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« on: November 10, 2006, 07:44:50 PM »
I think you could make it quite interesting with more detailed rules, but I'm not sure how you'd go about the task. Possibly start with the D&D SRD, and start layering allomancy rules on the top - D&D already has notes on different composition materials and a incredibly in-depth magic system. Remove the magic system, add a 'material' column to the weapon, armour and equipment charts.
The actual allomancy itself... I'm tempted to go for a Psionics route. Your Allomancer class * level and some other stuff (CHA for zinc, CON for pewter, DEX for steel and iron, for example) help determine your maximum possible expenditures of power points (both total and per attack); vials create your power point reserves.
Of course, it only gets more confusing past this point. The mental stuff could be waved away with simple effects but that would undermine their effect possibly. The various stuff you can do with the external physicals practically calls for a whole new set of combat rules. Pewter is easy enough - self buffs are hardly new things in D&D. You could make it fairly complicated, allowing players to assign individual stat buffs (or BAB / AC / save bonuses) on a per-turn basis, if you wanted.
* Seperate base classes for each of the metals and for Mistborn. Mistborn as Prestige Classes doesn't entirely work, unless you want to do it that way to show peoples speciality (Kell's mastery of steel/iron).
So yeah, I think that a complicated rules set for Mistborn would be fairly rewarding. The D&D stuff above is just for an example, but I don't think it would be an unbearably difficult task for any system.