Bad Game Ideas for Wednesday

Finding some system that lets us play a coherent game of Rifts has long been a dream of me and some of my players. Hero is the obvious choice and will do it, but you have to have players that can accept a 300 point differential in character values and that's ... unlikely.

GURPS can probably do it too but that means a lot of time spent with GURPS vehicles and I did enough of that in the 90's. It is fun to hear people argue about what's realistic when trying to turn Rifts into something that fits into a formula though...

Mutants and Masterminds I am almost certain will do it but I haven't tried, and I think the power levels might make it tricky. Perhaps another day...

The best answer is to stop trying to fix it and just embrace the madness - it may have the DM pulling his hair out at times but once again it leads to awesome player justifications for why that horrible thing that just happened couldn't actually possibly happen "because it's not rrr...rrrr...rrr...this system sucks!"

If you can't just ride the wave man ... well ... I've been having dreams about converting it to ICONS. Yeah, yeah, it's a little weird, but I think that the less detailed take of ICONS might be just the approach that handles the ridiculous levels of relative power without making the squishies feel overshadowed. You just assume that normal weapons are completely ineffective against everything in the Rifts universe and start with a rough conversion of something like weapons get half their dice as a power level and 1 level of Invulnerabilty per 100 MDC - like I said it's a rough idea right now. It keeps popping into my head though, demanding some kind of escape. Maybe if I just start with the main rulebook ...

Not so different is it?