How Professor X Taught the Ogres A Better Way

Another week of development, though I've spent almost as much time this week on formatting and arting it up than actual rules changes. Work fairly busy as usual, so not as much time as I'd like. I'm now signed on to 5 games on rpol as well, though as that's self-inflicted I can't expect much sympathy. Built a couple of characters and ran them through T&T adventures...the first one caused me to revise the attributes system and made me notice I left humans off the race list (oops!), and went on to die a horrible but balanced death (Deathtrap Equalizer, dice roll #12 - it eats most of the T&T characters that go there too) the second one only broke the Languages rules, and went on to be eaten by a mummy in Beyond the Silvered Pane. Still debating whether scimitars are broken, or maybe its just that most of the monsters in T&T don't wear armour.

Anyway, I think I promised to discuss development history of UH...
Say you want to build the ultimate RPG. The theory is simple - every RPG has a couple of awesome rules in a ton of mediocre ones. To build the ultimate RPG then, all you have to do is scavenge through every game for bells and whistle, and put them all together in one place.
After scavenging through a couple of hundred freerpgs (courtesy of John H. Kim's freerpg site) I had a fairly long list, though the complication of course is that all rules work best with different core mechanics, and they may not all be compatible within an overall rule context.We found then, that the highest number should work within a core system that was a combination of mechanic types; for UH then, we tried the combination of a Universal Table mechanic and the roll-a-bucket-of-dice-and-count-the-successes approach exemplified by Shadowrun/Storyteller.
Another moment that shaped the system was when we looked at the Mind Shield power in the old MSH Campaign Book - as used by Professor X, I believe - where the Power rating was rolled randomly but with a minimum rating of [Psyche + 1CS] (since normal characters defaulted to just Psyche). Why not, I thought, roll the Power rating up normally and just add it to the Psyche score, since with its Rank system doubling the score isn't too imbalanced.The next Aha! moment may have been Dragon Warriors, a little 80s game way ahead of its time that had an innovation called the Armour bypass roll, where after hitting you roll again vs. "armour factor" to deal damage. Ogres in dragon warriors get +1 to their Armour Factor for having tough skin, which is fine if your Ogre is wearing some furs or leather armour but which makes them tremendously tough if they're wearing Full Plate.Obviously, the stacking system I'd thought of using with Mind Shield could fix this, by giving diminishing returns. It was actually a nice, symbiotic relationship too - the MSH Body Armour rules were fairly broken, and an Armour Bypass mechanic could fix that.
So, we had a game mechanic and a plan. I borrowed a Rank system, converted it to the current
d6-and-cross-reference mechanic, and went from there.The first versions of UH looked very little like it does now, as tons of strange rules were combined together in some horrible bastard hybrid. Gradually, its mutated into its current form.