I’ve spent about thirty-five hours playing—ten of them GMing—Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, a tabletop RPG set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.
Here’s my advice for new players and GMs looking to get the most out of the game. I assume that you’ve read the rule book, so I’m not going to repeat the GM Guidelines or any other official wisdom, except to highlight some particularly good and easy-to-miss nuggets.
Embrace the Apocalypse Engine
Avatar Legends uses the Powered by the Apocalypse game engine.1 Although mechanically simple, it can be paradigmatically difficult if you’re accustomed to more traditional, rules-focused RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons.
Thankfully, the core book provides pages upon pages of detail and examples to illustrate its intended play patterns. If you’re unfamiliar with—or bewildered by—other PbtA games, I strongly recommend that you read pages 7, 94–99, and 126, even if they feel like review. And don’t skim the core moves (p. 127–136), either.
Speaking from experience, I only grokked the Apocalypse Engine when I internalized the idea that the conversation comes first. The game is by default a collaborative story, involving no dice whatsoever, just some friends sitting around a table and talking. It’s an escalating series of “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” and “Ooh, yeah, and then…”
You break out the dice only when the game explicitly tells you. This will, to be clear, happen pretty often! The game wants you to roll dice; it’s fun. But the dice exist in the service of the conversation, not the other way around. And even when you’re in the middle of resolving a roll, you’ll often want to fall back on the free-form discussion to hammer out specifics.
For example, the rules are deliberately imprecise about what each bending discipline can accomplish. The story doesn’t live in the nitty-gritty details of exactly how many liters of water you can manipulate with a certain level of Waterbending proficiency. Instead, the players and GM are asked to feel out what makes sense for any given scene. The details of the magic system are left to the conversation.
The other big paradigm shift is that failure is fun. The players’ goals lean much more toward telling a good story than winning encounters. Failures can introduce new obstacles, raise the stakes, and increase emotional investment in the characters’ fates. Putting a bit of distance between yourself and your PC—enough to enjoy their struggles as much as their triumphs—can greatly improve your experience. It helps that Avatar Legends PCs don’t die; they just get knocked out or kidnapped.
Play Loose with Playbooks
Cannibalizing the rules—using what’s fun and discarding the rest—is standard advice for any TTRPG, but for this game I want to draw particular attention to character creation.
Some playbooks are weirdly narrow. The Icon is the worst offender, designed specifically for characters who are champions of quasi-religious traditions, but even the most open-ended playbooks come with fictional and mechanical baggage that might not match your character concept. If you find your playbook’s scaffolding less than useful, try working with your GM to customize it.
It’s easiest to discard playbook elements that are pure flavor. Want to play the Pillar but don’t want your own off-screen gang of kids? Want to play the Idealist but without a tragic backstory? Want to play a 32-year-old?2 You can just do that—no additional assembly required.
Changing stats is also relatively easy: apply a spread of either +1/+1/+0/-1 or +2/+0/+0/-1, then choose a stat to increase by 1 as normal. Each playbook has its strength in one or two specific stats, so try to avoid shooting yourself in the foot—a Prodigy with low Focus won’t be very fun to play.
When it comes to customizing balance principles, some playbooks have it easier than others. A few, like the Hammer and the Idealist, never explicitly reference their own principles, so it’s easy enough to rewrite their balance tracks. But most playbooks aren’t like that. To change a balance principle that’s called out by name in your playbook feature, you’ll have to rewrite that feature.3 As with any homebrew endeavor, be ready to revise on the fly when it doesn’t play as expected.
Keep in mind that playbook cross-pollination happens naturally through advancement. If your dissatisfaction with your playbook can be fixed by taking one or two moves from other playbooks, then the rules as written will serve you fine.
Let Players Choose Their Conditions
Sometimes a move will tell you to mark a condition as part of its resolution. Inflict a condition is also a GM move. In both cases I prefer to let the player in question, not the GM, choose which condition to mark. It gives an invested player agency over their own character’s emotions, and it forces a less invested player to get inside their PC’s head.
This is more of a tool than a rule; I can imagine situations where it might not be warranted. If players are metagaming their characters’ emotions to avoid certain penalties, then the GM might want to assign conditions to keep everyone focused on the story. If a condition is really obvious—a PC with a fear of spider-ants is staring down a whole nest of them—then the GM may as well cut to the chase. GM-assigned conditions are also useful for tracking exactly which situations caused which conditions, making it easier to clear them naturally in response to the fiction. All that said, I default to player agency unless I have a good reason not to.
The Fifth Condition is “Overwhelmed”
Your character’s had a rough day. She burned a bunch of fatigue sneaking into the Fire Nation weapons factory, exchanged some harsh words with her brother, then got caught in a prolonged combat scene. She’s already marked four conditions. During the next exchange, someone attacks her, and she’s forced to mark a fifth.
You look at your character sheet and see that her only option is Guilty. Which doesn’t really make sense? Your character doesn’t have anything to be guilty about. But the game’s telling you that she must feel guilty because someone shot fire at her.
The core book gives GMs the following advice for portraying NPCs with several marked conditions (p. 238):
If an NPC winds up marking multiple conditions rapidly, it’s often simplest to choose a dominant one and play to that…or to play up how rapidly stressed out they are, suddenly filled with conflicting and dramatic emotions!
I would extend this advice to players. Your character’s first condition is always as described—you mark Afraid when they’re actually scared of something, Troubled when something is actually weighing on their mind, and so on.
But as soon as you’re forced to mark an emotion that doesn’t make fictional sense, you can ignore the literal interpretation. Usually the fifth condition—and often the third and fourth, sometimes even the second—represents not the corresponding emotion, but getting overwhelmed in a more general sense.
You don’t always need to reach for this tool, of course. Sometimes your character really is scared, angry, guilty, troubled, and insecure all at once, or maybe their dominant emotion matches their last marked condition. The generalized form of this advice is that conditions don’t need to map 1-to-1 onto characters’ emotions.
Write Condition Penalties on Your Play Materials
I would bet that more sessions of Avatar Legends have been played where someone forgot to apply a condition penalty than not. It’s hard! Whenever you look up a core move, you need to also look at your marked conditions and check whether any of them penalize that specific move.
To make this easier, next to each basic or balance move on your play materials, write down any condition that penalizes that move.
If you’re the GM, you can call out the condition whenever you call for that move—“Okay, that sounds like you’re Pleading with him; (glances at basic move sheet) are you Troubled?”—and apply the penalty as needed. If you’re a player, you can do this yourself and take some weight off the GM’s shoulders. Either way, this reminds you to check for condition penalties when it’s easy to forget, and it speeds up the whole process by cutting the “look at every single condition to make sure none of them apply” step.
Callouts Aren’t Persuasion Checks
In the first session I GMed, a conflict emerged between the player characters. I’m not sure at what point I said, “Sounds like…you might be Calling Her Out to live up to one of her principles?” but it instantly made everything worse. The seemingly irreconcilable argument between PCs not only ground the game to a halt; it also let everyone inflict a bunch of conditions on each other for no fun reason.
The Call Someone Out move is a way to highlight the character arc of the target. If you’re not specifically tugging at someone’s balance principles—which is to say, their deep-seated inner conflict—then use a different move (Plead for an NPC, Guide and Comfort for a PC) or resolve it without dice. Don’t map any old conflict onto a balance track just for an excuse to use the Call Out move.
Split Combat into Multiple Exchanges
The Avatar Legends combat system is unique. It’s faithful to the source material, and I’m quite excited to see what it looks like when wielded by seasoned players—but for newcomers it’s nonintuitive, and the flow of combat is often bogged down by the details. These next few suggestions are tools are for un-bogging it.
The first is straight out of the core book: split the party.
Every combatant is almost never engaged with every other combatant. Different fighters face off against different foes, saying, “I’ll hold them off,” or “Don’t worry, I’ve got this guy.” Each set of engaged fighters has its own exchanges […] The more that you can break up exchanges into bouts of three or fewer combatants, the more effective your combat exchanges will be. (p. 147)
It’s easy to miss this guideline because the quick reference materials (otherwise very useful) don’t mention it. The seven steps of combat are for resolving a single exchange—that is, just one of the “bouts of three or fewer combatants.” The extended combat example (p. 240–243) shows this rule in action: all three stances (Defend, Attack, then Evade) are resolved for a single bout; then the spotlight shifts to a different bout with different characters for a new round of Defending, Attacking, then Evading; then to the final bout for the same.
In my experience, splitting up an encounter like this is a GM’s single most useful tool for making combat less clunky and more awesome. You can really build up the fiction of each individual exchange, and the whole thing feels like less of an amorphous free-for-all.
(This section is adapted from my answer to a StackExchange thread.)
Have a Basic Technique Backup Plan
Your character gets into combat. You know exactly what you’re going to do—you have an advanced technique that is perfect for this situation. You declare your approach, grab your dice…
…and roll a 4, so you spend the next two minutes figuring out which basic technique to use.
One of the weirder features of the combat system is the order of operations. Instead of deciding on a specific action then rolling to see if it works, you first decide on a broad course of action, then roll to see what your options are, then choose from those options. When the dice hit the table, your original plan might not be viable anymore.
It’s natural, of course, that this would slow down games. But players can help speed things along by always having a backup plan: “I want to use [advanced technique], but if that doesn’t work, I’ll use [basic technique] instead.”
If you don’t know which basic technique to fall back on, I recommend Retaliate if you’re defending, Strike if you’re attacking, and Test Balance if you’re evading. These are the basic “deal damage” techniques that can be resolved without too much creativity—although the last one is more like “inflict character development” and requires a bit of roleplaying.
Another option is to ask yourself “What would happen if my character tried to use [advanced technique] but stumbled?” and map the answer to a basic technique. For example, imagine you want to use Fire Blade (p. 284):
Swipe your surroundings with a blade of flame. Mark 1-fatigue to slice through a piece of your surroundings and destabilize your foe’s footing, inflicting 2-fatigue and Impaired on them.
You choose the appropriate stance (Advance & Attack), but you roll a 5, so Fire Blade is off the table. Your only options are the basic techniques Strike, Smash, and Pressure. So you envision your character executing a Fire Blade imperfectly: his form is good, but he’s slow enough that the enemy sees it coming, and the effect is diminished. You might choose the Smash technique: your character still damages his surroundings and possibly Impairs his foe, but doesn’t inflict any fatigue. Or you might choose Strike, as your character is forced to abandon the fancy flourish and instead turns the blade directly on his enemy.
Declare Intentions before Stances
A Waterbender turns the ground to mud. An Airbender launches herself into the sky in an attempt to escape the fight. A martial artist breaks someone’s stance to prevent them from bending effectively. These free-form actions—not tied to any advanced techniques, but well within the PCs’ established capabilities—are the bread and butter of the combat system. By letting players deploy their trainings in creative, flavorful ways, the combat actually feels like an Avatar fight scene.
The nine basic techniques are open-ended to enable this kind of free-form play—but it’s not always obvious which technique is appropriate for a given action.4
GM: Okay, over to the exchange with the prison guard. Choose your stance.
Player: I’m Advancing & Attacking. […] (Rolls a 9 on the stance move.) I use Pressure. I don’t want to her to call out for all the other guards—can I use Waterbending to cover her mouth with ice?
GM: That’s not really what Pressure is about.
Player: Maybe Strike then?
GM: Uh, sorry, I don’t think preventing someone from talking is really within the scope of Advancing and Attacking, unless you have a special technique that says otherwise.
Player: Oh, shoot. Guess it’s too late to change since I already rolled.
As a GM, you have two equally valid choices for avoiding this awkwardness. You can play loose, say yes, and not worry too much about the letter of the law. Or you can familiarize yourself with the nuances between basic techniques and guide players toward the right approach before it’s too late:
GM: Okay, over to the exchange with the guard. What are you planning to do?
Player: I want to block her mouth with ice so she can’t call the other guards for help. That would be Pressure, right?
GM: That sounds more like…maybe Hinder? Being gagged isn’t literally a negative status, but it’s close enough.5
Player: Alright then, I Evade and Observe.
You can also initiate this script as a player, declaring your free-form intentions and asking for clarification even if the GM doesn’t explicitly prompt you.
Watch Avatar
The Apocalypse Engine runs on tropes and vibes. If you haven’t seen Avatar: The Last Airbender in over a decade, give it a rewatch. Familiarizing yourself with the source material can build your intuition about the narrative structure, magic system, and flow of combat that Avatar Legends is trying to replicate—which is way more important for bringing the game to life than memorizing the rule book.
Popular titles include Monster Hearts, Monster of the Week, and the original Apocalypse World.
Yes, this is against the rules as written.
Or swap it out with a feature that don’t reference specific balance principles: Legacy of Excellence (p. 172), Bringing Them Down (p. 180), Never Turn My Back (p. 188), Squad Leader (p. 192), or Building a Better Future (Republic City p. 114).
For my money, the three opening examples fall respectively under Ready, Seize a Position, and either Pressure or Hinder depending on the exact intent.
Or the GM calls for a basic move. I think both are valid in this situation.