How usable is my collection of old TSR books in playing ACKS?
Could I dust off the old ‘Castle Amber’ or ‘Vault of the Drow’, replace the monsters with the listings in ACKS and call it a day? I guess what I’m asking is, aside from monster stats, are the treasure amounts and encounter sizes the same?
Of all my old books, which come closer to matching up with ACKS’s numbers, Basic D&D, AD&D, or 2nd Ed. D&D?
Can’t speak for individual adventures, but Basic should be closest of those three. ACKS is based on B/X, so its lineage is closer to the Basic line than the AD&D line.
I’m running Castle Amber now and it’s really worked like a charm. Changing AC is about all I need to do.
Published dungeons varied a lot. ACKS has some fairly specific guidelines for treasure (4 GP per 1 XP of monster, on average, with specific monsters ranging from none to upwards 4x that amount).
So … most modules will need some work. Although in general, if you add up the XP for the monsters, and then add up all of the treasure’s non-magical GP total, it’s easy enough to adjust the totals slightly to match up with one another.
The rest for a Basic D&D module will generally be about the same IME.
Good to know. I’ve grown kind of impressed with the kind of thought that went into ACKS economic model. I’d hate to screw it up putting too much loot in my Horror on the Hill.
I have seen the creators post this elsewhere, but the great thing about accidentally putting in “too much loot” is that the game simply advances faster.
True! If I can get a real game going, I’m going to be doubling the treasure generated to keep the pace at a level that will appease my players.
Yeah…I don’t see how you have ‘too much’. I mean unless you want the kind of advancement that takes years between levels…and besides it’s always best to have more so that the inevitable replacement characters can catch up…
One approach I use in my White Sandbox campaign is to use whatever treasure is written in the source material (I've used everything from OD&D adventures from the Dungeoneer fanzine to a 2E module), but then bring it up to the 4 gp from treasure : 1 xp from combat by finding other ways for the PCs to get paid. For example, if they clear an ogre lair, I might look around at who would have wanted those ogres dead and provide a bounty for their heads. The nice thing about this is that it knits the group into the world; cultivating networks of NPC contacts is important for players proactively seeking these kinds of extra-treasure monetary rewards.