Pen and Paper RPG Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game

Stargazer

Well-known member
Surprised no one's made a thread for this yet, as I've been seeing targeted ads for it all over social media.



Magpie Games is developing an officially licensed pen and paper roleplaying game set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender/Legend of Korra. They're crowdfunding it on Kickstarter, and it should be no surprise that there's a lot of interest. You might be surprised though at just how overwhelming the interest is - it blew past the previous records for tabletop games, it's almost at 6 million dollars and still has over two weeks to go. That's the power of the ATLA/LOK fanbase for ya.

They go into more detail about the mechanics on the campaign page, but one thing that stands out to me is they're designing it to be played across five different eras in the Avatarverse:

-the era during Kyoshi's time as Avatar;
-the era during Roku's time;
-the era of the Hundred Year War, leading up to Aang's reappearance;
-the postwar era during Aang's time;
-the era during Korra's time.

I'm not a big pen and paper gamer, but I'm a big enough Avatar fan that I'd definitely be interested in getting the player's guide, and joining a game should the opportunity arise. Any thoughts from other Avatar fans or pen and paper RPG players?
 

Stargazer

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The Kickstarter campaign is over, and the final pledge total is...over 9.5 million USD. That puts it at #10 on the list of most funded campaigns in the history of Kickstarter. The game creators were probably expecting it to potentially reach a few million, but it seems it blew past even their most optimistic expectations. They ran out of stretch goals at 5 million, and had to come up with new goals for 6, 7, and 8 million! So many people pledged that their printers are telling them it's going to be hard to get enough cardboard supply to fulfill all the orders initially. This game is going to make waves.
 

S'task

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The underlying issue that I have is that it's built on the PbtA system, which is a system noted as a system more designed for "storyteller" RPGs that are less mechanically focused and more feel focused. Some folks like that, but I fall into a very different RPG cluster than PbtA usually caters to, having come from the DnD 3.5 and still to this day prefer the Simulationist approach to game design over all others that 3.5 is arguably the epitome of.
 

Battlegrinder

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Obozny
Yeah, having seen a few PbtA systems or discussions of them, the concept just sounds.....bizzare. I'm sure if I was a total novice to RPGs it would come off better, but right now it sounds so alien to my understanding of what an RPG is that I have a hard time buying into it. I've also heard the system is notorious for failing apart if you try to homebrew anything.

Though I will grant that a more narrative style of game might work better for bending, given bending is much more freeform than most systems and you don't have a fixed spell list (though TBH you could probably just staple the magic system from brikwars onto another RPG system and it would work just fine).
 

S'task

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Yeah, having seen a few PbtA systems or discussions of them, the concept just sounds.....bizzare. I'm sure if I was a total novice to RPGs it would come off better, but right now it sounds so alien to my understanding of what an RPG is that I have a hard time buying into it. I've also heard the system is notorious for failing apart if you try to homebrew anything.

Though I will grant that a more narrative style of game might work better for bending, given bending is much more freeform than most systems and you don't have a fixed spell list (though TBH you could probably just staple the magic system from brikwars onto another RPG system and it would work just fine).
Ehh, the thing is that a lot of bending's effects are more or less just different ways of fluffing various ways of attacking. From a game design standpoint do you really NEED multiple spells to cover the same effect of "single target direct damage attack spell"? While DnD answers "yes absolutely!" other simulationist systems go "no, that's just fluff, here, magic power that deals 2d6 damage, fluff it how you want!" So all casters use that base 2d6 damage spell as their baseline direct damage spell, but then can then fluff it as being a bolt of fire, water, earth, air or whatever else they want.

I'd think that kind of magic system would work just fine for Bending, look at the major effects you have, create the baseline mechanic around those effects, and then you fluff each effect with the appropriate element.

IE, you have your power that pushes enemies away from you in a line. Then you just fluff it based on your character if it's a wall of earth thrown against the targets, a wave of water thrown against the targets, or a blast of air blowing the targets back. In the end the result is the same.

Now, are there some unique special powers? Sure, Bloodbending and... that's about it. Lightning is just a more powerful form of your direct damage spell. Metalbending, lavabending, etc. are just differently fluffed effects. Lightning Redirection isn't anything unique, as redirecting others attacks back at your opponent is a core aspect of Waterbending (and could probably be done in Earthbending if so desired) so is again, just a generic power with specific fluff and limitations.

That said, you're right, you'd want a degree of freeform stuff too. A system like DnD for bending would be to restrictive. You'd have some basic innate "can manipulate X" type of abilities that don't translate well to how DnD handles spells.
 

Battlegrinder

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The reason I cited brikwars was because it's system works particularly well is because the effect is customizable. You can just go "Oh, I want to pick up that rock and throw it at him", and you just pick how many dice you want to spend on giving yourself range to throw the rock, how much damage you want the rock to do, if you want throw more than one rock in a bigger arc, etc. Or you pick something else you want to do, like create a wall or buff yourself or buff someone else, and you use the dice you have in your pool to figure out how to do that.

It also leads to tactical considerations being more relevant, every you spend on range is a die you can't spend on damage or other effects, and it gets harder to cast the more dice you use so you normally won't blow all your dice on one shot (in fact you pretty much can't use all your dice just on offense, you'll probably have to use a few on boosting your own skill so the attack will actually go off), and you don't want to just roll all the dice all the time anyway. There's also something about different dice sizes having different effects when they crit depending on what they're used for, but I don't recall exactly how it works.

I do recall it being a lot of fun though, as compared to the more normal "for some reason, every fireball in world does about the same damage" system. Which is weird because that makes sense for a wargame where balance and predictably are key to decision making, but less so for an RPG. Brikwars is even weirder as it's nominally a wargame, albeit an extremely umserioius one that discouraged you from actually abiding by its "rules" (I was never very good at that part, which is why my sister usually crushed me whenever we played).


Edit: To be clear though, an ideal system would maybe be inspired by brikwars, but with some major tweaks, as the brikwars system was intentionally designed to be chaotic and unpredictable.

Going "I'll launch a fireball to clear out that room!" would probably work, but with a concerningly high chance of either underperformed and not quite wiping the enemy, or worse going haywire and taking out the enemy, the room, the house, and everything within several inches of the house.
 
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almostinsane

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The underlying issue that I have is that it's built on the PbtA system, which is a system noted as a system more designed for "storyteller" RPGs that are less mechanically focused and more feel focused. Some folks like that, but I fall into a very different RPG cluster than PbtA usually caters to, having come from the DnD 3.5 and still to this day prefer the Simulationist approach to game design over all others that 3.5 is arguably the epitome of.
Yeah, having seen a few PbtA systems or discussions of them, the concept just sounds.....bizzare. I'm sure if I was a total novice to RPGs it would come off better, but right now it sounds so alien to my understanding of what an RPG is that I have a hard time buying into it. I've also heard the system is notorious for failing apart if you try to homebrew anything.

Though I will grant that a more narrative style of game might work better for bending, given bending is much more freeform than most systems and you don't have a fixed spell list (though TBH you could probably just staple the magic system from brikwars onto another RPG system and it would work just fine).

(Reads this while remembering all the narrative-focused roleplays dying one by one)

There never was a good DnD club near me when I was a kid...
 

S'task

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(Reads this while remembering all the narrative-focused roleplays dying one by one)

There never was a good DnD club near me when I was a kid...
There's a reason for that.

Narrative focused game systems rarely have good long term character development mechanics. They tends to be very good for taking a snapshot of a character and then having one or two narrative arcs with those characters, but the characters are effectively stagnant. Many narrative based systems don't actually do character progression, rather, they just do character change. Aspects of the character might be dropped or added, but there's no development OUTSIDE of that kind of thing, due to narrative systems preferring to eschew mechanical advancement.

Compare that to games on the DnD side where narrative and personality development are left entirely up to the players, but the mechanical aspects of the characters advance and grow over the time of the campaign. This leads to long term attachment to the characters being played as well as the excitement that is "leveling up" that most narrative focused games lack.

Thus, DnD groups tend to be able to have much longer campaigns that see characters played for months and years. Whereas story games can have memorable individual games, you don't get the same degree of buy in and you don't generally have memorable full campaigns.

Note that almost all the longstanding RPGs are mechanically focused games with a lot of potential for character development. Vampire, Mage, and all those games might pretend they are "narrative" games, but when you get into their design, they're much more mechanically inclined than they let on, they just have different mechanics than DnD. Further, almost all the dynamic systems with liscenses, save for PbtA, are mechanically crunchy games. Modphius, who have the Conan, Star Trek, and Fallout franchises uses a quite crunchy 2d20 system that's a lot of fun. Savage Worlds, which now has the Rifts, Pathfinder license, and their own Deadlands setting is also a fairly crunchy system with a focus on character advancement... and of course there's the elephant in the room that is DnD.
 

almostinsane

Well-known member
There's a reason for that.

Narrative focused game systems rarely have good long term character development mechanics. They tends to be very good for taking a snapshot of a character and then having one or two narrative arcs with those characters, but the characters are effectively stagnant. Many narrative based systems don't actually do character progression, rather, they just do character change. Aspects of the character might be dropped or added, but there's no development OUTSIDE of that kind of thing, due to narrative systems preferring to eschew mechanical advancement.

Compare that to games on the DnD side where narrative and personality development are left entirely up to the players, but the mechanical aspects of the characters advance and grow over the time of the campaign. This leads to long term attachment to the characters being played as well as the excitement that is "leveling up" that most narrative focused games lack.

Thus, DnD groups tend to be able to have much longer campaigns that see characters played for months and years. Whereas story games can have memorable individual games, you don't get the same degree of buy in and you don't generally have memorable full campaigns.

Note that almost all the longstanding RPGs are mechanically focused games with a lot of potential for character development. Vampire, Mage, and all those games might pretend they are "narrative" games, but when you get into their design, they're much more mechanically inclined than they let on, they just have different mechanics than DnD. Further, almost all the dynamic systems with liscenses, save for PbtA, are mechanically crunchy games. Modphius, who have the Conan, Star Trek, and Fallout franchises uses a quite crunchy 2d20 system that's a lot of fun. Savage Worlds, which now has the Rifts, Pathfinder license, and their own Deadlands setting is also a fairly crunchy system with a focus on character advancement... and of course there's the elephant in the room that is DnD.
Sounds about right. I was often just stuck going to places like roleplaygateway when I was younger.
 

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