An idea i had knocking around in my head.

[thecosmicgoose]

Hola Folks.

i've been binge watching episodes of Legend of Kora and thought it might be fun to run a game set in a similar world. after thinking about it, i think i came up with an interesting way to represent elemental bending. its not so much an ability in itself, as it is a way to arrange abilities into a frame work, to help model powers that are versital, but not quite versital enough to justify an "arcane magic" like power that could produce anything and the kitchen sink. its similar to other systems found in various games, so some of you may already be very familiar.

Multi-ability: basically, you spend your levels into a pool, that you can then arrange into levels of a few pre-selected abilities. you can re-arrange these levels once per round to adapt to changing situations as you need. during character creation and advancement, each die you allot to this pool costs twice that of a normal die, due to the multipools versatility. for each die you have in this "multi-pool" you can add one ability to the list of things the multipool can be spent on. if you desire to add more abilities at a later date, you can buy then with a single die.

so Airbending might look something like this
- Airbending: Multipool X3
-- Telekinesis (air only)
-- Evasive
-- Jump
the player can divide 3 dice around those three abilities as he chooses, and can change that arrangement once per round as he wishes.

thoughts?

[thwaak]

Got a character in my modern magic campaign who is, essentially, a water bender. We did it by giving him Magic, Arcane with a water Affinity, and a Focus: Ample Water. Individual attacks have Requirement: Focus as well.

He can pretty much do anything in the book so long as it is water based with ample water at hand. If an Ability (eg Time Freeze) can't be justified within those simple limits, he can't use that Ability.

It's worked pretty well for us.

[PandaDad]

Ooo! I like that! Simple, direct, flexible...am currently fielding a few questions from a player about just this sort of thing, and I suspect they're trying to make this far more complicated for us than it needs to be.

Thanks for sharing, thwaak! Please consider this suggestion yanked, the serial numbers filed off, and the paint job touched up.

[Clay]

I agree, Magic is probably the easiest representation of Element Bending. That said, having a pool of dice you can reallocate between Abilities is a fun idea, and something I considered once upon a time for OVA. I ended up dropping it simply because MOST of the game didn’t work this way, but still, there’s something compelling about being able to adjust your priorities in combat between attack and defense.