ETU Held Hostage By Savage Worlds!

ETU held hostage by Savage Worlds. 

Can it be rescued by FATE Core?

The Victim

I was a backer of the ETU kickstarter campaign. I was extremely excited at their promise of real mechanical changes that weren't just set dressing on the Savage Worlds system. They delivered something that could be amazing, but is crippled by the wrong rule system. 

The world of ETU is college meets occult investigations and monster hunting. It includes rules about needing to take tests in order to gain levels. It has great tables for random college party and a random fraternities/sororities. There are tons of great adventure seeds. The creators even went so far as to create a fake college website, form admission and academic probation letters, campus police citations, and student ID templates. 

When I read through it, I couldn't help but get excited for the game and the idea of exploring the world. Pulling an all night study session in a haunted library? Accidental voodoo curses from drunken frat guys? Stopping a witch's coven from burning down the best pizza shop in town? Yes these are all things I want in my game.

The Villain

The problem was I actually ran it using the rules they gave it. The Savage Worlds rules system is not designed for role playing characters. It is a set of rules for structuring a game of miniatures. There is nothing wrong with that in theory, but if you're not trying to tell the story of a bunch of college kids (who just happened to go to college with extensive combat training) attacking hordes of monsters, then you're sort of left with half a game.

Savage Worlds is not a game designed for zero to hero type of stories. It's about adventurers saving the day; which is not what college freshman are known for doing. 

This is largely a matter of personal taste, I'll admit, but the world demands characters that can adapt without needing X amount of experience to raise a skill enough to be useful. The skills in Savage Worlds are very restrictive as written. A skill let's a character do one thing and they get a bonus to that one thing they can do with that skill. Sure I could house rules up a whole set of nonsense to make it work, but if I'm doing that to fix the system why not just admit it's broken and find something that works better. 

It is a game where what is on the character sheet describes what you can do in the fictional world. There isn't a lot of flexibility written into the rules. This is perfectly fine if you are playing with miniatures and measuring distances with a ruler and having epic battles. This type of system does not lend itself well to the idea of people being out of their element, but finding a way to succeed anyway; which seems like an accurate description of college freshmen investigating monsters.

The Hero

I've never used FATE Core before and I am not even sure it is the answer to my issues with ETU's Savage Worlds system. That being said though, the FATE Core system has far more flexibility to it and focus on story telling than Savage Worlds. It also uses FATE dice (or just 4d6), so the players don't have to hunt for their dice depending on which skill they are rolling.

Instead of three loosely connected sets of numbers to represent attributes, skills, and edges (as in Savage Worlds), FATE uses three interconnected ideas called aspects, skills, and stunts. I know it sounds like different names for the same thing, but I assure you it's entirely different.

In Savage Worlds if you want to have the strongest character in the game you have a D12 in your Strength attribute. Any time a feat of strength comes up, your character will be more likely to succeed, but it ends there. 

In FATE Core if you want to have the strongest character in the game you have an aspect like: "Known far and wide as the strongest hero in the sector" This aspect would give you bonuses to everything from strength tests to intimidation tests to trying to use your name recognition to get what you want. This helps build a character's backstory during character creation, so there is no doubt that they are a person and not just a set of numbers on a page. It clues in the other players what type of person your playing as well.

The GM could also use that as a means to add drama to a situation: You're in a bar and someone recognizes you as the strongest hero: "You don't know if it's the beer or your own appearance that makes him come up to you, but he wants to challenge you to an arm wrestling competition." "You're too far away from your home turf, so your attempts to intimidate them with name recognition failed, so they are all laughing at you." 

Skills are similarly broadened. Savage Worlds gives you a definition of the skill. FATE suggests the skills are meant to represent broad areas of knowledge. So Athletics covers everything from running to acrobatics to baseball in FATE. Where as Savage Worlds would make you take Acrobatics, Knowledge: Baseball, and probably use an Agility roll for running. 

This is better because it frees the player to think of how they want to solve the situation, instead of trying to figure out how they can solve it.

Edges in Savage Worlds give you bonuses to rolls and sometimes special equipment. Still they are for specific circumstances (example +2 to all boating tests) or without the special equipment you get no bonuses to whatever the equipment helped with.

FATE's Stunts are very different. They are described as extensions of the skills that offer a chance to make your character more unique. Say you have a Fighting skill, but you really want your character to be an expert Thai kick-boxer. You'd take Expert Thai Kick-boxer as a stunt. And just like skills, the bonuses the offer can be made to fit multiple situations. An expert martial artist of any kind would probably be good at noticing people's body preparing for an attack. A player could easily make the case to receive a bonus to a check to see if they are surprised by the attack.

Could this work to make a better game?

I don't know. I do know my players had great ideas for things they wanted to be able to do, but had trouble figuring out exactly how the numbers on their page allowed them to do that. One could argue that a better GM would have instructed them how it does. I'd counter that by saying a better system wouldn't require so much GM hand holding for the players to play the game.

FATE rewards players for getting involved in dramatic situations and allowing the GM to complicate their lives. It also gives the players more license to become involved in the story telling. There are mechanics written into the rules for the player adding aspects and details to the game world. The simple complicate/reward system it uses makes for easy and dynamic story telling. At least it appears to anyway..

Having never played FATE or seen it played, it might have been a waste of my time to come up with a way to make ETU work in FATE Core. Not having play-tested my converted rules I won't know if it is an improvement for a while. I feel like just telling the story of the ETU students is more fun than seeing what the ETU students can and can't do based on the way they were built. FATE will allow the players to do that in a way that Savage Worlds can't.