Yeah but the thing with an RPG is you can just make shit up, this is what I have been told is the entire selling point of the medium. Star Wars also tells us that canonically Jedi are supposed to be super rare during the OG trilogy days and yet every Star Wars RPG has hidden Jedi all over the place

bsky.app/profile/kait...

I brought it up elsewhere, but if Eden Studios in 2002 could come up with a way to make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG in which people could be Slayers, Werewolves, Cyborgs, etc on the one hand, and normal high schoolers on the other, and have it work, it should be doable in the wild world of 2025

Aang has some special powers he occasionally gets to bust out, usually at a steep cost, and otherwise he's basically just another bender in a group of characters that include multiple prodigy level benders on par with him, and then one normal guy, it's not a One Punch Man situation here

This assumes two things:

1). That a game designer has to design their game for the most dysfunctional group imaginable, and I simply do not believe this is true. You don't have to write novels for the most media-illiterate person out there either

2. That the Avatar represents a godlike power tier

Is there plenty of space in Star Wars for stories that never touch on Jedi? Yeah sure, of course. But personal games are one thing, making a licensed RPG based on a property that doesn't let anyone play the person in the literal name of the thing is a very weird design decision

Yeah but that's orthogonal to the point being made. You could also, personally, have a rad Star Wars game that never has a single rule for making Jedi characters or the Force or anything, but if someone publishes The Star Wars RPG without rules for playing Force-using characters, that would be weird

It's even funnier because the Avatar, diegetically, is an eternally reincarnating figure that reappears constantly throughout history, it's not even like you're playing Literally Aang, the entire groundwork is laid for you to make up your own Avatar! They did the work for you!

Yeah, it feels like "what sort of group do you want to play? Someone being the Avatar? Nobody being the Avatar? Something weirder?" should have been a primary angle of approach and it's honestly kind of wild to me that they settled on "nobody can play the Avatar actually"

There are shows, books, etc out there featuring a cast where one character is clearly leagues above the others in some way and I'm slightly sympathetic to going "how can we adapt this dynamic to our game?" but I would never actually think this was an issue in adapting Avatar, it just doesn't exist

Here's the fucked up thing: even from the perspective of the most DBZ-brained mindset I can muster, it's hard for me to look at ATLA and go "yeah Aang was way more super powerful than the rest of the cast." Like 9 times out of 10 he's just a bender in a cast full of exceptional benders (and Sokka)

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG figured this shit out back in 2002

God I want an IPS-N Pro Shop shirt

The wild thing is, he doesn't have to. The Democrat party apparatus is just as in the tank for Israel as the Republicans, it's a true bipartisan platform

I mean same, and it's why a lot of D&D's recent internal attempts to paper this over ring extremely hollow, but even when D&D hasn't really been trying to hide what it is, people still get real upset if you point out what D&D at its most fundamental as a game is about, it's an issue on both ends

Saying this gets people real mad but it's true, the best you can get is putting a coat of paint over a dungeon delving and killing dudes simulator

I'm choosing to imagine the psychics all knew she was gonna fail but decided to gas her up because it'd be funnier