More on this bit.

Trollopulous was silly, of course. But it took the overall rules of AD&D and its implied game world very seriously. It was packed with Appendix N… which I always felt was something that went with the grain of the rules in general.

What did we find when we went down this path…? The game sort of just ran itself.

Now Dunder came into the BrOSR and was all into the goofiness. If he had a sane referee and a sane caller coordinating things, then the stupid stuff was kind of a garnish. I feel like Dunder sees it as primary. Like, he thinks the silliness and goofiness is the game. And then he gets into the game and doesn’t have the benefit of the rules doing the heavy lifting for him.

And worse… he starts pulling in all this stuff from people outside of the BrOSR. Which is even further afield from classic D&D and BrOSR play.

Dunder’s biggest “problem” is that he loves everybody and wants everybody to link arms and walk around like they are the Monkees. And I hate it, but life just isn’t like that. Dunder wants to mix everything up— both Law and Chaos— and then show everybody that they can feel good about it all.

But what you end up with is is something more like his campaign. Rather than combining the best of what everybody has to offer, he ends up with this sort of Dunderstein’s monster… and just like in the old story, it goes nuts and tries to kill its creator.

Or something like that.

But Dunder isn’t a purist. But some approaches to the game kind of require you to be a purist. And then bolting on stuff from people that aren’t purists just makes it all worse. It’s a very unstable gaming situation.

I think if you are going to try to run AD&D, though, you have to be willing to set aside how you would like things to be and then be willing to explore things the way that Gary (or whoever bullied Gary) would like things to be. But that’s freaking hard. And it is a slow project.

Like… where everybody else would be prepping something for their campaign during the week, you are instead spending time learning out to do one thing right that you know you did wrong in the last session. And then six months later you will go back to a passage you have been trying to get right only to suddenly see it in an entirely new light.

It’s going to be even tougher going through this when many of your players are not experts on the rules either.

Now, if you want to have happy goofy “we’re just making stuff up for the lols” gaming, there are plenty of other systems that will do fine for you. If you want to do that with AD&D, though… well… you can’t.

If the whole effort is not going to be stupid, then you are going to have to resolve to trust the game and its rules and then make an effort to see where it leads.

Just one example of where adding stuff to the campaign that is created by people with philosophies that are opposed to the spirit of the game… well… look at that whole deal with the Anomalous Subsurface Environment. Or look at Dwimmermount.

Dunder wanted to run a megadungeon. So he put one into the game. But the dungeon designs on the market for that are not ones that are built for open tables. Dwimmermount assumes one party working together and then every level has enough loot for that party to level up their characters before they go to the next level. That doesn’t work if there are multiple parties in the campaign and multiple parties in the same player group and people coming and going! And the Anomalous Subsurface Environment pre-game scenario… that whole adventure situation seems to be one that was not conceived of to be compatible with 1:1 time. Like… 1:1 time adds complications to that teaser opening puzzle thing that make it much harder for players to successfully resolve.

And Trollopulous? I thought everyone knew that I was very disappointed when nobody would go back to the same dungeon more than three or four times. Players didn’t want to systematically clear dungeons. They wanted to go wherever they wanted whenever they wanted to do whatever they wanted based on whatever random mood took them collectively when they showed up. This overall dynamic had a tremendous impact on the needs of any dungeon design that was put together for the campaign and whatever it was would tend to be something very, very different from all of the product that you might buy when you are making up stuff instead.

And what’s more…?

Every time the players noped out on one of my dungeon proposals, I tried to make up another that they actually would want to go back to. So I never got the design right on the first or even the third try. I tried a whole bunch of things and then I tried to design things based on what I knew would work or else not work.

Dunder…?

He put one idea into the game and then started doing all of this crazy stuff to try to make it work when it obviously wasn’t working.

I was able to get better because the campaign was set up in such a way that my bad ideas could quietly fail and then fade away. And then my good ideas would then get additional attention from both me and the players. In fact… if you look at Trollopulous 2020 in a certain light, it is basically a nonstop A/B testing that allowed me to work out a workable solution to both total player autonomy and 1:1 time in a RAW AD&D campaign with no stupid gaming products thrown into it at all.

Dunder did not have the benefit of that kind of feedback loop. And when he put in product and ideas from people that are well removed from what works in an open table total player autonomy [including the autonomy to fail] campaign… the results were just… not so great.