Rifts to Mutants and Masterminds Conversion--How well would it work?

[Thistleknot]

As I was walking to work this morning, I was thinking about an old Rifts game I played in back in my early college years and very much enjoyed. I was looking for a new game idea to either run and pitch to my gaming group, and a Rifts to d20 conversion seemed about right to me.

To a first approximation, Mutants and Masterminds looks like it would have the flexibility to create all the character classes and races in Rifts and not have the clunky, non-intuitive rules of the Palladium System. But I don't have much experience with the Mutants and Masterminds ruleset, so I could be way off.

Can anyone give me a better feel for whether or not this is really feasable? Is there a better d20 system for this sort of thing. Has anyone thought about/attempted to/succeeded in doing something like this? What advice might you have for a project like this?

Thoughts? Opinions?

Thank you for your time.

 

[drnuncheon]

It'd be terrible! You wouldn't have any of the RIFTS feel - the mix of demigod in the same party as a street rat...unless you rolled 1d20 for the PL of the character...

More seriously, I think it'd work, as long as you didn't get too hung up on exact conversions of things like MDC capacity and damage figures. If you wanted something a little closer to traditional d20, the d20 Anime and d20 Mecha stuff from Guardians of Order might also do the trick, although I can't say for sure as I haven't used wither of them.

J

 

[d4]

it would work fine, if (as drnuncheon says) you only try to convert the feel and flavor of the setting and not do a strict mechanical conversion.

and to get the real Rifts flavor, you wouldn't roll d20 for a character's power level... you'd provide a list of different character options of varying PLs from 1 to 20, and then let the players choose which one they wanted.

 

[omnimpotent]

Good point, d4!

Heh, heh - point - d4 - pointy...

Anyway, I'd expect MnM would allow the wide variety of character types and equipment from Rifts, with a more coherent and fast-moving system. I certainly couldn't recommend a better system, especially if you wanted to run the full mix of Rifts. If you wanted to focus on the giant robots, there may be a better system, but if you wanted it all, MnM is the system that has it all.