Star Frontiers / D&D 5e Conversion Part 5

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

I have continued to work on combining the Star Frontiers D&D 5e Conversion articles during the winter break. Previously there was some criticism for the D&D 5th edition conversion not being true to the original Star Frontiers.  I did take a lot of liberties with the races and their special abilities, and I did use information from several sources. So, while I worked on updates to my previous articles, I have had some time to reflect, tweak some things, and make corrections.

I wanted to create rules for the three iconic alien player character races from Star Frontiers.  So I needed to create a correlation between the abilities scores in Star Frontiers to the ones in D&D. The first thing I started looking at was the original Star Frontiers character creation.  Dice Rolls for abilities for Star Frontiers were original done with percentile dice, and those results were taken to correspond with specific ability scores. There were four d100 dice rolls, and each of those corresponded to 4 sets of ability scores: Strength / Stamina, Dexterity / Reaction Speed, Intuition / Logic, Perception /Leadership. Racial Modifiers were then added to the ability score pairs. Then the player had the option to take make changes, and 10 points could be shifted between ability pairs.

I needed to line this up with the D&D rule set, as it uses a traditional 3d6 random factor that creates a bell curve effect on the abilities. I went through several different methods, and decided to use a divide by 5, so that a 30% gives a 6, and 70% gives a 14.

Every ability score above 70 would add +1 for every 5%.  So that would be a +6 when the ability score reaches 100%, which would correspond to a 20 which is the highest ability score in D&D 5th edition (there are some exceptions).  So with this, at least the ability scores for a Star Frontiers generated character could be ported over to a D&D Character, but that’s not the purpose.  This allows me to start building the player character races with the guidance on the racial modifiers.

And this is what I believe the Star Frontiers ability scores would correspond against the D&D ability scores:

Strength / Stamina = Strength / Constitution
Dexterity / Reaction Speed = Dexterity / NA
Intuition / Logic = Wisdom / Intelligence
Perception /Leadership = Charisma

In Star Frontiers, a Human gets a +5 to one ability score, not sets of scores, Dralaiste gets +5 in Str/Sta & -5 in Dex/RS, the Vrusk get a -5 in Str/Sta & +5 in Dex/RS, and Yazirian get a -10 in Str/Sta, +5 Dex/RS, +5 Int/Log. Taking these racial modifiers, I divide by 5% and get the table below. Without a set ability modifier for Human, I picked one randomly, and the human takes +1 in Strength and +1 Constitution for this example:

I started with implementing D&D 5th edition base line modifiers for a human to receive a +1 to every ability score, but humans are already receiving a +1*, and that would lead to +1 to five ability scores. I then went to look at the Dralaiste, Vrusk & Yazirian ability scores and decided to distribute four +1s instead of five, and distributed three +1s to the Dralasite. Mainly to account for their racial special abilities.

To do this, I focused first on the negative scores, and then on their racial strengths, Dralaistes on Strength & Constitution, Vrusk Dexterity & Charisma, Yazirian on Dexterity. And that leads to this:

So taking these racial modifiers that were part of Star Frontiers, I was able to use them for the racial builds for D&D. This sort of jives with the limit of +3 on ability scores for non-human races.

For the remainder of racial special abilities, I created D&D rules for the player to use instead of a percent chance roll.

Have fun!
-Michael

Source reference material:

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules
http://starfrontiers.wikia.com
http://www.starfrontiers.us
http://www.starfrontiers.com/Rules
https://www.facebook.com/groups/DnD5th