Recently, in Internet Time, some sort of poll was posted somewhere saying when asked that women would, if lost in the forest, would rather meet a bear than a man. As usual with the internet this was probably a fake, or at least non-representative, poll, but immediately garnered attention (its purpose) and division (also its purpose) about what it might mean.

On one hand, women cited their various fears of men and absolute rates of attacks on women by versus by bears. On the other hand, as usual, this was followed up by men posting remarks about women’s inability to understand per capita. And, as usual, the men were right, but it was irrelevant because women’s emotions are what they are.

But, for me, who cares? What does this have to do with anything I am interested in, i.e. role playing games, specifically Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D)? Well, there kind of is a connection. Years ago I wrote this column on sexual dimorphism on bears in D&D (http://www.castaliahouse.com/bears-dd-sexual-dimorphism/). In that article I argued that animals in the real world exhibit sexual dimorphism (i.e. boys are different from girls) as do human men and women and making these differences part of your game can add verisimilitude. As well as being interesting and fun.

So what does AD&D say about encountering bears versus men in the woods? Page 184 of the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) gives the odds of meeting men and bears (brown) in Temperate and Subtropical conditions for uninhabited wilderness. That is a two percent chance to meet a brown bear and a ten percent chance to meet men. Men, however, are subdivided into several types of men.

The types of men (DMG p. 186) include bandits, brigands, characters, merchants, pilgrims, and tribesmen. One key this to note about this is alignment. Per the Monster Manual (MM) page 9 all bears are Neutral in alignment. Men, while predominantly Neutral in alignment, can vary into good and evil alignments.

Specifically, all the men are neutral except brigands (chaotic evil), characters (any alignment. see DMG p. 100), and Pilgrims which can be five of the nine alignments (see MM. p.69).

The upshot of all this is that the odds of encountering men and bears in the wilderness are known, as are the odds of the alignments of whom a lost damsel might meet. So, with a little bit of math, the table below shows those odds.

The AD&D lesson about meeting men and bears in the forest is the bears are pretty rare but always neutral. The men are five times more likely to be met, but you’ll meet evil men about 1% of the time. But good men 0.6% of the time. Bears are always neutral, but men you have to take the bad with the good. Though, meeting either good or evil men is much less likely than meeting a bear. One thing is clear, a neutral bear might eat you just as a neutral bandit might rob you. But, if you want to meet (and benefit from) meeting good people, one has to risk meeting some evil people. Yet again, looking into the details of AD&D teaches an important life lesson.

Back in my original article, I presented statistics for male and female bears under the BX D&D system. But here I am talking AD&D. AD&D has bears too (p. 9 MM). But, it only lists three types (black, brown, and cave).

Here is present my version of bears for AD&D in both male and female varieties and for most (maybe all I haven’t thoroughly checked) species. Note also, that I have updated the movement speeds for bears because the original MM clearly does bears a disservice in this regard. If you’d like to add more diversity to the bears in your game, enjoy!