Dog Bear is a super-minimalist tabletop roleplaying game where you don’t need special dice, character sheets, book-keeping or any planning at all, which lets you play out ridiculous stories of nationless soldiers opposing the many destabilising forces that fill this silly, silly world. A game of Dog Bear takes about twenty minutes, and all you need to play is a deck of playing cards and a few friends.
Interested? Great! Then go check it out!
And if you wanna hear more, well, here we go.
First things first, Dog Bear works by using playing cards’ values instead of dice rolls. A player wants to try a thing, they put down a card from their hand, the Boss – or you’d call them a storyteller or a dungeonmaster or a game master – flips the top card of their deck, and they check and see who has the higher number. When the check resolves, the Boss hands the player a new card, face down.
Now, in a simple enough roleplaying system, even the most minor of resolution mechanics is fine, but this one gives us the extra element of cards as things that have memory. When a player and the Boss are in contest, another player can swap one of their cards for the card the Boss has. This means that players can exchange ‘bad’ cards for good cards, and there’s an inherent narrative at work there. The baddie notices your stealth attempts – but suddenly, another player swings in and distracts them, reducing their result!
Now, if you’re like me and you own a bunch of D&D books, and say, FATE, maybe some Exalted, etcetera, you might wonder why you want a game system that’s so lightweight. Dog Bear doesn’t work for a campaign. Dog Bear doesn’t really create a long narrative – but it is good for creating a story. It’s a game where the game’s mechanics, with cards, is simple and abstract enough that it will give you all the inspiration you need to create a scenario on the fly.
When we introduce new players to tabletop gaming, there’s always a challenge of getting them through the rules-and-mess process to get them to the place where they’re having fun. There are plenty of players who’ve never played an RPG who have no idea that they’d like it, because for games like Exalted and D&D, playing the storytelling, narrative, roleplaying stuff is on the far side of what amounts to calculus homework. If you’ve got a new player who wants to see what it’s like, in your group, and you want to just have a laugh and get into that storytelling mode, where everyone’s creating narrative – well, Dog Bear is the product for you.
Check it out! It’s Ten bucks for a whole RPG! Get your codename, oppose enormous robots, sneak into the enemy compounds and find love on the battlefield!
And if my pitch didn’t sell you on it…?
That’s okay! I want you making decisions with as much information as you can have, and I want you to buy games that are good choices for you.
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