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Aimless Wandering

Conversions are Slow

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by
Dust Raven
, Jan 21st, '08 at 03:50 PM (1272 Views)
Work on Rifts Hero continues... but it seems like a proper conversion, one which is actually playable and provides a balanced campaign setting which still provides the options and variety of the original Rifts game, is really really hard.

For starters, I want to make sure that everything is at least moderately balanced against everything else. This means that all lasers should work the same, all plasma weapons should work the same, etc, but just have varying degrees of damage and payload. The sames goes for the many supernatural creatures. The toughest part is the armor and figuring out how much PD/ED each creature should have and how much of that should be resistant. Granted, I can just throw out all sorts of numbers and be done with it, but I need to make sure it balances with the amounts of damage everything else does.

But it's fun figuring it all out.

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  1. ghost-angel's Avatar
    Balanced Rifts?

    You're a brave soul my friend.
  2. FireTiger's Avatar
    Just wanted to mention this in case anything from it might be of use...

    I've got a small conversion book that is set up to convert between 19 different game systems. Palladium and Hero are both included in it, so I can always pass-along information from it if you like.

    (Not knowing how far along your conversions are I can't say for certain how useful bit from this book might be, though.)
  3. Killer Shrike's Avatar
    Some free advice from someone with a little conversion experience. I find it useful to pick a very weak character, an extremely strong character, and several characters at or around "average" and use that as an initial set. The goal is to support the bulk of characters, but still allow room at the bottom to handle weaker characters, and to not completely fracture around more powerful characters. Try to get a good sampling of kinds of characters, but on the other hand you want to avoid characters that are weird or unusual even in their own native game for now -- you don't want to pollute your set with extraneous things yet.

    Compare "baseline" from one system to the other and use this as a stake in the ground. Factor / scale differences from this baseline up and down.

    Don't worry about being perfect on the first pass; go for about an 80% conversion and do it fast. Punt on anything hard and move on. This should be a very quick pass.

    You're going to learn a lot about your problem set in this first pass. Some things that you thought would be a problem will turn out to not be. Some things you thought were going to go in easy won't or prove to rub edges oddly with something else. You'll encounter some things that hadn't really occurred to you.

    Do some analysis. Reexamine your original thoughts. Look for centers of gravity, synergies, and any axis of commonalities that you can leverage or package into consistent approaches. If youre in a good place tackle the toughies you left for later. If you're still not in a good place, reconvert a few of the characters or some additional ones, this time going slower and more detailed.

    Rinse and repeat until its good enough. Push as many characters as you can thru the conversion. Improve it over time.

    Good luck!
    Updated Jan 23rd, '08 at 12:17 AM by Killer Shrike

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