We might also take a short break from Greyhawk. There is at least one vote for "finish Time of Crisis", there has been some chatter about the GI Joe/Power Rangers/Transformers campaign, and I am missing the Savage Worlds stuff a little bit, so who knows? I'm not going to go nuts planning it just yet, just sketching out what I would need to pick one 

Converting Adventures from One Game (or Edition) to Another

 

Certain published adventures in certain RPGs are considered classics, and there may be certain adventures that you personally love and it would be a shame to leave them behind if you change games or move to a different edition of a game. This happens to me in particular with D&D but I'm going to talk about other games as well.

First, why use an old adventure in a new game? Well, because I like it a lot mainly. Some adventures, especially with D&D, are touchpoints one can share with many people across multiple editions of the game - Keep on the Borderlands, The Giant series, Isle of Dread, Hommlet and the Temple of Elemental Evil are just a few examples. For Runequest it might be Snake Pipe Hollow or just exploring the city of Prax. For Mutants and Masterminds it's Time of Crisis (probably the only published superhero adventure I actually like). For Gamma World it's Legion of Gold. For Star Wars it might be Tatooine Manhunt. There are many ...

• Though I may have run or played these in the past I might have a group of players that have never been through them but are interested in some classic old-school stuff.
• My players may have started them at some point but never got to finish them. If everyone is interested why not revisit one and give them a chance to close that loop?
• Maybe I ran them some time ago and feel like I could do a better job now or have an idea to change up some elements that would flow really well with this group of players and characters.
• Maybe we want to test out a new set of rules against a known scenario - does it feel similar? Easier? More difficult? It can be an interesting experiment.

Second, what do you have to consider when adapting these things to a new game?

• I'm going to lead off with "setting" - as it's not just the mechanics we need to check. Does it make sense as far as time and place and NPCs and organizations or power groups within the baseline of your new game or are you going to need to adjust some expectations. Many games mix the setting and the rules into one mish-mash and a new edition means setting changes as well as rules. You need to find a place to work it in. Old D&D adventures tend to be pretty generic as far as location other than some geographic features so they are pretty easy to drop in but some editions also update their settings and kill off gods - you might need to re-work a few things if Bane is no longer the big evil power in the Realms.
• Characters - Are characters built and presented differently in the new game compared to the old game? Is there a level range involved? How different are the mechanics for the PCs in the new vs. the old? Imagine trying to run Keep on the Borderlands for a Rifts campaign ... yeah that's just not a great fit for a typical Rifts party unless you make a -lot- of adjustments - likely to the point of unrecognizability. Expedition to the Barrier peaks? Now that might work.
• Encounter Structure - D&D 3E & Pathfinder started and then 4E perfected the concept of X number of encounters per level of various challenge ratings all calculated up to provide a certain level of XP to allow the PCs to progress through the adventure at the appropriate pace and the appropriate level. That's not going to be relevant to your new game. If your new game has something similar you are going to need to re-work it using those rules if it matters to you.
  In contrast a game like Savage Worlds does not care about that at all. If it does not have that kind of structure then I typically look to the flavor of the adventure - it's not the exact number of stormtroopers are guarding the docking bay - it's that there are some stormtroopers guarding the docking bay and you need to sneak/persuade/bribe/shoot your way past them to get to the ship and if a fight breaks out you only have a limited time before reinforcements start showing up.
• Monsters can also vary dramatically from game to game and edition to edition - don't get caught up in exact monster levels or stats, try to keep the flavor of the thing. If there's a Behir in a cave and your game doesn't have a Behir or they are too powerful or too weak for where your PC's will be then maybe it's a dragon of some type. If another cave has a singular minotaur but in the new game that's not much of a challenge to the party then maybe it's a minotaur chieftain and some followers. If your players are talking afterwards about "those minotaurs" rather than "that minotaur" then you're still doing it right.
• Pacing - D&D has XP for monsters defeated and a milestone system where PC's level up at certain points in the story. Old school Runequest grants a chance to improve skills just for using them. The current edition of Savage Worlds uses per-session XP with advances granted after a certain number of sessions. An adventure may make certain assumptions about party advancement during the course of the adventure - it's usually worth taking a look at that and seeing how it will work with your system of choice. 
• General Mechanics - Old D&D had no skill system. Many newer versions of it and many other games do. That means there are no target numbers for things in those old adventures like finding secret doors or avoiding traps or leaping over pits or climbing walls. Your new system should have some baseline guidance on what easy/average/difficult tasks should be and in my experience that should be enough but if you want to assign some specifics you're going to have to come up with those yourself. That's just one example.
  

Having done this a few times over the years I can say after thinking through the things above there are some other points to consider:

• It's not really all that difficult to adapt a D&D adventure to some other edition or version of D&D. Pick the setting, make some notes on DC's if you need them and then start adjusting the monsters. Since D&D tends to have the same monsters and races and settings across the editions all you need to do is ensure you have the statblocks you need for your chosen edition. Goblins, bugbears, ogres, trolls, dragons - they all tend to stay around the same level range across editions though I would advise against pulling these on the fly - there are occasional outliers that can be much tougher or much easier than you - or your players - probably want. AD&D 2E's update to dragons compared to what they were in 1E is a good example.
• Adapting an adventure to a very different set of mechanics within the same genre is more complicated but still doable. I ran a short RQ2 campaign using Caverns of Thracia as the adventure so a lot of my GM processing power was used in on-the-fly rulings on when a skill check was needed and whether any modifiers applied. I had monster stats picked out ahead of time so that wasn't a drain. That said moving an old Judges' Guild adventure into the framework for an old percentile-based system was an adjustment but one I could manage mostly live. 
• Adapting completely different systems and genres - this is a little trickier and probably rare but sometimes inspiration strike and your knights and wizards or cowboys and mad scientists need to go up against the Legion of Gold or Cylons or the 21st Panzer Division. In this case you need to look at what you do have:
• You have an overall situation that you presumably want to keep
• You have maps!
• You have NPC descriptions and motivations
• You have a list of the opposition
• You have some idea of what the prospective group of PC's can do

    That's plenty! Again we are mostly working out numbers for the new game - target numbers, statblocks for monsters and vehicles, and equipment/loot if that's a thing. For Star Wars & Superheroes it doesn't usually matter but for D&D and Gamma World it will.

Some of these conversions are pretty easy. Updating Time of Crisis for M&M was really just a matter of new stats for the characters encountered. It's a 1E adventure and Green Ronin did publish a conversion in the 2E GM screen which made it even easier and then somewhere along the way the stats one would need for a 3E conversion came out as well. 

Examples I have done:

• I ran Red Hand of Doom (a large 3.5 adventure/campaign) in 4th edition - recap here - and it was fairly easy because it is still a recent (at the time) D&D adventure with all of the D&D assumptions. I ran it in Impiltur in the Forgotten Realms which involved a bit of customization beyond systemic stuff but a lot of my effort was spent working out how it should work within 4E's level and encounter framework - basically getting the math right, at least according to the designers. The thing is I really enjoyed that part! The challenge of keeping the original flow and monsters and situations while making it work within a new framework ... yes that was a lot of fun and then seeing it play out with a really nice level of challenging but not deadly was pretty gratifying. Most of the effort was going through each part and saying "alright we have an ambush by a bunch of bugbears here - how many and what types make sense here for level X?", adding in skill challenges where appropriate, and then typing up my notes. It worked really well and it helped that I was coming out of doing it for two prior campaigns. 
• Of those two prior campaigns one was a 4E version of Temple of Elemental Evil and one was a conversion of Pool of Radiance, er, "Ruins of Adventure". 
• ToEE was again pretty straightforward as I was trying to run it largely as-written so it was mainly a matter of determining what level each part of the wilderness or moathouse or dungeon was and then dropping in the new statblocks for those creatures on a cheatsheet to use while running. It might have been the easiest of all of these because it's so easily divided up - breakdown here.
• Return to the Ruins of Adventure was my first 4E campaign and it was not a strict conversion - more of a loose interpretation of the gold box computer game and the paper module associated with it. Like ToEE it was pretty easy to structure it for 4E with each area being a certain level and having a certain number of encounters but I had a blast deciding what to put where and linking the encounters in narrative ways where it felt right and figuring out how skill challenges could fit in for the first time. This was also mainly a structure and statblocks conversion as the scenario was already solid and it was still a D&D adventure. 
  
  
  
  
  
• I am running the Temple again ten years later using Tales of the Valiant but this time I have a 5e conversion from Goodman Games that handles a lot of the details and all I have to do is sub out the boring 5E monster stats for the more interesting ToV Monster Vault (and other books) versions which is ridiculously easy to do. This is a truly easy mode conversion
• As far as 5E D&D conversions most of the ones that have been published have been solid to excellent. WOTC published some in Tales from the Yawning Portal, staying very faithful to the originals. The Goodman Games conversions are just excellent, putting a copy of the original and then a 5E update in the same book in most cases and adding in some optional extra material where the original is a little thin. I've run both the B1/B2 combo package and Isle of Dread in 5E and I am very happen with them.
• Old Traveller adventures are handy drop-ins for some Star Wars campaigns and I've run the 3-part starter campaign for Star Frontiers in both d20 Star Wars and d6 Star Wars as I think it's a really good fit and it's mostly a statblock-swapping exercise: Space pirates attack a ship? I just pick out Star Wars space pirate stats. The characters travel in an air raft or are attacked by a jetcopter? I pick out an airspeeder. Traveller free trader/far trader = YT1300 - it's not hard, you just have to work through it to prep.

That's probably enough rambling on this topic but I wanted to get it out there -  just because the rules change doesn't mean you can't use an old favorite again - or for the first time!