Someone actually did a d20 Avatar RPG. Haven't read through it, but I do not imagine that it is any good.
Yeah, looking through that really looks like they embraced every mistake that using unmodified d20 numbers might lead to. It really looks like people are going to be doing exactly the kind of ability spam you'd expect from that sort of thing. Basically, it's yet another game that decided that what we really needed from a spellcasting system was people being able to mix "seeds" together to make their own effects on the fly and generate DCs to make skill checks in order to use them all.
In practice what this sort of thing means is that people will design stuff ahead of time, because it's fucking algebra to get an effect to come in under DC budget. And then they will spam it because it's all they can do without whipping out a calculator.
And while they tried to do damage deflation (earth blast does 5d6 at 20th level, for example), it doesn't stop the game from being incredibly smack down oriented and fatal (you will note, for example, that even a bullshit 5d6 damage inflicts substantially more damage than is the death margin of a character).
Aang does not have a readily identifiable core style. There are no other airbenders with whom he can really be compared, and he is a master. Anything he does might be from any given style of airbending.
Doing things in terms of animals and plants is pretty reasonable. Even though in world they call it Foggy Swamp Style, it would probably be better to call it Banyan Style. Fire Bending could be named Dragon Style, and Tiger Style and such.
But you bring up an interesting point about non-bender combatants. Bending styles are kung fu disciplines. Water benders are running around doing Yang style Tai Chi, with the Fire Nation royalty busting out the Tai Kwan Do. Even without bending, Zuko can (and often does) kick peoples' ass with the martial techniques his bending discipline comes with.
Certainly on possibility is to do non-bender warriors by letting them grab non-bending options out of decks related to other classes. Another possibility is to make martial classes that are associated with the different warrior orders - thus making Kyoshi Warrior a class in the same way that Dai Li is a class (possibly linked in some way, because they were both founded by Kyoshi).
Storm Artists Net doesn't let people hotlink to their emoticons, btw.
Anyhow, the real questions are these:
How often would you like to "build" your deck? That is, you could plausibly be side boarding every combat round or only once a day - but more likely it'll be something in between. Like maybe let people take some kind of action to make themselves a hand out of whatever cards they want (including cards that are currently sideboarded).
How many dice do people want to be rolling? A attack could simply work unless countered, or you could have to-hit, dodge, damage, and soak rolls. Quite possibly something in between that.
How many non-card related actions do people want to deal with? You could seriously go all the way from none to having people move miniatures around the board and shuffling focus stones around their character sheet while keeping track of round to round ki effects. Probably something in between that.
Seriously, I could see Avatar running on what is essentially the Lunch Money combat engine.
• How many dice do people want to be rolling? A attack could simply work unless countered, or you could have to-hit, dodge, damage, and soak rolls. Quite possibly something in between that.
I would like relatively few rolls, so I could go with attacks automatically hit and then there's a defense roll to get out of the way; so there'd be two rolls per attack, defense and damage/effect. But of course, in the second episode Katara accidentally attacks Sakka instead of the Fire soldiers, so something has to be done about that.
• How many non-card related actions do people want to deal with? You could seriously go all the way from none to having people move miniatures around the board and shuffling focus stones around their character sheet while keeping track of round to round ki effects. Probably something in between that.
Minis might be appropriate, but given how mobile and agile most combatants are, I probably wouldn't have them in anything more restrictive than SOTC's zones. Focus stones could work, especially since it's clearly possible to be in a highly aggressive or highly defensive posture.
I think each player getting to roll 2 dice sets plus 2 per opponent is good. Attack, damage per round (no matter how many you attack) plus a dodge and soak mechanic every time you are attacked. I know some resolutions systems can allow someone to both attack and damage in one set of rolls, like net hits or something.
• How many non-card related actions do people want to deal with?
I'm personally sick of moving miniatures. But managing focus stones, ki effects, HP/stamina/MP and a hand of cards sounds great.
I had a signature here once but I've since lost it.
The way I understand bending to work, it is a skill. It's not some sort of magical power they have, but rather a skill gained by education and natural aptitude (like music or math). Thus shooting fire balls is no different than playing a guitar, and you need to learn the basic cords to be in the Fire Nation Army.
An advantage of Focus Stones is that they fit with a chat or forum game well. The key would be to set up the game so you actually wanted to use your Focus every round, because otherwise it's a non-stat.
So there's obviously an offense/defense slider. And Aang favors taking the defense slider up pretty high while The Boulder pus hs Offense slider to the max. But what else?
I could see a Speed/Perception split. Where you bypassed any attack whose range was less than the difference between your speeds, but attacks with a stealth higher than your Perception got combat advantage against you.
It's tempting to have a hard/soft split or a force/precision split, but honestly I can't figure out how that would work. Water Benders would just crank the softness up and Earth Benders would crank the hardness up and both would just leave it there. Those seem like they would be better as more of a static attributes thing. Force/Precision could still work though.
squee_nabob wrote:The way I understand bending to work, it is a skill. It's not some sort of magical power they have, but rather a skill gained by education and natural aptitude (like music or math). Thus shooting fire balls is no different than playing a guitar, and you need to learn the basic cords to be in the Fire Nation Army.
Just my 2 cents
Bending is definitely an innate thing. There are people who simply have no bending and will never get bending. Katara can learn new uses of Water Bending, but she can't learn Earth Bending from Toph, because she has no Earth Bending. Mai and Ty Lee have no bending, despite being very accomplished at the combat forms of their nation.
Most importantly of all, at the end of the show they seriously take Ozai's bending away. He doesn't forget how to do it or have his arms broken so he can't, the movements simply no longer conjure fire - in exactly the same way that those movements wouldn't conjure fire when used by some random kid from the Earth Nation.
FrankTrollman wrote:Bending is definitely an innate thing. There are people who simply have no bending and will never get bending. Katara can learn new uses of Water Bending, but she can't learn Earth Bending from Toph, because she has no Earth Bending. Mai and Ty Lee have no bending, despite being very accomplished at the combat forms of their nation.
I think we had a discussion about how it was tied to culture, which is why no nation has any of the other kinds of benders.
FrankTrollman wrote:Most importantly of all, at the end of the show they seriously take Ozai's bending away. He doesn't forget how to do it or have his arms broken so he can't, the movements simply no longer conjure fire - in exactly the same way that those movements wouldn't conjure fire when used by some random kid from the Earth Nation.
Having one's Kung Fu 'broken' is a classic of the genre. For instance, the White Eyebrow master had his Iron Shirt technique broken by the Shaolin masters he killed, which made him vulnerable to the revenge of the students of the surviving masters. Such a breaking can be done 'internally,' as Aang does to Ozai, by putting disruptive energy into the body which prevents the normal energies from functioning properly; or 'externally,' which would be by damaging the physical structures of the body to prevent them from performing the appropriate techniques. For instance, there's a way you can cripple a hand which makes it incapable of making a tiger hand, but doesn't interfere with crane hand at all.
FrankTrollman wrote:Bending is definitely an innate thing. There are people who simply have no bending and will never get bending. Katara can learn new uses of Water Bending, but she can't learn Earth Bending from Toph, because she has no Earth Bending. Mai and Ty Lee have no bending, despite being very accomplished at the combat forms of their nation.
I think we had a discussion about how it was tied to culture, which is why no nation has any of the other kinds of benders.
It seems to really be both. That is, both an innate quality... whether or not you have any bending for that type at all, and you only get one if you aren't a reincarnating demigod... and whether or not there are any masters of that type of bending in the area who are willing to teach you. Since the bending masters are secretive and mistrustful and, well, basically racist, it results in no one who is not of the right "clan" learning that type of bending, even though the various bloodlines for bending are probably scattered far and wide. Since there's no clear test for bending, and they haven't even seen the most basic bending techniques, they will only ever stumble upon bending powers by sheer accident, and bending very much seems to require both mind and body working towards it, such that it won't work if you are just screwing around... making discovering it by accident almost impossible.
Remember, most of the tribes learned by emulating naturally bending magical beings and then diversifying from there. So even the original (human) benders had to be taught.
Thymos wrote:Frank, with your deck mechanic how many cards do you think should be in a deck? Would you allow duplicates in the deck as well?
Depends on the prevalence of card drawing effects and the intended frequency of wrap-arounds. How often do people repeat maneuvers? Probably requires at least five times hand size, though.
I think the most important description of the process was by the Foggy Swamp Tribe. Upon learning that Katara could bend water, they remarked that she was kin. The implication was not that she was figurative kin, but that she was therefore definitionally a literal blood relation.
Thought for the day: the original fire benders are dragons. Specifically Korean dragons, apparently. The Fire Nation is pretty closely modeled on Korea in a lot of ways (on North Korea in a lot of ways too). The mythical origin of the Korean people actually is being descended from dragons - and it is likely that the Fire Nation has the same origin. It is entirely possible that most people in the Earth Nation have an actual badger mole somewhere in their family tree.
Of course, this being a fantasy world, it's also possible that you get those benefits from having been adopted by badger moles, without anyone having to have literally had sex with one. Of course, this being a fantasy setting, it is also possible that the first air benders were literally human babies born of sky bison.
Anyway, as for deck size, I would expect them to rise as people got more powerful of course. Low level people repeat moves a lot. The basic Fire Nation Warbender does the fire punch blast pretty often. Even some powerful people like Sparky Sparky Boom Man basically just uses the same move over and over again. So to an extent, I think people can choose to increase or decrease their deck size - up to a limit of only being able to put maneuvers you actually know into your deck. With defenses being focus related, having a lot of versatility in your deck would have substantial benefits. It would make it harder for enemies to guess what the right defensive grid would be.
So I suspect that it might actually be OK in principle to let people pare their deck down as much as they want (down to a single hand even) or grow it out to 40 or even 60 cards.
Well, I can believe it for the Foggy Swamp. The Water Tribe divided a long time ago into the Northern and Southern tribes, and it makes sense that a splinter group stayed in the swamp. And that this group, being based on the hillbilly stereotype as it is, would consider any other waterbender to be 'kin'. And mean it, and treat them as such.
(Which is how it works, anyway. If you find out you have a connection or something in common with someone you just met, it makes you a little more pre-disposed to like them.)
Now, I would say that bending was taught to (and learned by) people who had the talent, by the things which possessed such capabilities naturally, because I don't want to imagine being getting knocked up by dragons, badgermoles, and flying bison. So the Firebenders learned it from dragons, the Earthbenders from the Badger Moles (Toph learned her style from them, too, I think. When she ran away when she was little. I remember her saying she picked up the tremorsense. I imagine airbenders learned their stuff from the bison, and the waterbenders from the moon-spirit.
Now, I would say an important part of writing up powers is checking what people do in the show. Sure, we can't come up with the names and basis of the tricks Aang uses, nor any sub-schools which might be within Airbending, but watching a few youtube clips shows me Airbending can be used for...
-Generalized movement of a mass of air, whether it's a 'column' of it Aang is using to knock someone on their ass, or a whirlwind or a wall of it for deflection.
-An air-cutter effect (generally using his staff to help it).
-Flight and other forms of movement enhancement
But I remember a few episodes from the series being really showy as to what bending could do. Or, scenes at least...So if anyone can dig these up on YouTube...
-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.
-Can't think of many for Aang.
Last edited by Maxus on Thu Jun 17, 2010 6:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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.
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.
I've noticed that, when I was looking for a couple of Kenshin fights earlier. I remember being able to find episode snippets, but it appears Youtube is cracking down on that...
Anyway, I know Aang spends much of his early fights evading, usually by moving around a lot (see: Toph). And that time they were in the desert, he took out a buzzard-wasp with a long-range air-cutter. He's done it to rocks, too.
I recall thinking that Aang's fighting style mostly involves dodging and knocking someone on their ass with mega-gusts of air. Which does play into the pacifist monk thing (of course he'd rather not fight at all, but when he does at first, he doesn't really hurt people--he seems to mostly wear them out and incapacitate them. Or find ways to accomplish his objective without killing someone, such as when he goaded that firebender commander into burning all of his own ships).
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
And Uncle Iroh had 'that spirit realm adventure'. Of course, we haven't a clue what that means, but apparently during the animated books, he can see spirits because of something he did in the past.
FrankTrollman wrote:If you want to see an example of lower level adventures that can be had in the post-cartoon Avatar World: Zhao, of the Water Tribe.
-Username17
Holy shit, that's awesome. Is that really well done fanfic, or something by one of the writer/animators of the show?
FrankTrollman wrote:If you want to see an example of lower level adventures that can be had in the post-cartoon Avatar World: Zhao, of the Water Tribe.
-Username17
Holy shit, that's awesome. Is that really well done fanfic, or something by one of the writer/animators of the show?
That is done by one of the animators of the show. He apparently worked on How to Train Your Dragon as well. He also has a much darker and nowhere near as far along Avatar Alternate Universe comic where Aang got rescued from the ice by Sokka and Katara twenty years later, the Fire Nation owns everything, the moon has been destroyed, and the leader of the resistance is Jet.
There's also, looking at Katara and Sokka, the fact that bending may be just uncommon enough, amongst the water tribe, to be considered odd, and mysterious. Hell there's the implication that bending isn't "magic", due to Katara's vehement denial that it's not "magic water". I don't know what the earth nation thinks of bending in general though.
on the other hand, it may just be sibling teasing...
Last edited by Prak on Fri Jun 18, 2010 3:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Well, Fire Nation raids on the South Pole captured all the water benders and killed them or put them in death camps and then killed them, so benders being rare in Katara's tribe is an artificial and recent phenomenon.
