[candidgamera]

When you folks do a conversion of an older edition creature, what guidelines do you usually set for yourself? I'll give you an example - yesterday, I was tinkering with the Wolfwere and Greater Wolfwere from the 3.5 Ravenloft setting. Originally, their type was Augmented Animal - Shapechanger. However, Bestiary 3 uses 'Magical Beast - Shapechanger' for the Jackalwere. So I opted to make them Magical Beasts (Shapechangers) in the conversion, because I felt that was more consistent.

Of course, that changed some of their baseline numbers - or at least, I assume that's what dropped their will saves, unless they were poorly calculated before. Is it important to end up at roughly the same numbers, or is it more important to have a consistent interpretation? If the former, I could always give them a free extra feat to boost their Will save, or some kind of inherent bonus, but honestly, I am leaning towards the latter.

A similar 'problem' arose with the skills - with Pathfinder's condensing of Stealth, and Perception, they ended up with more skill points to spend. I spread them amongst their existing skills, and in the case of the Greater Wolfwere, added some ranks in Survival, as I felt it fit. Is that generally what you folks would do, or no?

Lastly, assigning class skills. Is there a good rule of thumb to use when giving a converted monster class skills in addition to those granted by type? I confess, here I totally improvised - as the 3.5 wolfwere has Perform : String Instruments, but also has a special singing ability, I actually gave them two kinds of Performance (Strings, and Singing) as class skills.

My goal was to make sure that their numbers in the various skills were at least as good as their 3.5 incarnation, but not too much higher. I suppose the case could be made that one should just re-engineer the skills from the ground up - after all, they don't really even carry stringed instruments by default - but that could defeat the purpose of conversion altogether.