Why does D&D have bears?

[tzor]

No discernable difference? My god, man - have you never seen the D&D stats for the housecat?

​

 

[F5]

I ran into a similar problem with a campaign I was working on. My intent was to replace common domesticated animals with domesticated versions of fantastic animals. No horses, but there are sleek, long-legged reptilian creatures with fast land and swim speeds (and stats otherwise very similar to the Light Horse) called Riverwolves which people could ride instead. This worked out OK. But replacing Oxen with massive, iron-hard turtles called Ferrouks was a mistake...all of a sudden Joe Dirt-framer is plowing his fields with something much tougher than a 3rd-level fighter. When you can resolve the invasion of the Orcish horde by opening the stable gates and letting your livestock kill them all, what's the purpose of having a story about an orcish invasion in the first place? The entire setting became all about the critters, and it required a ton of supplemental rule-changes to try to make it work.

That's the same problem you'll run into by replacing horses with Firemares...that's a powerful critter that can be had by a low-level adventurer for little cost (if you make them cost what they're worth, based on their abilities, they are no longer able to replace horses in the game world's ecomony).

Ultimately, I left my cool critters in the setting, but relented and re-introduced the "common" animals (horses, cows, etc). The fantastic domesticated animals became rarer, and harder to obtain. Another key to making this kind of thing work is being careful with names. If you call your elephant-analogue creature a Rock Titan, players get what you want the creature to be, without bashing them over the head with he exposition-stick. Call it a Phaelroph, and you will be explaining yourself over and over, since the name itself means nothing.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

Just Because.

 

[Desdichado]

See post 47, wherein you rebut a post by Celebrim, unfairly in my opinion. I then proceeded to rephrase the argument in Celebrim's post, in case the reason you rebutted is that the point wasn't clear enough, and then I proceeded to build upon the point further.

Even more confused. I know about Celebrim's post and the specific point that I was responding to. It's not unfair to say that he's painting with too broad a brush in saying that we need bears because we know all about bearness and what bears stand for in our world, including a few adjectives about bears as warrior-sages, etc.

That's BS. Bears don't have to stand for anything. They can just be bears. They don't have to represent anything, they're just animals that live in the woods and could occasionally attack campers or livestock.

Celebrim's post was trying to force all fantasy to conform to a strongly symbolic, or even allegorical mode.

Your post didn't have anything to do with either Celebrim's post (at least the portion to which I was responding) or my response to it. Hence my confusion. I'm not arguing with you, because I strongly agree with you. Without some familiar frame of reference, you very quickly lose your audience either as a writer or as a GM.

But I'm talking about something else entirely.

 

[Raven Crowking]

That's BS. Bears don't have to stand for anything.

No...they have to stand for Preventing Forest Fires.

But, I think that the point had not been that bears have to stand for something, but that, rather, when using mythic inference in a game, bears can stand for something, whereas it is infinitely harder to make grodumaks do so.

RC

 

[Desdichado]

But, I think that the point had not been that bears have to stand for something, but that, rather, when using mythic inference in a game, bears can stand for something, whereas it is infinitely harder to make grodumaks do so.

That's true, but that's not necessarily something that fantasy does, and it that's a completely separate line of reasoning from the "a more familiar baseline is a lot easier to get players grounded in the setting. If everything is alien, then they'll be completely out of touch with the setting."

I very strongly agree with that last sentiment, so clearly I'm not trying to poke holes in that point of view. Nor am I trying to poke holes in the point of view that grodumaks can't have some symbolic meaning without a lot more work; I agree with that too. I'm just saying that my fantasy does not have strong symbolic--and especially not allegorical--significance, whereas Celebrim's post seemed to be saying that in order to be fantasy it had to have that.

We're on a little tangent here about what it means to be fantasy. Which is only pseudo-related to the topic at hand, although it is pseudo-related. I think part of the problem with the OP's OP is that he's trying to approach fantasy from a science fiction paradigm, for instance.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I'm just saying that my fantasy does not have strong symbolic--and especially not allegorical--significance, whereas Celebrim's post seemed to be saying that in order to be fantasy it had to have that.

I don't think that is what Celebrim meant. I think that this is, in particular, a "reader filter" issue. I think that Celebrim was pointing out a common difference between fantasy and sci fi that causes fantasy to use certain tropes, and extrapolating from there.

Celebrim can correct me if I am wrong.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

You want the bears to go away? Tell them to their face

 

[GreatLemur]

Elves can stand in as symbols for alot of things, hense the fact that there are two sorts of fantasy settings: those that have them and those that consciously chose not to have them.

I think you'll find that's a pretty tough statement to defend. You're on reasonably solid ground if you're only talking about roleplaying games--elves are so ubiquitous in fantasy RPGs that people are shocked and bewildered when one doesn't include them--but if you're trying to cover things like novels and such, it gets pretty shaky: Elves are not such a default assumption of fantasy there, and I'm pretty sure they weren't even a common phenomenon pre-Tolkien. Furthermore, there's a tremendous amount of fantasy lit out there that's set on Earth, and I rather doubt elves were even in the running for a lot of those settings.

To the extent that your setting abandoned this combination of familiar and ideas as tangible things, and went out its way to create truly alien things that weren't embodied ideas, it would feel more and more like science fiction (and would likely become recognizably science fiction at some point.)

Debates about what's fantasy and what's sci-fi could go on for days, with purist fans of one genre disowning certain works and claiming they belong to the other. Sidestepping that, I could just say "Why does that matter?" If a more alien setting makes a D&D campaign into sci-fi, what the hell? Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

Of course, homebrew settings aside, that's a pretty good reason why the actual Monster Manual includes bears: By default, D&D is most certainly supposed to be fantasy, and people do generally expect fantasy settings to have a lot of Earth-like fauna.

 

[DragonLancer]

The way I like to think of D&D settings is that there is no Earth. Faerun, Eberron, and other fantasy worlds are not planets far away in the cosmos. They're in completely different realities. Not even a different plane, but a whole different multiverse.

According to the old 1st ed FR box set, the Realms were once connected to Earth via dimensional portals and thats why we have have legends of monsters like Minotaurs and dragons. The Realms are forgotten because those portals collapsed severing the link between our Earth and Toril. I always liked that idea.