As a long time Rifts player maybe I'm biased but I like the Palladium system. Character generation can be a bear but once you're in play I find very little wrong with the system. That said I'm excited for the Savage Worlds version of Rifts that should be coming out this year even if Savage Worlds is not my favorite system in the world. My TT game is playing a Rifts game set in England that is heavily inspired by Game of Thrones and the Arthurian legends and we're having a blast.
I'm obviously a big fan of M&M. I especially enjoy M&M 3E. That said the system is not without its flaws. The biggest of which also doubles as its greatest strength, the idea of Power Levels.
In theory 2 characters that are PL 10 should be equal to each other. In practice that's not necessarily the case. First, you have the overall PL of 10 which means you have 150 points to spend. You have to check their offensive PLs (Attack Bonus + Damage = 20) and their defensive PLs (Dodge/Parry + Toughness = 20). So you could potentially have 3 different PLs for combat purposes which are only connected to the overall character PL by a sense of what that character SHOULD have. I ran a TT game where we set the PP at PL 8 (120 PP) but allowed for up to PL 10 combat PLs for an X-Men type level game.
If that's not confusing enough you then have to deal with artificial PL inflating (my concept doesn't really call for me to have a Will save this high but for PL purposes I'm going to dump a bunch of points into it...) and powers/abilities that exist outside the PL framework such as teleportation or flight.
I'm sure this is a problem that exists for all point based character generation systems. I'm sure 2 characters made of the same number of points in GURPS or HERO are not necessarily equal across the board. At least M&M gives you defined measuring systems to know where you stand compared to other people of comparable levels. I just think the system could do a better job of letting you know what those levels are. Treat each section as a dial that can be set. How many points can be spent, Offensive PL, Defensive PL, Skill PL, etc.
So I threw Empire Bay MUX up a year or so ago in the hopes that it'd become a nice little sandboxy place for superhero RP. That never really happened. We had some nibbles at first but interest just never took off.
I'm still jonesing for some hero RP and I have a bit more time on my hand lately so I figured I'd take a bit more of a direct hand with the game. I won't say it's "re-opening" because technically it never closed. What I'll say is I'm hoping to start sparking more RP. To do that I'm looking to do 2 things.
1: Draw in players. To that end I intend to start up a government based hero group. That's all I really know for now, that's it'll be government based. I figured we can hammer out the rest of the details as players come to claim slots on said team. While I have other obligations (such as my Force and Destiny game) I still think I could devote 1 or 2 days a week here for purposes of RP and scenes.
2: Draw in staffers. This can also probably be broken down into two areas. First, I'd like some app staffers. People familiar with the system who can help those unfamiliar with the system craft characters. People who could explain PL caps and help build power sets and what not. The code does a good job of checking to ensure characters remain within their points but app staffers would also help by ensuring no PL cap breaks happen on the sheet. They'd also need to be familiar with the coded systems to help code challenged people with apps.
Next would be plot staffers. People looking to run scenes, maybe 1 or 2 a week. They could be general scenes or if you have an idea you want to build on and explore (like a group of mutants or themed heroes or whatever) that'd be fine too. I think it'd be great to have a little bit of both.
I recently did a purge of all idle characters so if you had a character on the game they have likely been @nuked. This was just an attempt to clean up the DB, nothing more. So if you're interested in either of the above come on over and we can chat. 
We have a wiki at http://empire-bay.wikidot.com/ and you can connect to the game via muxmadness.com:1200.
@Ganymede
Yeah, I'm working on some bells and whistles. I'm trying to keep the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) methodology in mind. Right now I have it set up so it will recognize crouching, standing, and flying attacks. Flying attackers run the risk of being knocked out of the sky costing them their attack. There are sweep attacks that do the same to standing attackers (knocking them down and costing them their attack). I have ways of doing multi-damage attacks (say a triple fire ball). I'm working on a system for weaknesses and resistances. There is also a method in place for doing combos taken straight from the SF RPG. I'm also looking on ways of implementing status effects like stunned, frozen, and poisoned.
I haven't been able to do much testing because it's not all put together yet but I'm liking what I see.
The system, as I'm designing it now, is very casual. Also very simple. Designed for 2 fighters and an optional GM. The GM could force a round if someone is taking too long (which defaults the absent fighter to Blocking).
I've just been playing around but I'm convinced it's doable.
Yeah, it wouldn't be that difficult. Either with or without a timer. Could even me modes. Casual mode for a nice, lazy day of RP and ninja fighting and "Hardcore" for time sensitive scenes or just to add a sense of drama to the scene.
@Misadventure
I pointed out the familiarity most people have with WoD as a bonus, not as the main selling point. The main selling point, for me, is how much fun I had playing the game "back in the day". I don't think it would work straight up on a MUX but I think a modified version could work really well.
I think a system could be created that is both fairly simple and fairly evocative of the MK experience. Players have their "move cards", each player chooses one, when both are in the system lets everyone know mechanically what happened (or maybe private emits to users to let them know or something), then the players pose based on that information.
Been a while since I've really played with the system though so maybe I'm wrong. Either way I'm having fun going through the old books at any rate.
I think a modified version of the old Street Fighter system might work fairly well. In the end it broke down into a card based system anyway and everyone is familiar with the WoD style attributes. For shits and giggles I'm throwing together a combat system just to see how smooth it plays.
So I've been playing through MKX and I've found myself wondering...why have there never been (to my knowledge) a Mortal Kombat game? I know it's based off a tournament fighter but the past 2 MK titles have been very story driven and I think they've created quite the expansive little universe.
I like it so much my TT group is searching for a decent system to emulate it to try it out on our game day. It's almost like throwing superheroes, GI Joe, Thundercats, and He-Man into a blender. I'd seriously RP the crap out of that game.
To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been an MK game and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Even before they got more story driven in 2011 I think they had an amazingly deep universe that could be explored. Seems like one of those games that could have a little something for everyone.
Any ideas as to why it's never happened?
Attributes and everything are the same but the system is different. Instead of roll and keep you're rolling a handful of d10 (Attribute + Skill) and forming sums of 10. This essentially gives you a pool of points that you can spend to do stuff (overcome the action risk/achieve your intent and overcome any possible consequences). It sounded wonky to me at first but it works pretty well. At least in the quick start.
The example in the rules is having to run across a room that's been set on fire. The risk is that you're running across a room that is on fire and the consequences of achieving that goal is suffering two wounds. So say you're character was going to just run across while dodging flaming debris you'd roll your Finesse + Athletics. You'd get a bonus die if it was the first time you'd used Athletics in the scene and could get another by spending a Hero point. You could also get a bonus die for "Flair" (describing what you're doing with style).
So let's assume your pool comes out to 7 dice and you roll 3 3 4 5 7 7 9. You'd group them together like 9+3(12), 7+3(10), 7+4(11) so you'd have 3 raises as they call them in the game to do stuff with. You could spend 1 to achieve your intent (running across the room) and the other 2 to cancel each of the wounds you would have suffered. If you had any extra you could use them to help other players avoid the consequences of the action (but not achieve their intent/overcome the risk).
For wounds there's a "Death Spiral" that tracks how many regular wounds you've taken and how many dramatic wounds you've taken. You can take a number of regular wounds equal to your resolve + 5 then you must take a dramatic wound. Each dramatic wound you take modifies your dice pools (sometimes in your favor sometimes not). Once you've taken 5 dramatic wounds you're rendered helpless and can be killed.
Some of the nations have been altered (though beyond a change in sorcery I'm not really sure how) and they've added a new nation to the core rules, The Sarmatian Commonwealth.
Off the top of my head those are the big changes I can think of. There wasn't a ton of info in the quick start guide.
The Kickstarter is live.
My TT group played the stuff in the quick starter this weekend. We had a pretty fun time with it. The system was a bit different but we thought it worked really well. Really encouraged descriptive actions.
As an update, character generation is almost done and I'm waiting on the latest source book from FFG to drop before I move on to creating the game world. I'm not sure that it's really going to impact the design I have for the planet but I figure better to just hold off a week or so and be sure than to get ass deep into building and decide to change directions all of a sudden.
Things are moving along though. Maybe not at the pace I was hoping but they are moving.
For me it's less about emulating any one type of serial and more just the general atmosphere. Foggy cobblestone streets lit by flickering gas lamps. Shadowy killers lurking in the alleys. Things like that. It's just one of my favorite periods.
Agreed. I just like the settings. 1800's London. Again, Jack the Ripper, Jekylland Hyde, etc and so on.
I'd love a Penny Dreadful style MU. WoD or CoC even.
@Botulism I hosted and coded the game for you. I may still have a backup of it on my server somewhere if you wanted it put back up.
I'm unaware of any unfortunately. I pondered doing one a while back with a Rifts like theme (beings from any type of universe being drawn into the game) but I thought the overall mechanical nature of the system would push people away. Which is a shame because I love me some GURPS.
They're coming. I don't want to give an ETA because we're still way too early for that but things are coming along.
Character generation is nearing completion and I think I have a first draft of the theme just about done. So we're moving along. Once character generation is done I think things will start moving at a brisker pace. It's a lot of data input right now as I get all the specializations and species in.
Certainly. I've been running DC games for over 10 years and on most of them I've run story arcs that impacted the world. Sadly I have yet to get New 52 driving in that direction but it can be done.
As for how hard it was to pull off...that varied. Sometimes players just did not get into it or half way through you'd find out things weren't going the way you anticipated. So long as you stay flexible, however, I think most campaigns would be fairly easy to do. Especially if you have story staff to help.
And yes, always listen to player input. They're the people playing the campaign after all. Bore them and they'll just stop playing.
So, wow. I wasn't expecting this much positive feedback! Very exciting though. Since there's so much interest I'm going to just post the site address just keep a few things in mind that I would not even call us in alpha phase yet, I'd say we're "in development" at the moment. People are more than welcome to come, hang out, share ideas, and we can really start to get to work though. I'll be opening the character generation up for testing soon so the more people who are there to try and break it the better.
You can connect at starwarsmux.com port 1979.