Bear World

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Bear World
Created by	Hiram McDaniels
Published	September 2014
Genres	Meta Parody
Dice	2d6

Bear World is an unplayable RPG posted on The Gaming Den which parodies several tropes, in particular of narrative systems such as Fate and Powered by the Apocalypse, but also of several OSR systems. Its name refers to the "quantum bears" criticism, originally levelled at PbtA games.

Characters are specified by "traits" which can be any arbitrary phrase without balance. A 2d6 +trait roll determines success, marginal success, or failure; in combat, the player rolls attacks and defences NPCs with the GM never rolling. However, every roll (regardless of the result) causes an arbitrary number of bears to appear and attack the PCs. Bears are relatively weak opponents but rolls against bears can generate more bears which are not affected by those rolls; meaning that any game becomes a never-ending combat against an infinite number of bears.

• Characters being defined by arbitrary phrases with no regard to balance is likely a reference to Fate's Aspects, but Aspects do not define a character nor provide permanent bonuses to rolls.
• The appearance of bears on any roll is a reference to PbtA systems where an early criticism made on the TGD forums was that the rules technically permit the GM to take the "show signs of an approaching threat" any time a roll is failed and declare a bear has appeared, although this criticism was not intended to be taken literally and is not the intended play of PbtA.
• Players are encouraged to write down meaningless PC statistics such as "height, weight, eye color, hair colour, dominant hand, blood glucose level" as a reference to some versions of D&D which included explicit spaces for these on the character sheet. The same reference is made by the availability of an "adventuring pack" to all PCs which includes standard OSR items such as a pole and mirror plus a "goat, mix CD, travel-size Stratego game, and bottle of mouth wash."
• "Average" armor is cheaper than "poor" armor because poor armor gives a bonus to action rolls as it's easier to move in, a reference to misbalanced mechanics in several d20 games.