Last week Ed mentioned some of the thought processes that led us to ETU: Degrees of Horror. In a nutshell, even though we had all sorts of ideas for all sorts of campaign, ETU is the culmination of everything Pinebox we’ve written thus far. We couldn’t not write it. We decided on a rough outline for the book about a year ago, but because we had so many other titles already in development, finding time to work on ETU was next to impossible. Finally, in January I decided to dedicate one night a week to ETU.

I don’t consider myself a mechanics guy, but clearly the book would be dependent on the choices we made during character creation. Consequently, that was the most logical place to start writing. Since ETU uses the Savage Worlds system, you’d think that character creation would be a no-brainer. After all, character creation is part of the core system. So what’s left to do? Well, having played with the system for a few years, I knew that there were a few setting-specific things I wanted to accomplish. For one thing, it was (and IS) vitally important that we give players the kinds of character options that evoke the feeling of college life. Also, I wanted to “fix” some of the problems we’d seen when our d20 friends played Savage Worlds games.

I need to spend just a few moments talking about some differences between the d20 System and Savage Worlds. First, I’m not knocking either system. What I’ve observed after playing both systems for a number of years is that they tend to draw different kinds of people. I liken d20 System fans with shade-tree mechanics. They tend to like to put their characters up on ramps and fine tune under the hood to get the best performance. Many gamers find satisfaction in that kind of mechanical fine-tuning, which almost becomes a game outside the game. Rather than showing off their souped-up hot-rods, d20 gamers like showing off tricked-out heroes with multiple attacks and crazy armor class. Common misperceptions aside, Savage Worlds also lets you trick-out your character. However, in the interest of fast, furious, fun, that system tends to rely much more on “trappings” to distinguish those customizations. For the uninitiated, trappings are the in-game descriptions for that distinguish mechanically similar effects. For instance, rather than have separate rules for spells called “flaming arrow of doom” and “icy bolt of affliction”, both of which do d6 damage, Savage Worlds has a single spell called “Bolt”. This mechanic not only lets, but expects, the players come up with their own signature trappings. However, the problem arises when the entire group doesn’t go through the effort to come up with trappings and use them consistently in game. “I cast bolt,” leads to characters feeling–mechanically–identical from one campaign to the next.

Our friends, lifelong D&D players, bravely broke with years of system preference to give Savage Worlds a try. And they enjoyed it! However, the shade-tree mechanic mentality meant that within a couple campaigns they’d figured out the feats to take at character creation that would give them the best edge in combat and thereafter they walked through settings scything down opponents as if they were a rank higher than the rest of the party. That’s okay for certain “pulpy” settings, but it was clearly far from ideal for a horror setting.

As I started work on character creation, those were the design issues at the top of my mind. I thought my job would entail restricting certain character options to keep them from becoming too powerful too early, while simultaneously giving players new edges for customizing their characters in more granular ways. Fortunately, I have since come to my senses. In two weeks, I’ll talk about some of the early design choices we considered. In the meantime, next week Ed will be back to talk about generating ETU adventures. Or something.