Quantum Bears are actually good for TTRPGs

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Fri Aug 14, 2015 5:58 am

... as long as the waveform is defined beforehand somewhere, either in rules or campaign notes or whatever. #NotAllQuantumBears

Anything that Mister Cavern doesn't have to keep track of right now and can be procedurally generated when it becomes relevant is less work for Mister Cavern, which makes the game run faster and smoother, with less people SSBing while he spends forty seven minutes every round fiddling with numbers and dice and cheetos behind his MC screen.

An example of good quantum bears would be random encounter tables and random terrain generators. They let you have a wide open wilderness in your setting that your players can drop into and adventure in spontaneously without your Mister Cavern needing to find time between his 93 hours of work as a nurse every week to write up five-and-a-half continents worth of maps, wildlife, trails, and ruins.

What are some other examples of good quantum bears?

zugschef · Post by **zugschef** » Fri Aug 14, 2015 6:17 am

What you are describing are not quantum bears.

GâtFromKI · Post by **GâtFromKI** » Fri Aug 14, 2015 10:36 am

Random encounters are quantum bears.

You travel in the wilderness, there are undefined stuffs, then you make some rolls and the wavefunction collapse: the undefined stuffs become a bear at a defined distance.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Aug 14, 2015 11:21 am

GâtFromKI wrote:Random encounters are quantum bears.

No, quantum bears are a specific AW-related meme with a specific meaning. It's when an action collapses an unrelated waveform for no good reason.

If you're travelling in bear country, you roll for bears each day (or each hour) and that's okay. If a random encounter roll generates a nearby bear, you then can roll Spot against its Hide.

Now quantum bears is when you decide to check for bears (or shard your purplz, or scratch your ass) and the presence or absence of the actual bear is derived from your Spot/Shard/Scratch result in an intellectually offensive way, such as:
- you succeed and notice a bear attacking you! Good job!
- you succeed at cost. The cost is that a bear is attacking you.
- you fail and a bear eats you.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 9:54 am

Also, they're called "quantum" because said bears did not exist in the adventure until you rolled that Perception check, point at which they materialize from the ether regardless of the check's result.

Quantum bears are a phenomenon exclusive to comedies of errors where Failure Is The Only Option (see *World and Fiasco, games that are not about whether you fail, but about how hilariously hard you fail).

angelfromanotherpin · Sun Aug 16, 2015 11:40 am

There are some indie-type games like Donjon and Trollbabe which use a variant where if the player declares they're searching for e.g. a secret door, and they succeed, then what they are looking for is retconned to be there. That's still kind of wacky, but at least it's empowering to the player.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 5:30 pm

To understand why we mocked Silva the Unbearable so hard one must remember that at the time he was touting AW as being exceptionally railroad resistant compared to other games. My original point was simply that whoever gets to generate the range of possible results can easily dictate that all roads lead to Bear Country.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 5:46 pm

Were you the person who came up with that insufferable Bear World meme, Whipstitch? Or more pertinently, the cavalcade of ursine puns that it unleashed?

You have just made a powerful enemy, my friend.

Darth Rabbitt · Post by **Darth Rabbitt** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 5:49 pm

I'm pretty sure that Lord Mistborn is the one who started the bear puns.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 6:16 pm

I raised the possibility that the MC was obsessed with bears in particular and things escalated quickly.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Aug 16, 2015 9:06 pm

I think this was the first quantum bears quote:

Whipstitch, Jun 2013 wrote:You realize this is kind of my point, right? Falling is a pretty obvious potential outcome of a botched or mediocre roll on a climbing stunt but AW is a MTP game so when the MC checks his asscheeks for treasure falling may not even be on the table at all because he thinks that is boring and predictable. He may be all like "Wouldn't it be way more awesome if like, you dislodged a rock and woke up a bear instead!? I'm a genius. This isn't rail roady at all. Ignore the fact that our last three adventures had bear fights and that bear fights are a thing that I do to players."

With the followup:

Frank wrote:Did you fucking ask how many trained guard bears those warlords have? You didn't fucking mention how many guard bears the warlords had when you described the scenario, so they could plausibly have any number between zero and many.

When your game is freeform bullshit and your world is not particularly detailed, that works both ways. A player can announce that they toss the ticking bomb into a nearby mailbox because no one mentioned how far the nearest mailbox was. And the MC can have the warlord call in their trained guard bears because no one mentioned how many guard bears were on hand. Anything undeclared can be declared. Even guard bears. Especially guard bears.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 12:22 am

angelfromanotherpin wrote:There are some indie-type games like Donjon and Trollbabe which use a variant where if the player declares they're searching for e.g. a secret door, and they succeed, then what they are looking for is retconned to be there. That's still kind of wacky, but at least it's empowering to the player.

Huh. I'm looking at Trollbabe now. The super simple system is interesting, and I could see it working for a beer and pretzels "we don't really care about a big mechanical system" game. Possibly on IRC or something. Have you played?

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 12:25 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:You have just made a powerful enemy, my friend.

I'll bear with it.

koz · Post by **koz** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 12:40 am

Lord Mistborn wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:You have just made a powerful enemy, my friend.
I'll bear with it.

I believe that bearly qualifies as a threat.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 1:13 am

All games need more bears.

Bear Cavalry

Stealth Bears

Bears with Guns

Bears who know Kung Fu

and Lesbian Bears

Bears are very diverse adversaries.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 3:35 am

Bears.

Everywhere there be there be a bear there.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 4:25 am

Maxus wrote:Bears.

Everywhere there be there be a bear there.

Bouncing here and there and everywhere.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 7:16 am

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 10:41 am

RadiantPhoenix wrote:... as long as the waveform is defined beforehand somewhere, either in rules or campaign notes or whatever.

I would also add that, on average, an encounter that a GM has prepared for is better than an encounter that a GM is scrambling to create as he goes along (Žak Š exceptionalism notwithstanding). So if a GM has a bear encounter prepared, then dropping it in somewhere is not a sin.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 5:19 pm

Ursine software pirates!

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 5:40 pm

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Aug 17, 2015 7:18 pm

Frazetta's Bears can pull a sleigh without using a harness

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:05 am

Always fear the bear technopriest.

Teddy · Post by **Teddy** » Tue Aug 18, 2015 3:03 pm

Starmaker wrote:If you're travelling in bear country, you roll for bears each day (or each hour) and that's okay. . .
Now quantum bears is when you decide to check for bears (or shard your purplz, or scratch your ass) and the presence or absence of the actual bear is derived from your Spot/Shard/Scratch result in an intellectually offensive way. . .

Keep in mind, irl, Bexar* County is an actual place, and you can live there all your life without encountering a bear, until you have the misfortune to play a badly-designed rpg.

*I'll let you guess how that's pronounced.

GâtFromKI · Post by **GâtFromKI** » Wed Aug 19, 2015 11:15 pm

Starmaker wrote:
GâtFromKI wrote:Random encounters are quantum bears.
No, quantum bears are a specific AW-related meme with a specific meaning.

I know that.

It doesn't prevent the random bear encounter in bear country from being a quantum bear: before the roll on the random encounter table, the bear was delocalized. He's not here because his action led him here; he didn't even take any action before the roll. The bear is here because Mister Cavern made a measurement, forcing him to chose between the states "being nearby" and "not being nearby". That's totally a quantum bear.

The Gaming Den

Quantum Bears are actually good for TTRPGs

Quantum Bears are actually good for TTRPGs

Re: Quantum Bears are actually good for TTRPGs