Role Playing in Avatar.

[Rawbeard]

I think the Lion Turtles confuse people.

[Prak]

Oh, right. I remember thinking about it at the time, now. The old lore is that people learned air bending from the sky bison, fire bending from the dragons, earth bending from badgermoles and water bending from... the moon? not sure. This doesn't necessarily invalidate that, as Wan demonstrably did learn better fire bending from a dragon. I think it's more along the lines of "this was ancient prehistory, or a myth that a lot of people believe," and there's nothing saying there wasn't a collapse of society, or a bunch of people that just haired off without being granted bending from lion turtles, and they later learned it from the animals--which can all be seen as animals with awakened spirits.

[Rawbeard]

pretty much. of course that left a "plot hole" why people didn't just learn air and earth bending en masse, since the bisons and badgers are still around. That obviously did not happen, the ability to bend must have come from somewhere else, innate or bestowed. the turtles and Wans trainings montage closed that gap. the energy bending turtle hinted at that in Aang's series, too.

Can't think of anything else that might be considered wrongbad canon.

[MGuy]

Actually, one of the great weaknesses of LoK's first season was the complete unwillingness to address whether Amon (whether or not he was sincere) was actually voicing legitimate grievances held by the population; I mean, he seems to have a *lot* of followers.

For fuck's sake, the whole Equalist movement was based on the premise that the benders were a privileged class, and the response of the city was to have their all-bender police enforce a curfew on non-benders.

Honestly all of LoK feels like one really big missed opportunity.The themes explored are FANTASTIC. The Equalist movement, the horror of losing their bending, the way the spirits work, the story of the first avatar, history of and evolution of bending, the nature of bending itself, the relationship between the Lionturtles and humans, etc etc. Each and every one of these things could've been a season onto itself though you really could've folded multiple subjects per season. Yet it just seems that the writers didn't just drop the ball they threw it away.

[Prak]

As I've gotten back into magic lately, I've started following Mark Rosewater on Tumblr, where he answers random questions. I've come to find out that, apparently, Kamigawa block (one of my favourites) was horribly received. There are a lot of reasons to this--storyline that didn't necessarily grab people, mechanics that didn't interact with cards outside of the block, mechanics that were overall lacklustre, etc.

But I started wondering since LoK season 2 started up--what if Avatar-verse were to be used as a basis for a Magic set?

[Whipstitch]

Avatar isn't a full-on kitchen sink setting so there isn't really enough scrap laying around to fill out a full-fledged set while keeping Avatar flavor around in any real meaningful way. There's no intent to throw shade in that statement, btw--I like the Avatar-verse as much as the next guy. But a big chunk of what makes the shows work is the relative focus--for the most part, the stuff benders can do with the 4 elements is pretty intuitive, and the limitations they labor under help keep the stories from entering into crazy town. It's to the show's benefit that you can explain a master firebender's powerset on a back of a postcard, but it'd be hard to replicate that kind of simplicity without just taking pre-existing cards like Lightning Bolt and Fireball and slapping some Zuko and Azula art on there.

[Prak]

Well, a set can certainly reprint some number of cards. The four nations map to the colours somewhat ok... though one might need to do dual-colour nations or something... so WU Airbenders, UB Waterbenders, GR Earthbenders, BR Firebenders. There are a large number of animals that would make good creatures, and there are plot lines ready made.

[Username17]

Magic did a 180 card set for Romance of the 3 Kingdoms. Doing an Avatar set would be easy. Even a full block is only 579 cards if they kept it to the size of the last one (or 666 if they did it like the one before that, there's a lot of variability in there). Remember that you can do a Creature card for every type of military unit, including groups that are bigger or smaller (so you can have a Water Tribe Hunter, a Water Tribe Hunting Band, and a Water Tribe Grand Hunt as different cards), and another creature for every kind of bender (remembering that there are healer benders and ice scultpers, who are different kinds of specialist Water Benders), and you can have as many specific characters as you want get their own creature cards. You can have a Land or Enchantment for every single place. You can have an instant or Sorcery for every single major bending move. You can have a card for every major event. You can have a card for every kind of creature in the world.

There are literally over nine thousand pages on the Avatar Wiki, and some of the things that you'd want to make cards out of don't get their own pages. Like Earth Nation Heavy Infantry or whatever. Coming up with five hundred and some cards to fill three sequential expansion sets is trivial.

The big problem as far as Avatar + Magic goes is that the colors and terrains don't match up right. The Earth Kingdom lives in Plains and Mountains and their heraldic color is Green, but they are game mechanically probably White. The Fire Nation lives on Islands, and their color is obviously Red. The Air Nomads live in Mountains, their color is Yellow, and their game mechanics are Blue. The Water Tribes live in swamps and snow covered lands, their heraldry is Blue, and their game mechanics are Green.

And of course, there's the minor problem that none of the major factions are Black. There are some Water Benders who are Black, and some evil spirits who are Black, and some individual bad people who are Black, but there's no Black nation. Republic City might be a fifth faction, but it is not Black. There is even a fifth energy thing to have, but it's pretty explicitly colorless rather than Black.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Given how much of a disconnect there is there, you'd probably just give up on having nation/color connection. You could do up some non-basic lands like Ba Sing Se which tap to produce 1 mana of any color towards any Earth Kingdom card and such, and the cards are just whatever color their mechanics and flavor suggest.

[Prak]

That might be a better way to do things, and then you either make super/sub card types tied to nations or bending techniques, or you use watermarks like Ravnica and Scars of Mirrodin did.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Given how much of a disconnect there is there, you'd probably just give up on having nation/color connection. You could do up some non-basic lands like Ba Sing Se which tap to produce 1 mana of any color towards any Earth Kingdom card and such, and the cards are just whatever color their mechanics and flavor suggest.

I'd rather have spell lands.

EDIT: I don't know why the url isn't URLing, so I split it off.

http://magiccards.info/query?q=o%3A%22} ... an&s=issue

[Chamomile]

Oh pretty please! Would love to see avatar turn into an rpg I'm sure it could be a great hit.

[silva]

I think Wushu would be an awesome fit for Avatar.

[Wiseman]

Final episodes are already up on nicks website for some reason.

[Prak]

Unfortunately, most youtube clips of awesome fight scenes involve someone taking some random song and blaring it. f all of those, I could only find the Fire Bending fights with the original music.

-Katara and the Water Master's duel
-Storming the Earth King's palace
-Toph in the Arena, both against Aang and against all the wrestlers together
-Can't think of much of one for firebending, although probably Azula's introductions. (Less ridiculously high powered one here)
-Can't think of many for Aang.

Aang rarely uses air bending to fight. He is a pacifist monk, and avoids conflict even at personal cost. By the time he has resigned himself to fighting back at all, he is mixing it up with waterbending, and by the time he really strikes to incapacitate, he is using earth bending as well.

The do mention outright that it gives you super leaping and ultrafast running just as a normal thing that it does.

-Username17

Surprisingly, I couldn't find anything with bending and necromancy that I could really use. So this thread necro is brought to you by Blood Bending

Thinking about the idea of attendant buffs to magic arts, what about using AS's system and structure for a game about bending? Instead of three power sources there are four, and then each discipline is, well, a discipline. So instead of Chasing the Storm, you have Lightning Bending,m but then it otherwise works pretty similarly. Just with a WoF resource system.

[Username17]

After Sundown has a number of basic game mechanics that would be useful for such a thing. The dicepool system inherently allows log effects in character ability allowing the difficulty chart to smoothly progress from "lifting a rock" to "throwing a giant block of stone" without having to literally break the RNG or make a new subsystem. The dicepools being made of various stat+skill combinations means that different characters will inherently gravitate to using different maneuver sets without having to shit all over specific character concepts with railed character classes.

Now there's a couple things that just won't work. The big thing is the effects of maneuvers themselves. If you're going to make a game that is largely about kung fu fighting, it has to matter whether you're using a series of combination punches or a mighty ax kick or whatever. And that means that you need a maneuver/stance interaction game that is at least as interesting as 3rd edition D&D's square control game.

Such minigames can be pretty abstract, it could be about color changing or runs of card suits or whatever. An RPG is first and foremost a game. But for martial arts to be as front and center as this, you need to have a big part of the game be doing stuff with talking about what your martial artists are doing. And FATE style "say whatever the fuck you want, get +2" is not goign to cut it.

-Username17

[erik]

I dunno if the Elementalists from my Nexus project would fit the bill. The elemental spells are intended to be able to emulate avatar's benders, at least to some degree. I didn't keep their entire schemes with water-healing/plants/puppetry/power cancellation, earth-metal/lava/tremorsense, fire-electricity/flight, air-speed/flight, but it wouldn't be hard to add on.

Magic runs off of having a pool of mana that you can allocate to have a number of effects running concurrently, or pour it all into one for a larger effect in some cases.

If you want to be an earth bender for example, you have Earth Bending(earth), Elemental Barrier (earth), and Force Bolt (earth).

Lets you shape things, make impromptu walls, and throw rocks. Doesn't have the entombing I suppose, but that wouldn't be hard to add on too for a game that is totally focused on elemental schticks.

[Prak]

Putting together a martial arts system and bending disciplines for an AS hack would dovetail very nicely with my desire for a system that uses d6 dicepools that's about kung fu so I can use these dice I bought.

What about basing a martial arts system on AS's argument stuff? Basically replace the various argument forms with martial arts styles. Maybe expand Combat into a few different skills based on hard/soft style splits?

[Longes]

So Fire Hitler instead of Fire Joker.

He did give us this wonderful clip by GanXingba.