This began as a leisure exercise in putting a few moves together and apparently ended as a full draft of a playbook.
Based (shamelessly) on the Avatar cartoon show (which everyone should be watching), with various portions stolen from the four corners of the Tavern, including Jacob Randolph , the Ninja playbook from Lee’s Lists, and Grim World.
Completely unplaytested, probably borked on more than one level, and kind of a joy to put together – as far as borked stuff goes.
Anyway, since I’ve come this far, I’d be interested to see where I’ve mis-stepped and where this can be improved.
Obliged!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzuG4my2HZ_fUWJ6d1pfWHcweWs/edit?usp=sharing
Tony Scinta III look at this.
I love it. This leads to an involved conversation, but I like where you’re going and I really want to play this.
I had thought Phil posted this originally so I went into edit-for-play mode, I hope you don’t mind.
From first a glance, I’d change earth to close, far. Earthbenders suck at mid-range combat.
I’d kill multiclassing all together or put it on tier 2. Its the tendency of benders to rely heavily on their dominant skill rather than branch out. Iroh is the only one I can think of that broke that trend, and I think it had more to do with circumstance than personal growth.
Superskills could feasibly be compendium classes if you want to be a purist, but I like where they are.
Thanks for the feedback, Tony Scinta III; On reflection, I absolutely agree on changing Earthbending to Close and Far – makes more sense and gives it some range diversity from the others.
I’m hesitant to take the multi-class moves out. I won’t argue about the nature of benders and multiclassing – i’d say that most of the secondary skill sets we’ve seen in the show are the result of a compendium class, or (in the current season) of a person multi-classing INTO a bender class, as opposed to multi-classing out of it.
As this got turned into a draft playbook, I realized that not everyone would want to play a straight ‘bender’ class (which is the reason for a couple of the Naruto-inspired moves, incidentally). On top of that, there are a few good martial artist playbooks that could get tied into this class nicely, and I wanted to be able to take advantage of that. Also, since the class is a base D6 class, some of the oomph would come from multi-classing. I “Fire-bender” here would benefit a lot from a fighter move, for example. But mostly, I put them in because they are an option that can be left aside in favor of the rest of the moves, which I think (read: hope) give a feel closer to a pure bender-type. It was really a design choice of: ‘Options are good, and options are optional.’
Finally, I agree that the advanced bending stuff could certainly be placed into compendium classes – but I liked giving the playbook access to all of them in the hopes of creating something that wasn’t tied overly to the television show. Were I ever to run a campaign in the world of avatar, this would definitely require an overhaul, though!
Again, I really appreciate the commentary, and I’m glad you like it! I’m going to keep coming back to it and (hopefully) honing it a little bit more – I’ll post a v3 in the event that there are enough changes to warrant it 🙂
Hell, if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get a chance to playtest the damn thing at some point and see if it works as intended!
The more I look at this, the more I’m tempted to run with a full simulationist experience of avatar.
In that case, looking at the base classes, these things don’t fit into the avatar world. I would want to see two classes, benders, who have a sheet in front of them, and a multi class type who selects moves from a set of cards, basically building their own class from all available options (these would be optionally limited) as they go.
I’d make moves about interaction with certain groups of people, royalty, military, white lotus, and I’d reward players for discovery rather than loot.
Also ‘parlor tricks’ replace adventuring gear wholesale. The item section would be completely sparse, save for macguffins and tools that each class uses.
If were going off the beaten path and running with a different kind of experience, look at the Druid’s elemental mastery ability. Christopher Sniezak rolled with my interpretation of this as calling forth warring minor gods to do my bidding. Failure invokes catastrophe. That gave him plenty of fodder for drastically changing the stakes. We may want to look at the cost of failure.
I would add a table move that pertains to accessing magic (much like location moves from ‘the hood’) that reads something like “Write a move about the cost of accessing these abilities”, “Write a move about how magics interact with eachother” akin to the ghostbusters theme of ‘don’t cross the streams’.
Back end wouldn’t change much, but I’d take away either the wizard and druid playbooks, or the fighter, thief and ranger playbooks depending on the experience that I wanted to craft and ultimately what the game is about. Do I want to offer niche protection, or do I want to play a game that focuses on the consequences of magic?
Gimme a shout if you’re at qcc, I could talk about this all day.