We did no mechanical conversion whatsoever; everything was mapped onto the D&D rules. We did map some new names onto classes and alignments.

 

 

 Good to Evil became Pacifistic to Violent; Lawful to Chaotic became Hip to Square. The classes, we mapped as follows:

 

Strength is used pretty much for melee attacks. It seems to be your raw ability to engage people.

Dexterity is used for ranged attacks, your AC, your reflex save (generally used against sudden, unpredictable occurrences), and quite a few skills. It seems to indicate your ability to plan, think on your feet, and leverage connections to your advantage.

Constitution is used for hitpoints and fortitude saves. It looks to be the strength of your convictions.

Intelligence determines how many skills and / or spells you can know. If we take spells to be intellectual movements, it might be something like how involved you are in the world of academia and the roots of intellectual movements.

Wisdom is used for your will save (against magic, mostly), and sensing stuff. It's something like how good your sources are, and how much you've got your ear to the ground.

Charisma is just fuckin' weird. Mostly, it's used as the base for various Mystic (Cleric) and Demagogue (Paladin) powers. Perhaps it's manipulation / marketing? The degree to which you can make the masses agree with you.

 

The Activist gets favored causes. The Lover is adept at unarmed attacks. The Beatnik class is meant to represent any kind of poet or writer. Other than that, they seem pretty self-evident. Except for maybe the Psychonaut, but we haven't really looked at that one very hard. I guess I was thinking feats would be roughly analogous to different drugs.

Barbarian—Seeker (The "seeker" class is specifically modeled after the Easy Rider archetype. It's a person who's out trying to find himself/his place/the meaning of life etc. Rage is when he thinks he's found it.)
Bard—Rocker
Cleric—Mystic
Druid—Tree-hugger
Fighter—Psychonaut
Monk—Lover
Paladin—Demagogue
Ranger—Activist
Rogue—Revolutionary
Sorcerer—Beatnik
Wizard—Intellectual

 

Broadly, melee attacks are face-to-face interactions and ranged attacks occur through media or public influence (we didn't enforce this very strictly, but the guideline was there). Cover indicated using influence anonymously.

 

A more appropriate distinction between melee and ranged attacks is that melee attacks involve engaging the enemy directly in such a way that they can easily respond.

 

You have the rules you need in the DMG under the environment. There's another type of damage in D&D, which is fatigue damage. It's temporary and comes back quickly. Hostile environments can take away fatigue damage while other things can restore it.

So, the hostile-to-idealism environment of a corporate boardroom or Flyover Country maps to hostile desert terrain. Travelling across it is fatiguing, to the point where it starts to eat away at your psyche (once it translates into hit point damage). What does water do? It refreshes. You're in some rural bible-thumper enclave trying to find a party member who has been abducted by his straight-laced parents. It's so 'dry' you can barely think, and your 'movement' is impaired. Someone casts 'Create Water' and you miraculously find a store that sells underground comics, restoring you to full health and movement