Are there any systems made for the Avatar universe? If not, what would be a good one to use?

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>tfw you will never play an Air Bedouin who is tired of being genocided all the time so they go full Israeli Secret Service and start fucking assassinating threats to the Air Nation like Jewish Zaheer

I even put thought into ways I would use weapons and shinobi tools to disguise the fact I was even using airbending, like an actual fucking Ninja kite, shurikens guided/propelled by the wind, air dispersed gasses and poisonous powders, air dispersed razor wire, etc.

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Dragon blooded from Exalted is 100% what you want. Look at the monk powers who have element powers...

Avatar d20

>d20

>2017
>d20

This. LotW is weirdly crunchy for a narrativist system and actually learning how to play it is a fucking nightmare due to the godawful editing and layout of the core book, but if you manage it? Holy crap it is the best system for high flying action I have ever played.

I'm not sure, OP, but I heard there's a really nice system in the trash can. You should check it out!

Bring Avatar with you.

I've heard that Fate Core and Accelerated both handle it pretty well, but obviously Fate's a bit polarizing.

While I've yet to have played it, Open Legend would handle it very well.

Part of the problem with most systems is that they don't deal with improvised magic very well.

We instinctively know how to deal with physical things, because we interact with them all the time. Wet things are slippery, rocks are hard, sand is loose and hard to stand on.

The problem with magic is that we don't interact with it all the time, so we don't instinctively know the limitations. Is throwing a fireball harder in hot or cold air? When you're creating a todal wave with pure will, how does distance affect things? Is creating a rock wall more difficult than flinging a boulder? You can come up with answers to these, but it's difficult to systemitize them.

The two main solutions that get implemented are rigid, D&D style spell lists, which don't capture the mystical nature of magic, or narrativist improvising, which is better flavor wise, but also makes it harder to make it feel like you're advancing and gaining a deeper intuition for the subject.

PbtA does seem like a good system for it. The way that things ramp up and snowball definitely seems like a good way to capture the high energy feel that Avatar has

Remember the six billion airbenders

I maintain Fate is the best system overall for it. It won't quite capture the exponential power gain you see in the shows as points out but it still works terrifically. Bending doesn't work like D&D magic; Katara didn't open her spellbook and caster her 4th Level Water Whip. Bending forms are martial arts, not sorcery.

But I find Fate is incredibly difficult to run and play unless your players are good writers. Which mine really aren't. I actually am running an East Asian style fantasy game loosely based on AtLA, complete with elemental martial arts fights. I'm using Savage Worlds, and made the bending styles into unique Edges tied to the Fighting skill. It doesn't perfectly capture the way it works in the shows but it's worked pretty well so far.

>Party's Oven.png

While I respect the design in FATE, the lack of enjoyable and mechanically rich combat is the thing which would make me not want to use it for Avatar.

If that's not a problem for you and your group, then it'll work fine, but when you're playing in a game in a setting with such awesome fight scenes, I'd want mechanics that actually live up to that, and FATEs combat has always been one of its weakest aspects in my experience.

But I feel Fate works really well for the kind of improvisational uses of bending you see in the show. Things like Azula using Firebending to jump far, or Katara skating across a strip of ice. That sort of stuff is hard to abstract in a more rigid system.

Thing is I'm not sure if you really can replicate the show's combat in any meaningful way. It's extremely fluid and situational. You either try to replicate it wholesale and bog everyone down with a million rules for every little thing, or make it as barebones as possible and just give simple dice rolls fancy descriptions.

This is where I'd default to Legends of the Wulin, although I've already summed up the up and downsides in LotW's combat is a third option from the two you give. It's abstract but also mechanically deep, giving you a lot of useful mechanical options but leaving the fluff relatively open, as well as making elements of your description, and even things like your characters beliefs or ideals, meaningful and tangible parts of every combat. It also has some incredible rules for the consequences of a battle, with a defeated opponent being inflicted by a social or spiritual condition just as easily as a physical injury.

It's really neat... Once you get past the awful core book and figure out how it's meant to work. Such a fucking shame that they didn't do slightly more work on the game before the company imploded.

Legend of the Wulin does fluid combat very well, but it's also very weird until you take the time to sit down and understand it, which is hard because the book is laid out/edited in a non-intuitive way.

I thought Wulin was about only (crazy) martial arts, not magic?

Wuxia tends to blur the line, and LotW is a system that's very easy to refluff and rescale. I'm in a magical girls game using it and it works perfectly.

For the kind of supernaturally empowered martial arts combat you see in Avatar, LotW is the RPG which I think could capture it most effectively.

There's literally elemental Chi.

It can do Avatar fine.

I didn't finish Korra, so did they actually reveal secret airbenders living like ninja or was Aang for real the last of his kind?

Aang was the last, but then Spirit world bullshit deemed that people randomly became airbenders all over the world so Tenzin had to become a door to door salesman to try and recruit them

I've been working on a full conversion of FFG Star Wars to Avatar since September.

Here is what I have so far:

docs.google.com/document/d/1SCD0NBMaCJ54njx0uXVjzsV60iw-L7ViEWJndwom3vQ/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to leave comments. I have not play tested or balanced any of this content yet and the content is still severely lacking in terms of late-game bending techniques, adversaries, gear & equipment, and adventures....

But check it out.

I really think that Fantasy Flight Game's narrative dice system would work beautifully for Avatar considering the fast-paced context.

They created the system to emulate off-the-wall adventures in a vast Star Wars universe which I think translates well to players who want to explore the Avatar universe as it was presented in a serial television show.

The core mechanic for Star Wars is the narrative dice which relies on a Pass/Fail mechanic. You want to perform an action and you either succeed or you don't. The nuance is that sometimes you fail but acquire some sort of advantage and sometimes you succeed but with unintended negative consequences. FFG's dice system perfectly captures this.

I think the combat system is what needed the most work to really emulate the fluid and often spontaneous ad-hoc nature of the fights in the Avatar world. So when it comes to bending, entrenched techniques (like the water whip) are outlined as though they were Force techniques.

That is: you get the basic technique but you also have the ability to take on more stress to enhance that technique in ways to make it more powerful, potent, or to boost the form's utility. So specific bending forms are handled by a Bending skill (itself reliant upon *any* of the characteristics depending on the nature of the ability) whereas generic moves that are narrative, like sliding across an ice path or using earthbending to enhance your ability to climb a steep cliff, are handled by a Bending Arts skill to represent the more utilitarian aspect of bending.

By separating certain techniques into outlined abilities (Bending) and free-form maneuvers (Bending Arts), I've provided players with clear-cut mechanics for combat AS WELL AS narrative flexibility for improvisation.

GURPS
No, really, there is entire source book about magic + martial arts and thus improvising "spells"