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js_thrillYesterday, we did our session 0/character generation session. The system for ATLA:Legends is built on top of Powered by the Apocalypse, which is the game system used for Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Masks, and many other games. There are a lot of things i like about the core system, especially for rules-lite/narrative forward RPGs. Some of the things I particularly like are:
A) Players basically always roll 2d6 and add a fairly intuitive stat. This is relatively low rules overhead for the player to internalize. There may still be a lot of other stuff for them to pay attention to, but it's good that basically all the dice rolling revolves around the same idea: roll 2d6 and add the relevant stat.
B) Roleplaying/narrative depth is mechanically rewarded. Even newer D&D—which is less based on tabulating how much XP each monster is worth—hasn't really gotten its head around encouraging roleplay through game mechanics. And I understand that some people want simulation-y rules that go on while you roleplay, but I like when a game's structure supports and encourages the roleplaying, so, for example, the PBTA systems, as a baseline, tend to give you XP at the end of a session when you acted out your character's central motivations or played up their core characteristics, etc.
C) Character creation is often based around integrating the characters backstories. Lots of games have the issue where you are like "and why do these characters spend time together? I guess just because otherwise we wouldn't be playing a game?" But a lot of the PBTA games encourage you to work out elements of your character that bond them to one another so that, during play, you don't constantly wonder "why are we putting up with this guy again?"
So that's general thoughts about PBTA. The people I roleplay with locally tend to be much more into heavy-crunch systems that are more traditional in their structure, though. We've played D&D, L5R, Aberrant (which was very messy, but did have a lot of rules!), and some others I am forgetting. We tried playing Blades in the Dark recently and it was not for them. I like Blades, personally, but I think it just varies whether a group can get into it.
On to Avatar Legends. The first thing you do, or at least, are instructed to do (as we will see, we did switch up the recommended order on things a little bit) is pick an era to play in. This is actually a pretty substantial choice! Several of the eras exclude PCs getting to be Airbenders, for example. I mean, you can houserule things, and you don't have to obey canon, I guess. But if you are playing an Avatar the Last Airbender RPG, it is probably because you love the series, and care a lot about, at the least, some of the very basic elements of the canon, so deciding that, actually there are a bunch of other Airbenders after all, during Aang's lifetime, would be a Big Weird Choice. If you want Airbender PCs you pretty much have to play during the Kyoshi Era, the Roku Era, or the Korra era. And those are very different choices! Kyoshi era is when the four nations (as we know them) are pretty much having their borders established. Roku era is the one that had the least established about it before the RPG came out and added some plot details for you to put in your campaigns; most of what we knew were fire nation flashbacks. The Korra Era is all tech'ed up with cars and movies and so on. Anyway, we chose the Roku era, in part because one of our players hasn't watched Korra, but it also allowed us to worry less about stepping on canon stuff.
People were interested in the water tribe and the earth nation, in particular, and the book's info about the Roku era had some interesting historical developments that seemed like a good way to give us wedge into that:
The Northern Passage
For years, the Northern Water Tribe and the northern Earth Kingdom state of Chenbao have been embroiled in a dispute over local fishing and trade routes. Both nations have engaged in minor skirmishes and militarized the waters in-between as a show of force. A massive tsunami swept through those waters and struck the northern coast of Chenbao, nearly setting off a military conflict between the two sides. Chenbao blamed Waterbenders for sending the tsunami, while the Northern Water Tribe blamed Earthbenders for creating an underwater earth- quake. The truth is that both sides suffered losses from a natural disaster—the tsunami destroyed several Earth Kingdom towns and completely wrecked a Northern Water Tribe fleet. Greater tragedy was averted when Avatar Roku—supported by several airbending masters from the Northern Air Temple—intervened before a full-scale war broke out. Though both sides backed down, their navies remain in the waters ready to act at the first sign of wrongdoing from the other side. And the conflict is on a path back to greater tension as the governor of Chenbao now tries to tax any Water Tribe goods or ships traveling through these waters...
The first thing the group is supposed to do (before they even think about their own characters) is figure out the group's purpose in the form of a central verb.
- To defeat [dangerous foe]
- To protect [place, idea, culture, person, thing]
- To change [culture, society, place, person]
- To deliver [person, thing] to [place, culture, person]
- To rescue [person, thing]
- To learn [idea, culture, training, history]
So, this list is fine, but it is jarring that this is before you even are told to think about who your character is, at all. Now, partially, I love this idea. The group is central to what you are doing. But at the same time, it is fundamentally hard to think about the group when the people in it are all just placeholders. So I do think it is probably okay (maybe even recommended) for people to do a bit of light thinking about characters along the way.
The players got really into this idea that the border villages in this Northern Passage area had been pretty mixed heritage before the Tsunami (and presumably just generally in the time leading up to the present-Roku era). Water-Tribe people married Earth Nation folks, and vice versa, on both sides of the passage. But the rising tensions, the Tsunami, the attitude of the current Avatar, are all combining to threaten that. And that's something the players think is valuable. So they settled on protecting the mixed-heritage culture of the border-area in the Northern Village. (I may not have phrased this precisely correctly).
You might think "okay now you make your individual characters." NO! Next you answer more questions to flesh out the group goal, and then, you still don't make your characters, you try to sketch the plot of the (approximately) pilot episode of the tv show about your group. still without any development of the individual characters.
This is the point where we broke with the book's instructions, and everyone did a bit of working up a character concept. The characters were: Kallik: a water tribe member whose family had died in the Tsunami (timeframe: 8 months prior to Start of Game), Po (short for Porphyra, but she'd rather you not call her that), a character from a mixed family who had gone elsewhere to study technology, and was returning in the wake of the Tsunami (to check on family), and Opal, a character from a large earth nation family who owns a fusion restaurant (northern sea fish cooked in an earth-nation style) that has been suffering due the tsunami and the rising tensions. This level of detail made it much easier for us to actually do the next step, which was, sketch out the pilot episode!
OUR PILOT EPISODE
Act two: Opal goes to report the intimidation and rising hostilities to the local authority: Sheriff Woong. Sherrif Woong is overworked. His inbox is overflowing. The town has grown from around 1000 before the Tsunami to closer to 1300-1500 now, with refugees coming here from the villages destroyed in the Tsunami. It's not a huge number of people coming in, but it's a big adjustment for a town that didn't have a lot of infrastructure. Woong is giving Opal the brush off, in part from being overworked, but in part he seems to not really care about the "crime" she's reporting. She glances at his desk and spots orders from an Earth Nation general indicating the strategic importance of keeping Zeng Chu Cove a solidly Earth Nation asset. Crestfallen, Opal leaves, and tries to figure out who, if anyone she can trust with this information. People who have been around seem risky. Her new waiter is obviously not going to be against the water tribe, though. And Po just got back to town...plus, she's pretty sure one of Po's parents was from the water tribe! She gets this small group together, and tells them the horrible news. They come up with a plan. If we can't appeal to their humanity, let's appeal to their coin purses.
Act three: Crime in Zeng Chu Cove isn't organized yet, but Hanna is working hard to fix that. Opal and Hanna went to school together, which was a tenuous connection, but enough to get a foot in the door. Plus, Hanna heard that Opal and her friends had something against the Green armbands, and Hanna really doesn't like when other people start organizing crime in her town. An audible interrogation/beating can be heard going on down the hall from where Hanna is conversing with Po, Opal and Kallik. Po proposes sharing some helpful boat upgrades in exchange for Hanna's support with the group project. Hanna says she needs information on the Earth Nation and information on the Northern Water Tribe. "We're well connected in the water tribe!" the group lies. "See" they say, pointing at the orphan Kallik. "He's got plenty of connections to the northern water tribe! You need someone on the inside with the northern water tribe, we've got you covered!" Hanna says, "We'll just see about that." And nods to a lieutenant, who has them drag the prisoner in from the other room. Through bleary eyes, this prisoner shocks herself, and everyone else..."Cousin Kallik?" Kallik strains to remember this distant cousins name..."Tapisa!" Hanna's jaw drops. She's good at reading people and was sure they were lying. Duly impressed and now happy to have connections to water tribe on her side, she makes a deal with the group, and allows them to take Kallik's cousin, a member of the Water Tribe army, with them.
End of Pilot!
Okay, so, I won't go through the rest of character gen in as much detail.
Po's playbook is The Bold, and she is a technologist.
Opal is a Guardian (her ward is Kallik), and she is an earth bender.
Kallik is the Idealist and he is a water bender.
Some of the details I included in that summary of the pilot episode are things we didn't actually flesh out until after (like character names!), while others of them are things that we worked out as we went, but I put them in as though they had been established in situ.
There is a lot of the process that is great because it is collaborative. Maybe my favorite moment was that I wanted to make sure we had some Water Tribe plot hooks in there so I said before we started act three "think about where a water tribe army character could fit in here, her name is Tapisa" and someone threw out the idea that maybe it was a distant relative of Kallik's. But we didn't have a reason they would have been coming to look for Kallik directly, so we put a pin in Tapisa for a bit, and thought about what their next step would be, which was going to figure out if they could get smugglers to help them politically put pressure against this military order, since smugglers would also prefer not to have the town become militarized. Then I figured the smuggler might have captured a water tribe ship and be interrogating the army member they found on board when the group got there, and the earlier seed of being related and the group's spontaneous lie about knowing people in the water tribe came together like magic.
There is a lot of great material and depth to the characters that I didn't cover here, and we haven't actually had a session yet where we played the system, this was all prologue, really. One thing I want to emphasize: I went in with basically zero planning on my part, before this session. I familiarized myself with the rules, but I didn't plot out any of the stuff above. I didn't know what era people would want to play in, and that meant I couldn't easily make plans because three airbenders in the Korra era are very different in terms of what adventures they would have from a fire bender and two water benders in the Aang era. But the system did a (mostly) great job of getting us to a point where we just naturally have a group identity and roadmap for where to go from here. I probably could have come up with the start of an adventure if we were playing straight through after character generation, but I am glad to have some time to plan before the actual first session.
I'll tag posts about this particular game with "entering my roku era" so you can find them all.
