Red Box Fate - Crunch & Conversion

Part of the Red Box Fate series, here are the rules for converting existing material written for Basic and Expert set D&D and other Old School material.

THACO

To those folk who learned D&D's original combat rules with its looking up of descending AC on Attack Roll Tables, THACO was a fairly logical shorthand to speed up game play.

To everyone else, coming into the game from the outside, it was opaque and arcane.

When converting D&D BEX material to Red Box Fate, subtract the creature's or character's THACO number from 20 to give their Attack Bonus, then decide which Archetype that bonus comes from.

Attack Bonus = 20 - THACO 

Descending AC scores

Because "1st class armour" is better than "2nd class", the Armour Class of the first few editions of D&D was better when it was lower. However, this was a confusing concept to explain to new starters once the game had evolved to include zero and negative Armour Class, AC 0 and AC -2 and so on. It was especially confusing when we need to apply a bonus to AC - do we call it +1 or -1?

To convert from a Basic & Expert D&D AC score to a Defence bonus in Red Box Fate, subtract the AC from 9. For NPCs and monsters (with fixed Defence Scores), add the Defence Bonus to 10.

Defence Bonus = 9 - AC

NPC's Defence Score = Defence Bonus + 10

Saving throws

Old editions of D&D have a set of Saving Throw target numbers for particular nasty situations:

Death Ray / Poison; Magic Wands; Paralysis / Turn to Stone; 
Dragon Breath; Rod, Staff, or Spell

In play, sometimes these would be used for other situations, rendering their titles fairly pointless. 

Later editions tied "Saves" to more generic concepts - Fortitude, Reflex, Will, or just straight to the Ability Scores. We're going to partially follow that method.

Saving Throws are replaced by the Defend action - describe how you're avoiding or mitigating the trap, the spell, the poison, or whatever it is, and use that to select your Approach, Archetype (if applicable), and any other bonuses (like shield bonus, for example).

Defend action = Saving Throw

Demi-humans as classes

Basic and Expert D&D had one adventuring class each to represent all Dwarves, Elves and Halflings. I always took this to represent those demi-humans who chose the adventuring life - but much of the published material assumed that every single Elf in the elven woods was a fighter and spell caster, and so on.

I think it's safe to split out the demi-humans from their classes, and allow us to play dwarven wizards, halfling clerics, and elvish rogues.

We'll call that "Kin" and deal with it as part of your Background.

Placeholder

This section is for anything else I notice that needs converting as I go through the rest of the project!

---

Credits

I'm indebted to Killershrike's "Pathfinder Fate Accelerated" for the initial idea that this sort of thing could be done - without their groundwork, I'd have been lost.

Of course the Creative Commons access to D&D's engine and FAE are essential as well - D&D is CC-BY-4.0, FAE is CC-BY-3.0

Old School Essentials collects much of the D&D Basic and Expert set rules into one handy SRD, which you can find here.

---

Introduction & Index