Has there ever been an Avatar tabletop? How would you do it?

A:TLA is pretty good, though it's definitely got some issues. It's a show I usually rewatch once a year, partially for nostalgia and partially because I just really like it. Season one is a kind of slow start, Season 2 ratchets it up a lot and has some great moments as well as some disconcerting possibilities for the origin of my hypnosis fetish and Season 3 alternates between fucking excellent and pretty okay.

I'd say it's worth a watch.

>When you realize that even Mary sue Republic City was originally founded on territory populated by Fire Nation/Earth Nation halfbreeds.

Genesys has a full-length system book in their trove. It's not bad, if you like FFG Star Wars and all that that implies.

I'd use Legends of the Wulin, personally, but it'd take some tweaking. Also, y'know, the unavoidable fact that the system as presented is a total fucking mess and way more trouble to learn than it has any right to be.

I've also pondered a few post Korra flavours on the setting, vaguely titled 'The Lost Earthbender' and 'The First Voidbender'.

The Lost Earthbender would occur during a period of population explosion across the world, with populations falling through the cracks and the White Lotus funding their established structures and practices absolutely insufficient to actually find the next Avatar, set in an era where he exists and is presumably out there, but the world is forced to make do without him as, while he must be of age right now, apparently he's just doing his own thing, with the PC's being problemsolvers basically going around working together to solve problems he rightly should. With the Avatar themselves likely being a background PC who shows up once in a blue moon, slowly revealing exactly why they're acting more like a robin hood man of the people figure than an agent of the establishment.

The First Voidbender, meanwhile, was pondering a future where they've achieved spaceflight and discovered, beyond the limits of their world, the fifth element of Void. Void is strange and unsettling, with the potential to warp or corrupt the bending of terrestrial practitioners, while the nascent Voidborn peoples are looked on with distrust as the first Voidbenders begin to be born. But then the Avatar cycle moves... And instead of progressing by normal rules, a Voidbending Avatar is born, creating a political upheaval as the voidborn demand recognition as a true nation with the backing of their Avatar as a major bit of leverage. Exploring the metaphysics of the Void and exploring the politics of trying to establish a new nation in such a traditionalist world struck me as potentially interesting.

no

I was thinking of having it have been written by the cabbage guy.

...I mean, considering how much he shits all over the original Gaang as well as making himself the founder of a what is basically a megacorp, I can see it.

>Has there ever been an Avatar tabletop?
I fuckin wish

I mean, out of the other Avatars we know about, Kuruk seemed pretty shit at his job in general, Kyoshi only cared about her own home and Roku was basically the firebender Paul von Hindenburg.

So at least Korra picked a central multicultural republic to be a lackey for.

The humor and filler can be pretty hit-or-miss but it's worth trying for the worldbuilding and creative fight scenes.

Legend of Korra series was ok. The thing that intrigued me the most was the Dark Avatar.

It was heavily implied he was just destroyed. But my headcanon says it just started a new cycle opposite of the avatar. Where an individual will be born with almost complete mastery of a single element from the start and all the knowledge of their past lives. This figure will usually lurk in the shadows, influencing powerful figures.

Which brings me to imagine a cyberpunk avatar setting with a fully grown CEO as the dark avatar against a child avatar raised on the streets.

As much as a LOATH Korra, you can probably use her stupidity to your advantage. She severed the connection with the Past avatars, so the next will only have her "wisdom" to fall on.
Evil Avatar leading Bender Supremacists.
"My brothers and sisters. My fellow Benders! For too long, we have been ostracized for our abilities. We have been Segregated, exploited! loathed! WHY should the Firebender labor as a low paid Smelter? Why should the Earthbender labor in the dark tunnels? It is because the rest of the world fears us. They fear our gifts! And these ARE gifts, my brothers and sisters....not curses. The very elements themselves are at OUR command. Not theirs! They are right to fear us. Us, the chosen of the spirits. Us, the TRUE Rulers of this World. Look at the Equalists, who hunted our people like dogs! Look to the factories and the mines, where those blessed with amazing talents are Exploited and Opressed for the greed of the Unchosen. But I say to you, this will no longer stand. One cannot tame nature. One cannot shackle it's will. And us, my brothers and sisters? We ARE nature. We are it's power made manifest. My brave followers, my loyal compatriots, my fellow....Chosen. Let the world fear us, as long as they now. Let them hate us, as they always have. Let them KNEEL BEFORE US, as they have been made to do!"

I honestly might just ignore that part. It cuts off so many interesting future plot hooks. Or say that, later in her life, she was able to renew the connection or something like that.

>inb4 someone gives non benders classes beyond Antibender and Fighter

I still think the Bender Supremacist idea could work. Normal people shat all over them during the Korra series, so having their own version of the Equalists might be interesting.

As said, just pretend Korra is fanfiction. It fucks up the setting way too much to really play with.

So what classes?
Fire, water, earth air, antibenders and fighters?

I don't think all the setting elements in Korra are terrible. The increased urbanisation, the industrialization of Bending, the emergence of new national identities aside from the classic four and the struggle of society to adapt to technology and the emerging middle class are all pretty cool things that are worth exploring more than the show itself did.

And it goes even further when you remember he was a primary source for that Boy in the Iceberg play...

No Monk equivalent? Are the Kyoshi Warriors or Sokka's sword teacher just Fighters, then?

Hug me user, because that's exactly how I see LoK

It is telling that many fans openly supported Kuvira. At least she wasn't a whiny brat.

Yes.

Delineating people into "classes", especially non-benders, kind of contradicts a lot of the series' meta themes.

Classes don't fit well, yeah. Bending is potent, but I think you need to apply the Star Wars principle, how you keep non-force users relevant alongside a force user PC. PC's are, by default, non-benders who can keep up with Benders. They might not have as much direct power but through some advantage or another they can hold their own and contribute, because if they couldn't do that then they aren't a PC.

I wouldn't have minded it if it were set further in time to be better differentiated, but as it stands it's too close to the main time period to really distinguish, and as a result it harms the setting.

It has some cool stuff, and I liked the 20's vibe, but it just wasn't avatar. Avatar was a wuxia-inspired ancient asian fantasy world. Korra just...isn't.

I'd say the best way to do it would by not making benders "classes", or at least not the main one.

You could totally play a Fighter who is also a waterbender, for example.

People having specific skillsets typified by specific character archetypes is against the series' themes? How?

Also going to point out it's called The LEGEND of Korra

Which means it could all be that, a legend, and extremely apocryphal

Holy fucking shit LADS DID WE JUST SAVE AVATAR!?

You forget the point of Sokka's Master, which is non-benders aren't truly gimped.

But there does need to be some way of articulating that in a game. I just object to class bloat since this world is full of people who are multi-talented. Aang could weave necklaces. Sokka liked geography and history. Katara could cook.

>Be a Fire Nation soldier
>Be a hardened veteran Fighter
>Be one who has sacrificed much for your homeland.
>Face Katara, a child waterbender.
>Feel your neck snap as the child hits you with a water whip.
>Be a dead veteran with a wife and 3 kids back home.
This is why classes don't work.

Honestly, you just need to make it a more flexible chargen with being a bender eating a shitton of points, enough that a non-benders investments elsewhere keep them equivalent.

The show makes a point that non-benders can equal benders, but it's also the case that benders do have inherent advantages that take extremely hard work for non-benders to match. Hence the idea that all non-bender PC's should be that sort of exceptional.

Zuko was also a sword-wielding martial artist who could well be a Fighter/Monk type even without his bending.

>Be an orc soldier
>Be a hardened veteran raider.
>Be one who has sacrificed much for your homeland.
>Face PC, a child caster.
>Feel your neck snap as the child hits you with a Magic Missile.
>Be a dead orc with a wife and 3 kids back home.
This is why classes don't work.

This is why I used Qin for my game up here . Even if you aren't a bender, you just spend your points on other crazy Wuxia abilities, and it lets you have nonbenders who can still kick bender ass. Additionally, the way we homebrewed up how bending works means that you have benders with tons of power and absolutely no skill and benders who can barely move their element but can do so with perfect, razor precision. Bending takes a lot of points because of this, but makes up for its point sink by being bending, while nonbenders instead can sink those points into all kinds of bullshit.

Also, there's an already in-game version of Toph's blindsense already available, so it's great.

But that isn't an argument against classes, it's an argument against shitty class design.

The main draw of the avatar franchise is elemental bending. A rogue class would take away from air benders being the quick and agile class for instance.

Does avatar have stealthy agile rogues? Yes. But they shouldn’t be as good at it as Airbenders

What does that have to do with Monks?

Anyway, Avatar does have stealthy agile rogues who and non-bender close combat fighters who are better suited to it than benders. Playing as a Sokka, Suki, Mei, Ty Lee, Jet or Asami would obviously be perfectly within the setting.

Also stealth =/= speed and agility. Most of the airbenders we see are great at avoiding things but are generally pretty loud in doing so. They aren't better suited to sneaking about than anyone else.

I think you're missing out on an important point, though. While bending is the main cool thing, there are still a lot of badass, competent non-bending characters and people will want to play PC tier non-benders. It's why the 'PC's are exceptional' rule is important, IMO. Every non-bender PC is one of those rare, supremely competent people who can keep up and even outdo benders in their area of expertise.

PC benders should also be exceptional, so they should therefore be above regular benders and exceptional non-benders.

Just don't allow players to be non-benders if the setting is about fucking elemental kung fu.

After anime, I never even noticed the fillers in Avatar.
They are certainly there, but they aren't so abhorrently shitty like in your generic shonen, so they don't break the flow of the show.

This.

But both series have exceptional non-benders both as main characters both alongside the bender protagonists and as capable villains, so it's very much a part of the setting?

... you know, with some re fluffing you could make rogue trader work. like basic benders can do their stuff safely but when they really push it risk low tier demon (spirit) shenanigans.

The first series was called "The Legend of Aang" outside the USA, IIRC.

Maybe in Canada. Here in France it's just a translation of "The Last Airbender"

yep, mostly because in the UK 'bender' has another meaning

>nonbenders
You all can keep your not benders. If I’m playing in avatar game, I’m gonna be playing a bender

it is a kids show at heart (it aired on nickelodeon), so the jokes can be a little childish and sometimes the themes are a bit too on the nose. and there are times that the adherence to the PG rating puts a frustrating limit on how fights can go (for example, one antagonist fights using throwing knives but literally never hits anyone directly with them because you can't have blood in a kid's show).

that said, for a kid's show it handles lots of mature and sometimes outright dark themes pretty well and the characters are all really relatable and likeable. the worldbuilding is fantastically done and the fights are well choreographed and animated. they used real-world martial arts as reference for most of the combat. i highly recommend at least trying to watch it. it's not for everyone but there is a lot to like about it.

the above only applies to the last airbender though. korra is an absolute clusterfuck of a dumpster fire that has zero redeeming qualities that takes a steaming dump on everything the original did well. avoid it at all costs.

>Is this show any good
Probably one of the best childrens shows of all time. Up to you if you want to watch children's shows though.

Middle of yurop here, it was "the last airbander"

korra was fucking good, it just stumbled a bit in the first season. The first season ender was incredible and if you didn't like it then you clearly don't enjoy good things.

Backing up your unpopular opinion.

Seasons 1, 3 and 4 of Korra are good.

First season was pretty good and a lot of fun, second season started super strong but really shouldn't have doubled down on the spirit world bleed-through, third season kicked all sorts of ass, fourth season was great at first but ended on a bad note because the giant robot was really stupid and Korra's nonviolent 'I'll send you to jail' decision point seemed ultimately unearned. The whole climax felt like an awkward way to avoid addressing the finality of the arc.
And as someone who only watched season 4 after all the hullabaloo about the closing shot, it certainly isn't entirely out of nowhere; there one or two bits where they're basically on a date, but they coulda/shoulda had a few moments earlier on to communicate things clearer to the viewer.

>spoiler

I got the impression that it was the direction they wanted to go but their hands were tied by a network that didn't. Even the closing shot is intentionally pretty ambiguous on the matter.

it's not an anime

My go to description of Korra is it's like the Star Wars Prequels. A poorly-thought-out mess which added a bunch of unwelcome and mystifying changes to the mythology. Along with art and action directions which really hurt the tone set in the previous series (example: spirits going from weird inscrutable entities to Technicolor monsters for Korra to punch). Like the Prequels, it also had a bunch of bland, annoying characters who simply couldn't match the original cast. It even has its own analogue Ewan McGregor in the character of JK Simmons' Tenzin as the only likable person there.

Now this isn't totally fair; Korra is far more watchable than the Prequels. And unlike the Prequels, LoK doesn't tell us a story we don't actually need to be told. But it's still a disappointment. If you want cool action and art design or just want to go back to this world it's fine. But the character development, mystery, and sense of adventure are all absent.

...

You could also do a Ty Lee "fuck your bending" chi-blocker type character

First of all, it's technically not an anime, it just borrows heavily from that art style.
Some of the filler in the first and second season gets a little tedious, but that goes away completely towards the end.
It is a kid's show, so you're not going to see much blood or anything sexual, although that doesn't mean it doesn't have it's messed up moments, ie the blood witch.
I would totally recommend it, especially if you have kids to watch it with as both of you will get quite a bit from it.
I would skip the live action movie and the legend of whorra as they are both pretty shit and retroactively ruin everything good about the setting, characters, and theme of the first series.

While yes, the hundred year war undoubtedly advanced technology greatly, that is just generally what wars do.
And the even if the technology for war is better, that doesn't mean the common people have access to any of it, even the people of the fire nation still live in tribes and are trodden upon by their own army.
Not to mention that their first act was to exterminate a race of peace loving monks.

I would make it so that non bender players get more skill points to level with than benders, meaning that they can be much better at non bender things than a bender ever could be, just to balance things out so some people would play them.

I have some problems with the immediate setting, for example the lightning power plants.
In the original series lightning bending was rare, it was different, it was incredibly powerful.
Now, apparently everyone can do it with minimal effort.
Same thing with metal bending, Toph was able to learn it because she spent her whole life learning to sense the earth, and it took several days of constant effort to finally get it right, it just seems weird that it would be so common just around 50 years later.

>it took several days of constant effort to finally get it right

It took a few hours in a box.

You forget her learning she could do it was juxtaposed over Pathik saying people's own stubbornness is the root cause if why things like that are hard.

Genetic lotteries and power levels are shown time and time again as things people only think are real. Bryke themselves even said Sokka could have been a waterbender but his deep-seated skepticism and lack of spiritually prevented it.

>Toph was able to learn it because she spent her whole life learning to sense the earth, and it took several days of constant effort to finally get it right, it just seems weird that it would be so common just around 50 years later.
And Toph herself taught the skill to others after she herself invented it. It wasn't that others weren't capable, it's that she was the first one to realize how to do it because she could sense the impurities in the metal.

It was presumably the same story with lightning bending, the secret skill of the Fire Nation rulers which was likely opened up to the masses after Zuko came into power.
Also I don't think we ever see Mako use a real "lightning bolt" the way Azula could, he can just kind of make electricity and doesn't really use it in combat.

Korra was only good for her body.

And yet Mako still went back to Asami.

Granted, even a rack as nice as Korra's probably isn't worth dating a woman who shows up at your job and trashes your desk because you argued politics the night before n

On a similar note, I'm pretty disappointed with how elementalist monks turned out. I wish it was more doable.

My main issue is that Toph wasn't fucking bending the metal like they do in Korra. She found a work around by bending specks of earth within it.

There was a 4E homebrew someone made and released with classes based on benders that wasn't bad.

She wasn't literally bending "specks of earth" within the metal, the visual effect was to establish her feeling the impurities in the metal and starting to see it as something she could bend. When she actually bends metal she does it as a homogeneous piece.

And anyway, she had decades to refine the techniques behind it.

Fuckin this

and this. Korra's body is 10/10, she a great-looking character. Sadly she's also a cunt with temper issues and sociopathic behaviors...

I remember seeing homebrew for 4e, Gensys, and D6

These peace-loving monks used to be Mongol invaders. Just see their air-based weapons.

I always liked the idea that the air nomads had some kind of dark past. Air bending has such incredibly lethal potential that I think it's kind of stupid that they've never abused it in the past.

Hell, imagine what an airbending bison mounted archer could do.

>tfw you preferred Korea

[Spoiler]I loved the tech and setting

Id love to hear more about how you make it work. Is It like a weapon skill or just a tao?

Also there is an user working om avatar the second age using genesys as a baseline worth checking out. Cant post it causeri Phone though

Korra season 3 is every bit as good as TLA got.

It's both actually. We split bending into two separate functions: The Tao of each bending style, which controls your power and potency of what you can bend, and the Skill of each bending style, which is the actual knowledge of the martial arts side of things. You can use the martial art style without spending Chi, and it uses Metal as its requisite stat, but then when you decide to actually add bending to it you use the Elemental stat associated with it instead (With Wood being Air). Coincedentally this also means that high level earthbenders are gigantic stamina tanks, since Earth governs your chi pool.

Additionally, each different type of bending has a different kind of effect in terms of damage: Air pushes you around, Earth being solid can't be deflected as easily, Fire does burning damage, and Water can hit around and through armor.

>and this. Korra's body is 10/10, she a great-looking character. Sadly she's also a cunt with temper issues and sociopathic behaviors...
Perfect for rape.

Relevant
Earth a best

Theyre all pretty cool desu

Anyone got the water one?

Could i convince you to post an example write up of say earth tao and its martial art?

What happened to make A:TLA so good?

>Animation
>Not a anime

Sorry, Won’t let me delete post. Mods help

Absolutely! And I'm pretty sure even the creators are aware of that because there's many scenes in the show where Korra gets beaten harsh, or she's in pain/tortured

>actually being butthurt about the yuri
>implying it didn’t make sense

This desu Season 3 was fucking hype.

The villains of Korra were great.

The Dai Li would be bretty good specialization imo. In a world where they weren't dealing with the Avatar, they'd be pretty boss.

...

>TLA: toph
>LoK: Jinora

If nothing else the people behind these series can make a damn fine loli