Tuesday, February 28, 2012

found this at my local con

'At this point, I should let you know what it is that makes me qualified to write such a set of charts.  Let's start with the fact that I have been gaming for more than 10 years and ran the "Armadillo Game Club" for a few years.  As well as the fact that I am a "Contributing Editor" for a local game "fanzine".'

That passage from the intro to this book cracks me up a bit.  Dude, it doesn't matter if you were president of the local chapter of Nerds Anonymous, either the charts work or they don't.

So anyway, RPG DATA CON is 30 pages of conversion charts from 1992.  Here are the systems it attempts to cover:

AD&D
various Palladium games
RuneQuest
MERP, RoleMaster & SpaceMaster
GURPS
HERO/Champions
WFRP
CyberPunk 2020
CyberSpace
Shadowrun
the original Marvel rpg
the original DC rpg
Call of Cthulhu
Chill
Vampires [sic]
FASA's Star Trek
WEG Star Wars
MegaTraveller
TORG
Dark Conspiracy
Dark Space
Mechwarrior
Mekton II

All RPG DATA CON tackles are raw character stats.  You won't find rules here for converting AD&D spells to FASA Trek or statting out Mekton machines for MERP.

One of the charts is called "Level & Points".  Here we learn that a 16th level AD&D character is roughly equal to a 74th level RoleMaster character or a 400 point Champs character.
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9 comments:

  1. 賈尼7:56 AM

    Wot... No T&T?

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  2. huth8:25 AM

    So do we ever find out who the badass on the cover is?

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  3. Roger G-S9:07 AM

    For all his accomplishments he never learned about the "rhetorical significance" of "scare quotes"...

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  4. Mike Mearls9:27 AM

    It's likely I'm just hallucinating, but I think the guy who wrote this was on Jeopardy. I distinctly remember a guy describing this book during one of the between the round bits where the contestants tell stories about themselves. It was around 1992 or so.

    The guy came in a distant third.

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  5. yell0w lantern9:41 AM

    I've had this since almost 1992!

    Honestly, I haven't used it much. My one definitely negative criticism is that the strength conversion from Marvel to DC is quite innacurate when comparing the weight limits.

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  6. Knightsky3:02 PM

    I also have a copy. some of the conversions are pretty wonky, but it's still amusing to flip through.

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  7. Devin Parker7:11 PM

    Funny! I don't remember this book at all, but I remember that cover illustration. Must have seen it in a dozen Dragon Magazine ads or something...

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  8. Timothy Paul Schaefer3:59 PM

    I found this at a game store in Florida. It seems like a Rosetta Stone.
    The store had a lot of off the wall stuff. I also found a copy of Supersbabes, the RPG based on the Femforce comic books.

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  9. Timothy Paul Schaefer4:02 PM

    PS - I also like the way the illustrations are pretty much straight rip-offs of the stuff in the other games.
    How did this guy not get sued?

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