Alright, I've found that the best first step when analyzing a system is to explicitly work out what it's meant to do. You can't really say how well it's working unless you've established what goals it's actually working towards.

This looks to me like a system that's all about putting a leash on players who hate losing and just want to say that their character wins every single fight. I'm always skeptical about this kind of system because that sort of player is a problem that the admins are going to have to deal with directly in any case. Players who are interested in having a balanced experience with both wins and losses don't need this sort of system in the first place, and problem players are going to try to wiggle out of the system's restraints anyway. On top of that, while it seems like a natural choice for a setting like Bleach, you're correct to note that Bleach and My Hero Academia are very different settings.

Rather than designing systems to stop bad types of behavior, I prefer to focus on assisting good types of behavior. Think of it as building roads instead of walls. The admins can put a stop to bad behavior at any time, but helping good behavior is more difficult. Rewarding postcount or wordcount isn't enough by itself, because it's also important for the contents of each post to provide an opening for interesting subsequent roleplaying. That's where a system can be useful.

I'm going to sketch up a simple example system here. Feel free to use it or modify it as you like.

My Hero Academia is a setting with superpowered fights. But at the same time, as you say, it's a setting where some people get powers like turning water into soda. For the system to be true to the setting, people need to be able to pick quirky Quirks and still do interesting things with them rather than just get wrecked by the guy with super strength. I call my attempt at doing this the ORT System. It's named after the three power stats: Overwhelming, Reliable, and Tricky.

---

The ORT System

Each character has three stats to describe her Quirk's strengths and weaknesses. New characters divide 200 points between these stats. No stat can go above 100 for a new character, but points gained after character creation may bring stats above 100 at no extra cost. The stats are as follow.

Overwhelming: How effective the Quirk is at quickly and decisively defeating enemies.
Reliable: How effective the Quirk is at controlling the battlefield and keeping things from getting out of hand.
Tricky: How effective the Quirk is accomplishing things in unexpected, unconventional ways.

When two characters get into a fight, both of them PM the admins to secretly choose which stat they're using for the fight. The admin then determines who wins based on the following rules.

1. If both combatants used the same stat, then the one with the higher value in the used stat wins.
2. If the combatants used different stats, then determine the winner as follows:
   • Overwhelming beats Reliable by overpowering it
   • Reliable beats Tricky by ensuring it can't use its trickery
   • Tricky beats Overwhelming by "fighting" with unconventional means

The admin posts in the thread to identify the winner and specify how many Results (see below) each character can choose. Results are allocated as follows.

• Both combatants always get 1 Result each.
• The winner gets 1 extra Result.
• If one of the used stats was 30 or more points above the other, then the combatant with the higher used stat gets 1 extra Result.

Results are the outcome of the fight beyond who wins and who loses. The winner will always get either 2 or 3 Results, and the loser will always get 1 or 2 Results - this means that even the loser of a fight can achieve something by fighting.

After the admin announces the winner, the winner should post to specify which Results she's picking and describe how she achieves them. Next, the loser posts to specify which Result or Results she's picking and describe how she achieves them, but she cannot pick a Result that's opposed to a Result the winner picked (except where explicitly stated otherwise). After that, the thread continues as normal, but any further fights should take place in separate threads.

The list of possible Results follows. Each Result can only be picked when you used an associated stat in the fight - this means that you might sometimes need to use a bad stat in order to accomplish your goals. The letters after each Result show which stats they're compatible with: O for Overwhelming, R for Reliable, and T for Tricky.

• Delay (RT) - Make the fight long and exhausting. Opposed to Speed.
• Destruction (OR) - Deal collaterial damage, wrecking something (or someone) beyond repair. Opposed to Protection.
• Glory (OR) - Make onself look strong or smart. Opposed to Humiliation.
• Humiliation (OT) - Make the other character look weak or foolish. Opposed to Glory.
• Information (T) - The other character reveals a previously-unknown character trait of her choice. No opposites.
• Injury (O) - The other character is seriously injured. No opposites.
• Protection (RT) - Take possession of something or someone, ensuring that the subject is safe. Opposed to Destruction.
• Resistance (ORT) - Only choosable by a loser who has also earned a second Result. The second Result can be the opposite of one of the winner's results, negating it.
• Speed (OT) - Make the fight quick and easy. Opposed to Delay.
• Teamwork (R) - Allied NPCs achieve what they set out to do. No opposites, but cannot contradict winner's results (except with Resistance).

As an example of how this works, say that someone with the Quirk to turn water into soda gets in a heated argument in the town square with someone with the boring (but ordinarily very powerful) Quirk of some sort of super strength. They both PM the admin to say that they're using their strongest stats: Tricky for the soda maker, Overwhelming for the strongman. Thus, the soda maker is the winner and the strongman is the loser.

The admin posts to announce this, gives the winner 2 Results, and gives the loser 1 Result. The winner takes Humiliate and Information. He describes how he jumps into the town square's fountain in hopes of luring his opponent after him, then transforms the surrounding water in order to soak him in sticky, fragrant flavored syrup. Then, the change in viscosity makes the fountain spray wildly, providing cover to escape. The Humiliation is self-evident, but it's left up to the loser to decide what the Information means.

The loser takes the Injure result. He describes how he jumps into the fountain without a second thought and lands a few solid blows before his opponent can escape. As for the winner's Information, the loser decides to expose his social phobia, describing how he flees from the laughing, jeering crowd with tears in his eyes, even more bothered than you'd expect anyone else to be in that situation.

The winner comes away from the fight nursing a few broken bones, and he didn't even manage to put a scratch on his opponent, but he still comes across as the clear victor. Because the system is more about the outcomes than the fight itself, it leaves plenty of plot hooks for future threads: recuperating from injuries, third parties reacting to the humiliating incident, and the revelation of a character trait that might not otherwise have come out. It doesn't really matter who's actually "stronger," because the story is driven by different things.

As a final note, I'd recommend having the advancement system be based on fights, rather than on raw posts or wordcount. This system makes it relatively easy for low-level characters to beat high-level ones, so it's not a huge deal either way, but fight-based advancement would let you put extra incentives in place. I'd probably make it something like 2 stat points per fight, with a 10 point bonus for a fight between combatants who haven't fought each other before - this would be a good way to encourage people to interact with newbies, and since the award is the same for both the winner and the loser, it also lets newbies catch up relatively quickly.

I was going to put my own two cents in, but then I read this and it left me confused. Generally, the purpose of the system is to help decide what happens when two PCs clash. The good systems I've seen act as writing prompts to help guide the story and help players come up with ideas they never would have thought of, but to do that they have to accept the outcome of the system and that by definition means that they can't write whatever they want. That said, in my opinion systems should really only determine success or failure, not try to decide the narrative for the players. That way, they can still decide what makes sense for the scene still.

So if that's not what you're looking to do, why do you want a system on your site in the first place? Maybe it'd be better to just ditch it and go purely freeform? I mean, having a progression system is always nice, but if it's just arbitrary ranks or numbers that have no value in the RP itself, then it's going to feel a bit empty. And if it has an effect on the RP then by definition you have to have some way for players to try to do something that will dictate what happens, and players will probably disagree on what they want to happen sometimes, which means that, in order for the stats to do anything satisfying at all, they're going to have to decide who 'wins' and who 'loses' there.

Yeah, I understand completely. There are Checks and Skills, so the stats do determine combat and the effects of actions. I don't mean to confuse anyone, but I didn't list every aspect of the mechanics - sorry.

I actually accidentally deleted the last part of that post, so I quickly rewrote it - sorry that it may not be totally coherent.

No worries at all! I'm just trying to figure out your intent with systems so I can help you figure out what's best for your site because the needs of every site are going to be just a little bit different.

So, it sounds like your in agreement that a system will dictate what happens ICly at least to a degree. This doesn't mean players won't have the freedom to decide what happens naturally (at least if the system is any good), it'll just give them guidelines to give them ideas for what might be happening. I think it's important to say it like this because I don't think systems are meant to restrict people. They will to a degree because the alternative is totally freeform where the players decide literally everything with no prompts at all, so anything, even the freest of systems, will obviously be more restrictive than that.

So I think before you get into the nitty gritty of the system, you have to ask yourself an important question: what do you want your players to do on your site? On Ascendant, we wanted big super power fights and dramatic, world changing affairs, so we designed the system around that. Picture the kinds of dynamics and the kinds of events you want to happen on your site. What do they look like? If the story and events go the way you want them to go, what kinds of things will end up happening? What kinds of things do you want your players to gush about OOCly?

I think it's important to think about these things directly because it's so easy to forget that your system is supposed to encourage those behaviors. The system is as much a part of the story as each individual post is because it's there to help your players make things happen and to help move the story along.

I'd say there are two mains things I want my players to do:
I think those are the kind of climaxes that I and the other players look forward to - battles that in some ways mirror the highly emotional ones of the show and manga. Along with that, I think many of them will want to form deep connections to other characters along the way - mentors, friends, lovers, rivals, and archenemies.

Okay, this seems like a good place to start! Let's focus on the second one for now.

Okay, so you want to have cool fights. What defines a cool fight for you, and what kinds of powers do you want people to have? What should they do in fights? I'm assuming you also don't want fights to be all about people beating their heads against each other for no reason and that there's probably going to be some purpose behind them. What happens when they win?

This is where you start getting past the abstract and try to think about what you actually want people to do. I'll use Ascendant's as an example again. We wanted fights to be more about strategically using powers so that there would be lots of options for different kinds of powers, and that weird powers would still be able to be strong. For us, the fights are just as much about thinking OOCly as they are big cool displays of power ICly. So we built a system where planning plays a pretty big role and thinking will help you win.

The other big part of the system was getting people to change the setting in really big ways. We did this in a couple of ways. first, when people win a fight (or what we call an Incursion), they get to decide what kinds of things are going on in that area now. If they win enough, they can claim it as territory for their group and can make even bigger changes, to the point that we actually write new board descriptions for them. Cities can be conquered, destroyed or what have you, but people can also try to figure out details about the setting, research new topics, or even decide that they want to give the world pizza if that's what they really want to do. Winning reflects this and we actually track the big changes in monthly updates so people can keep up.

So now you have to really think about what you want to do. Not just big broad things that sound nice, but when people play your game, what kind of game are they playing and what are they doing?

All I have to add at this particular point is that in order to have a climax, you need to have a buildup first. And if you want to have a buildup supported by the system itself, that's going to have to involve some complexity. A system that boils down to rock-paper-scissors is awfully simplistic and doesn't offer much buildup, sure, but the virtue of that sort of system is that it's very simple to resolve. Ditto for systems that just involve comparing power level numbers to each other. There's a tradeoff between how impactful the system feels and how simple the system is to resolve. You're going to have to decide where on that spectrum you want to be.

For me, I think (in context) cool fights are either raw power struggles between two powerful characters, an underdog fight of someone creatively using their less powerful Quirk to win, or something like two people with non-combat quirks having a down-to-earth realistic fight. The bulk of the fights will be context of the school - training, exercises, but predominately tournaments. A lot of these will carry in-character weight - since the placement of characters could affect their desirability post-graduation. (Sounds a lot like the real world there.) Otherwise for non-student characters, these big fights will ever be the culmination of long chases or clashes of ideology. For them, it may sometimes be life or death, the imprisonment of a dangerous individual, or public acknowledgment.

You've been talking about a lot of conceptual stuff, and that's necessary at the beginning. I think you're past that now though. You have to decide what you want people to do now. It's real easy to through around high level ideas, this is why in game development we say there's a lot of idea people but not a lot of people that can actually make it. It's easy to talk about cool stuff, it's a lot harder to actually implement it.

So I'll reiterate: what are people going to do? What is your game?

People are going to have a lot of non-consequential, non-combat threads - whether those serve to foster character relations is dubious, but most of the threads won't be action-packed finales.

They'll be writing and in doing so gaining points to spend on stats, though better writing and character arcs will be rewarded with more points through request forms. In a simple list:

1. Write/Request; Gain EP
2. Spend EP on Stats
3. Write/Fight with Characters of similar calibers

Repeat. If what you're asking for a literal explanation of what they'll be doing - that's it.

That's still super broad, and this might be where some of your problems with designing a system you like are coming from. Hm, how should I explain this? I think a lot of people make the mistake that the RP, the characters interacting with each other and the plots they make, and the system, a series of prompts to give people an idea of what's happening and an opportunity to change the setting, are separate things. They can be, but in my experience, the best systems are the ones that work with the narrative and are just as much a part of the world as the setting itself.

So I'll take a step back and introduce the concept of a gameplay loop. In games, there's often this almost cyclical style of gameplay that people experience as they make their way through the game. Some examples: in an MMO you might see something like this:

Do quests/Fight mobs -> Run Dungeon -> Get Gear -> Do Quests/Fight Mobs

Or in something more like Harvest Moon and those farming simulators

Plant Crops -> Get Materials -> Harvest Crops -> Get Money -> Build up Farm -> Plant Crops

On Ascendant it's something like

Characters Interact -> Character Tries to Pull Something -> People Join in And Try to Help or Stop Them -> World Changes -> Characters Interact

Notice I didn't talk about leveling up or exp even though all three of those typically have some kind of exp mechanic (especially MMOs). It's too soon to talk about progression since you don't even know what they system will look like yet. It's important to think about progression (beyond the fact that you want it to exist) until after the system itself exists for two reasons. The first is the obvious, if you don't know how the system itself looks, then how can you expect to know how people should be able to advance with in it? The second, is that if the progression is too separated from both the RP and the system itself, it's going to feel grindy. It's best to give exp for actually accomplishing something with in the RP itself, not for basically fluffing up posts or spamming them. It feels a lot better in my experience.

So! All that said, you need to figure out what your gameplay loop is. You had a couple of things you could use here. Are you going to focus more on the school life aspect of the RP or the heroes vs villains aspect? You probably want to pick one or the other and then use the one you don't use as a backdrop for more plots independent of the system because trying to do too much will just make the system unwieldy. So like, if you focus on school life, then what they do to get good grades or get peoples' attention would be a good thing to focus on with maybe the hero vs villain stuff being ways to get good grades and/or attention. If it's heroes vs villains, then you might want to focus on how they can change the world with the school life being something they have to juggle a little in the background ICly.

This is the part where you really have to think hard about what kind of game you want to have, both in terms of narrative and the system (because they should be the same thing). If you really want a new system, then don't think in terms of the one you've already built. Throw it out of your brain and try to think from the beginning. Don't shackle yourself to what you've already built. You don't need to use RPG stats. On Ascendant, the characters' powers themselves are literally the stats; if you have a character that punches things really hard, they don't have Strength 4, they have Aggression (Force) 4 because Aggression (Force) represents powers that tend to do direct damage. On dungeon crawler system we made before, we basically didn't have stats because the purpose of the system was to figure out a path through a maze-like dungeon and how to get through it quickly and efficiently. You can do anything. You don't have to have DND style stats to have a meaningful gameplay loop, and it's very important to figure out what you want your players to actually do before you get into the nitty gritty of the stats.

For now, don't think about stats, don't think about progression, just think about what the system itself should accomplish and how it will interact with your narrative. Think about what kind of game you want it to be. More focused on PvE or PvP? Strategic or more 'Twitchy'? What you want your players to do and how that interacts with the narrative will ultimately be what guides everything else, so take your time and think about this kind of thing hard.

Ok - I'll imagine there are no systems at all right now; starting from scratch. I think to start it'll also make it easier for me to think of it as if it were literally a video game, so I'll do that.

It'd be an Open World game, of course, with highly customization characters. But focusing on the narrative in the style of the gameplay loop:

For Students