Begone, FOE - Fun With Conversions

magnificenttophat is currently working on a Monster Manual and Spell List for my fantasy heartbreaker Begone FOE, with everything organized around the four stat points and associated saving throws. For now I've been using OSE stat blocks for monsters and trying to build NPCs like player characters.

I ran a session of Begone FOE last week and made a huge mistake. The players fought an NPC Cleric who I quickly generated stats for using the OSE generators, as I'd been doing for the last couple years. The last time I did this I did it before the session and handled the conversion details there. This time I forgot. HP caps out at 24+BODY in Begone FOE, while it scales basically indefinitely in OSE. The Cleric ended up with 35 HP, more than all the players combined. This made a huge difference in survivability and nearly wiped the group.

Besides HP and saves, Begone FOE also flattens the spell level curve. You get spell slots equal to your MIND stat and can cast spells whose level sums to that number of slots in a day. This means you get access to higher level spells earlier, but fewer daily spells overall. It also means that any caster created with the OSE generator will have way more spells than the players, but not access to the maximum possible ones. The Cleric threw out two Fingers of Death in a row, which is more than a player cleric of equivalent level could have done.

Besides NPC stats, the misstep exposes some longer standing problems if I continue using OSE monster stats in Begone FOE.

• Under the OSE paradigm, monster attack bonuses (based on HD) will usually be higher than the players, though that's also true in OSE proper. I've had players stack their AC pretty high so I'm less worried about this.
• Using the OSE fixed saving throw categories and difficulties, monsters will generally have a higher chance to save than players. This is especially true of spells, which in Begone FOE have escalating DCs based on caster and spell level ala 3.PF. This one makes player magic dramatically less effective than monster magic overall.
• Some OSE monsters have damage values high enough to instagib a Begone FOE character in a single round of attacks, calibrated for much higher max HP than 18. I've been thinking about buffing BODY to provide more HP, this is one area where it would help.

Worth noting that some rules in Begone FOE benefit the players rather than NPCs. 

• I apply Chip Damage on player attacks but not monsters, giving them a slight advantage in a battle of attrition.
• In practice the players typically have enough Stealth and Alertness distributed through the group to detect monsters before the enemies detect them, which is a massive advantage.
  
• HEART and Soul Dice let players no-sell status effects in exchange for using up a renewable resource, which has a huge impact on survivability. 
• Because the player characters start with two stat points, that effectively leaves their Hit Dice one higher than their level (Esoteric Enterprises also did this). Higher HD means they more quickly gain immunity to instakill and no-save abilities, like an Air Elemental's whirlwind or a Sleep spell.
• NPCs and monsters typically die at 0 HP, players suffer death/dismemberment and often no permanent injury at all.
• The pursuit rules give the players ample opportunity to end turn based combat and escape at the cost of dropped items and treasure.

I also find that I don't consistently choose which saving throw people need to make versus magic spells - be it HEART or MIND. In fairness OSE is the same way. Sometimes you Save vs Spells to no-sell a magical spell, sometimes it's vs Paralysis or Death. Sometimes the OSE rules do follow a uniform schema despite the game's overall tendency to use handcrafted mechanics for each specific use case, like Saving vs Breath Weapon to dodge area attacks.

Players using different mechanics from the NPCs is not the worst thing in the world. The D20 fantasy games of yore I'm aping did the same thing. I think that Begone FOE characters are generally tougher and more survivable than their OSE equivalents, though they might not be as strong in a straight fight.  The two problems are:

1. Anything which requires conversion or hand-fitting is going to be forgotten if there's anything else going on. Including a reminder in the rules book does not help anyone remember things in an actual game.
2. If other people want to run Begone FOE (and several people have) I'd like to hand them a complete rules document rather than a skeleton that requires them to scour the internet for additional content.

tophat's bestiary will inevitably introduce its own cascading balance problems by trying to fit all the monsters into the Begone FOE stat system, but I'll accept those problems in exchange for having a single set of rules that doesn't require anyone to hop between documents and remember to convert.