Notepad Little Opinion on Avatar Legends in About 5 Minutes

My Opinion on Avatar Legends, a condensed version of the livestream.

In Short: It's another PbtA game, a 9.5 Million USD PbtA game. Some interesting ideas sprinkled in the middle, with some poo flakes for good measure.

Ending Music is: Cao Huoxing 's "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China"

This is entirely my own opinion and nothing else, the stream can be found in the Curious Case Playlist.

[EvilDoresh]

My enthusiasm for this dropped _a lot_ after I found out what system this was gonna use. And yeah, it's pretty much how I feared this would go.

[cxsanchez]

First RPG campaign I had to drop due to total lack of interest from my party and me about the system. Inmediately picked up Dungeon World and had a lot of fun.
Worst offenders are actually statistics and statuses. "Bending" is linked 90% of the time to the Focus stat, so players who have low Focus stats usually fail their bending all the time, super fun for an Avatar RPG game. Statuses are a mess, they are deeply mechanically detailed, but then basic exchange maneuvers are very vague about which status you can apply at any given time (unless explicitly mentioned in combat techniques). Magpie's answer to this is "just use one and then apply another in case the situation worsen for the character".
Also, the game requires an amount of "feelings" role play my party was not interested in playing.
Finally, the exchange mechanic is way too detailed to only be used against VIP NPCs 1to1. And explaining its backwards-looking mechanic is a pain to new players. Just having combat techniques as regular moves would be much more in the spirit of PbtA.

[bannerpunk]

Normally I would describe the wonky, unpleasant mechanics in a game as "jank, " but here they went ahead and called it "balance."

[mrmiclego]

Kind of disappointing considering that the bending system in general is maybe one of the most flexible magic systems out there. And in the show it’s usually tied to a user’s skill, discipline, spirituality/wisdom, and mindset/mood. Something that can tie nicely if the game wants to also be about personal growth. Personal growth is actually a core theme in the show.
Not to mention how in the show techniques from one culture can influence techniques from another culture and create entirely new techniques in the process.

[newironside]

"and others have control over the."

For 10 million they should have released it for free. I would feel bad charging for this game even if I hadn't already made 10m off it.

[mistery]

1:44 "over the"
Over the what?

[stevemanart]

I hate to say thing, but I think I would have preferred a 5E hack than another unfinished PBTA thing