Rethinking Avatar Legends as a WoDu hack
I played Avatar Legends some time ago and although there were a lot of cool things about it, both mechanically and aesthetically, the game felt a bit too heavy on the rules for me. I think the world of Avatar is really unique and the playbooks create a lot of interesting prompts for playing your character, but having to juggle Conditions, Statuses, Balance, Center of Balance, Fatigue, Fighting Techniques and more was a bit too much to handle1. So I've been thinking about doing just like a way better designer than me did and trim down a very lengthy PbtA game into a two-page spread.
This is mostly some brainstorming on the matter, since I both legally can't publish an Avatar Legends hack and have no intent of doing so. Besides, as the people that have read or played my game know, layout and design are not my strongest suits, but I do feel like putting some thoughts out there. As I mentioned before, I am leaning heavily into the core of John Harper's World of Dungeons (WoDu) to guide my brainstorming.
For starters, I would obviously keep the classic 2d6 PbtA resolution system with failure, weak hit and strong hit, but extend it to all situations - i.e. remove the combat procedure (the Exchange). In WoDu fashion, there would be no more specific moves, just a 2d6 roll when something dramatic is at stake with a weak hit being a mixed success and a strong one a full success, adding a modifier from one of the Stats. Speaking of which, I like the Stats since they give me very much an "approach" vibe, kind of like Claymore's FIST. I could see a bending attack using basically any of the four (Creativity, Focus, Harmony and Passion) depending on the fiction and I love that.
Even though the Exchange is gone, I do think keeping the mechanic of Learned, Practiced and Mastered fightning techniques could be interesting, with them functioning like WoDu's skills. Something like having a Mastered technique meaning that whenever you use it, your roll results can only count as a weak or strong hit. Maybe doing something that isn't Learned could only count as a miss or weak hit? This makes me think characters should start with a couple of Learned techniques and a Mastered one, doing away with Practiced.
Despite keeping the fighting techniques, removing the Exchange makes me think I'd also remove Statuses since there's too many of them and they feel a little bit too similar to eachother, if I'm disregarding the Exchange-specific effects. Conditions I do like though, both as a mechanical way to deliver consequences and also as a general status check for you character, with the fiction first way of clearing them seeming nice to keep as well. I'm a bit iffy on Fatigue, since the concept of a resource that can be used to push yourself while acting as a Condition buffer is nice, but it just feels like a bit too much if I'm trying to trim things down. My current line of thought is just removing it and adding a Fatigued Condition.
Now, regarding Balance... I honestly have no idea. I think it's an awesome mechanic in concept, but using the moves to deal with it felt very fiddly and complicated. Would simply declaring that "whenever a character acts according to one of their principles, their balance shifts accordingly" be too cheap? Would it be interesting to put this choice in the hands of other players on the table, not the GM? If I'm keeping the negative consequence when the character loses their Balance, maybe there could be a simple pushing mechanic by letting the player shift their balance away from center and then letting them use it as a modifier, instead of costing Fatigue like in the original?2
I really wanted to be able to use a lot of the stuff from Avatar Legends without having to deal with all the heavy bits, so maybe this will get me running a "World of Legends" one-shot to see how it works out. Once again, these are all rather incomplete ideas, but writing them down somewhere helps me make a bit of sense out of them.
anb
Links3: Avatar Legends, World of Dungeons, FIST
I'm going to be talking about a lot of the mechanics and aspects of Avatar Legends. If you're willing to give Magpie Games your email for no justifiable reason, the core downloads and playbooks are free at their website.↩
The cost of over-relying on a principle is risking loss of balance, that seems fair enough. See, Balance is so cool in theory! Why are the Balance moves rules-as-written so weird?!↩
Doing this since Bearblog doesn't show hyperlinked text on the embedded preview when sharing. Had some weird previews in the past days.↩