#Also a persistent poster trying to bring up Apocalypse World in every thread soured the conversation

[rampagingpoet]

As someone who was on The Gaming Den a lot around the time of the "Bear World" memes, I can explain that one.

The bear-summoning meme arose from the combination of two criticisms of Apocalypse World: a thought experiment about perception-type checks and the way GM Moves can introduce threats.

On the perception-type checks front, "you found a bear / a bear found you" is a plausible response to literally any roll if you're in an environment bears live in. Succeeded a check? You know where the bear is because you succeeded. Partial success? You found signs that there's a bear in the area. Failure? Well maybe they got separated or dropped something... or maybe they realized they're two feet from a bear cub! That would put them on the spot!

The Principles don't contradict this. You're supposed to make sure the PCs lives aren't boring and respond with fuckery - and "you ran into a bear" is neither implausible nor boring. But on the flipside if they didn't roll anything there would not have been a bear. Sure there might be one in the woods, but it isn't onscreen until the results of a player or MC move put it onscreen.

(This is one of the reasons Apocalypse World doesn't actually have perception checks. Read A Sitch isn't a spot check or a search check, and it doesn't quite work when you try to use it as such).

On establishing threats, the rules of Apocalypse World explicitly state that the MC can make as hard a move as they like on a failed check. Several of the MC moves bring threats onscreen or otherwise establish that they are nearby: Announce Future Badness, Put Someone in a Spot, possibly some Threat Moves for Threats that have already been encountered, etc. And again the Principles explicitly state you're supposed to be looking for opportunities to disrupt the status quo and that you should be making things difficult for your players about two times out of three ("fuck with" rather than "fuck over", but that's a delicate balance).

The MC has license to introduce threats on any failure, and there are very few situations in which a threat appearing would be implausible. And game mechanically the cause and effect is very clear regardless of the fictional justification: someone failed a roll, and then a threat showed up. This isn't a wandering monster check where there are procedures that introduce threats over time regardless of PC actions - the PC taking an action and failing directly causes something bad to happen at an inopportune moment.

Sure you're not going to literally summon a bear every time someone rolls a 5, but maybe tense negotiations get disrupted by a rival gang striking the Hardholder's settlement. Maybe someone really needs their fix and pulls a knife on the Angel while they're with a patient. Maybe you're in enemy territory and failing to jimmy that lock open meant their next patrol caught up to you. The MC probably isn't going to introduce a new threat on literally every failed roll - but it would be within both the rules and the Principles to do so much of the time.

This is really weird from a "trad game" standpoint! In D&D the expectation is that the world (especially in a dungeon) has a definite state with which the players interact. Furthermore there are ways for the players to gain information (or fail to find information) about that world state without affecting it. If a D&D character searches for secret doors, their roll only affects whether or not they find any secret doors present. Any orcs that appear during or shortly after their search are unrelated.

Meanwhile in Apocalypse World, making checks to learn about the world state directly modifies the world state. Successful checks nail down something about the world that was previously nebulous. Failed checks allow the MC to introduce threats that were not previously present. If dice are being rolled, the state of the world is changing.

Combining these thoughts - any failed roll can summon a plausible threat, bears are a plausible threat in the woods - lead to the meme that rolling 6- summons bears.

TL;DR Bears were shorthand for "a plausible Threat". Using bears specifically was from a thought experiment about perception-type checks in Apocalypse World. The central disagreement was a matter of taste about how RPGs ought to model their world state.

I feel like maybe I'm out of the loop on this, and you are one of the most well-versed people I've ever seen when it comes to ttrpgs, so I'm hoping you might be able to enlighten me on this. I've played a good few games in my time, but I've been running into people who seem to have an almost feral hate for any "Powered By the Apocalypse" game. Now I can't say for certain all of them I've played (at least 3), but is there something about the system that just enrages people?

I know that some people dislike PbtA games for reasons that boil down to matters of taste. One of my good friends, the lead writer of @anim-ttrpgs does dislike PbtA games, and in his case it boils down to a number of reasons: he feels the structure of these games is often a bit too restrictive and ends up with characters who are defined largely by their narrative tropes; and another reason he tends to dislike them is that the popularity of the framework has led to a lot of lazy PbtA games that don't really do anything interesting with the framework and are kind of just lazy and bad. That's a surface level read of his points and he's actually written a long post about it, but especially on that latter point I do agree with him: it's nowhere near as bad as the proliferation of lazy D&D 5e hacks, but on the indie RPG side there are a lot of cases where someone feels that a PbtA hack would be perfect for their first TTRPG. The thing is, it's very easy to make a PbtA game, but it's extremely hard to make a good PbtA game. Some of the best games I've seen using the framework are actually quite involved and have lots of interlocking parts, but a lot of the ones I've seen are simply kind of. Meh.

But there's another strain of PbtA haters out there that I know of and this group of people is best characterized as "people with a grudge against certain types of games doing the worst faith reading of those games to find 'flaws' in them." I think the most visceral hatred of PbtA games I've seen was on The Gaming Den, where a bunch of dudes convinced themselves that PbtA games are bad because on a roll of 6- a GM could just make bears happen out of nowhere. So, you know, it was a bunch of guys who did a surface level read of Apocalypse World but never read the MC principles, because if they had they would have realized that "Make a move that follows" is one of the MC principles.

All of which is to say, it's more or less the same that's going on with pretty much any RPG: some people will read a game and give it a shot and decide it's not for them, and often come away with a way to articulate why they disliked it. Other people will go in wanting to find a reason to dislike a thing and do the worst faith reading possible. And a lot of people will simply never read a game and simply accept that the previous group's reading of it is true.

So none of this is to say that none of the people who you've encountered have actually read a PbtA game and played it and actually formulated their opinions through experience. But knowing what nerds can be like it's probably at least some of them.