Jeffro comments on Dunder's running adventures in the BROXT's UMBROS campaign.
This whole scenario makes no sense. Like, I really don’t get how guys like Dunder can hang around the scene for as long as he has and then still do this off the wall stuff. Judging from the way this discussion has gone the past couple of days, it is likely because he lives in kind of a cloud of people that reflexively fight any attempt to elucidate matters.
Why would you put a canned OSR product into a bro campaign? Why?
We already know from Trollopulous 2020 that players like doing whatever they want whenever they want with no planning. We know from Trollopulous 2023 that a couple of pages of one-page dungeons is easily enough to sustain ten or twelve 4-hour sessions. How do you look at all of that play experience and say, “man… what these campaigns need is some dude’s product dropped into it”?
And didn’t we see earlier this year Dunder was talking about how he had made up all of these Settlers of Catan boards to represent kingdoms and [blah blah blah blah zzzzz] huh?! dude! what?!!
Seriously, what is wrong with you?! If you are running D&D, then you need just enough of a scenario so that the players can be delighted that they have successfully stymied and thwarted whatever it was that you were trying to do. Any more than that is wasted effort.
But wait. You drop this megadungeon product into the campaign because you are so taken with it. AND THEN YOU MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO GET TO IT.
Okay, this alone is just awesomely funny. The BrOSR I remember would have teased Dunder relentlessly for this. Personally, I love this image of the plucky survivors running this massive gauntlet, dying in droves, players baffled and exasparated, everyone wondering just what in the heck is wrong with this campaign, and then finally… desperately… after ten or twelve or twenty sessions the players have arrived at the ENTRANCE of the adventure location and… a gigantic wolf eats half of them while they are vulnerable from breaking through the ice. The two surviving dudes get to the entrance somehow and realize that they can’t get in because someone sold the key. And the DM says that, yeah… well if you had all kept it you would have died from it because it was radioactive.
Guys.
That is a freaking masterpiece of game mastering awesome.
IT SHOULD BE IN A MUSEUM. I mean, that is just deep meta-commentary on the nature of life, art and gaming.
This is all going on in a backdrop of exploding frogs, some kind of wheelchair goblin charity benefit, and then something to do with an entire solo session with some random guy just because Dunder felt bad that he died pointlessly in the first session.
But no, seriously.
Here is what is so stupid.
Dunder puts Fun Adventure Product™ into the campaign. Yeah, okay. Fine. Stupid. But whatever….
He then makes it practically impossible to get to the Fun™.
Sotto voce: everyone has fun anyway because playing D&D is fun and stupid stuff happens no matter what you do
Dunder then at every opportunity beats his breast, talks about how challenging it is to run a bro game, confesses to all in Evangelical fashion that “he has not arrived” and that he is still learning, still growing, still making mistakes. Dunder… one of the best Braunstein players in the world. He is just a babe, see?. A novice. An initiate. He has not yet attained to even a tithe of the gaming brilliance of the worst player from Trollopulous 2020.
And on and on and on.
He is putting out these session reports of all kinds of weird and crazy stuff. But it’s all wrapped in the framing of “something is not working. SOMETHING IS WRONG.”
He has run what to the entire rest of the world is a “campaign”. And theme of the campaign was: *the players never got to the campaign.*
Man that is amazing.
Like I mean seriously, this is the zen koan of D&D campaigns. That is just such a deep comment on the life prospects of Gen Z right now. Incredible. Art imitates life!
And that flushes out the other thing that is completely off about all of this. Let’s say Dunder made an intrinsically unplayable scenario. Let’s just agree that happened, because everybody seems to think this is the case. Even Dunder.
But here’s Dunder… he has this stupid idea for a campaign which will never work. And then… all the players just dutifully feed themselves into the meat grinder week after week because, after all… that’s just what you do. You go to the table and you just do whatever it is that the DM his hinting that you are supposed to do. Because, I mean, there is just no way that you could play D&D any other way.
I mean, that’s what D&D is. It is a game of pretend. The people who sell it pretend that it is a game. The DM pretends to create an adventure. And the players pretend to play it. Then the DM pretends the players won.
Except you didn’t.
The key was radioactive and there was a wolf at the doorway to fun.
How is it that nobody involved ever thought for a moment that maybe deciding in advance what the campaign was supposed to be about was never going to work? Don’t you know by now that you just lay a few things out and then something will happen and then piece by piece, everything develops and fits together somehow and then something wild happens that is colored by things that were developed across a dozen sessions and OH MY GOSH THAT WAS JUST THE MOST AMAZING GAME.
The idea that the players even went along with Dunder’s stupid idea for even a second is what really gets me.
“This game is stupid and unfair,” said at least one ungrateful and unimaginative player. Maybe they won’t own up to it now, but SOMEBODY said it.
And yet somehow none of those players ever attempted to take control of the game.
“This game is not about getting into the Game Module of Fun™. This game is about me. This game is about finding a Troglodyte that looks like Steve Buscemi. We are going to use funds from a Goblin Charity front to create a gang of mutated freaks to take over level three of a dungeon that doesn’t exist yet. And Troglodyte Steve will be my henchman.”
Or whatever.
This is Meffridus 101.
And no, Meffridus did not teach people to play AD&D RAW even the weird and dumb rules that the gross nerds never figured out.
Meffridus taught players to take control of the game. The way Oghma did when he visited Trollopulous.
That’s the craziest thing.
None of these people washing up into a bro game ever thought to do that? Really?
I don’t get it.
If none of you can walk into an unfair game and then just make up your own victory conditions, then I don’t know what to tell you.
You failed Bro 101.
You all don’t need any of this #SuperAdvanced Braunstein theory. You need to go back to body builder memes and ridiculous hashtags that are weirdly inspiring.
At any rate… thank you for running the bro campaign that proves we need bro campaigns. I guess it had to happen to someone.
And honestly… that is just about the most Dunder thing I can imagine.
- Jeffro Johnson
Read on SubstackDon't think that the Bros don't criticize their own. That happens.
This is exactly that in action, and wiser heads will pick up what Jeffro laid down here.
"Wait. Why are we trying to do it all at once? Why didn't we secure the entrance to the Moon Pool first, set up a base camp there, and secure the road back to town? That would allow further pushes to start closer to the action, let parties react faster to developments, and allow for serendipitous opportunities to manifest that we could capitalize upon. Every time we get to another location like this, we move the base camp up and repeat the process until we're camped outside the target location and we have a secure logistics train all along the way."
Jeffro has a clear point here about seizing control of events: "Meffridus taught players to take control of the game. The way Oghma did when he visited Trollopulous."
What I wrote above is the most obvious form of doing just that.
At every point there is plenty of opportunity for player-driven action. Securing the route from town to the Moon Pool alone means beating a road down, clearing that route of bothers of all sorts, establishing and maintaining patrols, and then setting up the secure base camp--with supplies, Expert Hirelings, defenses, etc.--on the other end like any other serious expedition into dangerous territory.
Once that is done, action predictably goes two ways. One direction goes down into the Moon Pool as intended. The other goes out into the surrounding area, tracking down threats and resources- the former to kill, the latter to secure. Revenue from both forms of activity go into the maintenance of the camp and its garrison securing the route back to town.
Meanwhile, the Moon Pool needs to be swept and cleared of both threats and treasures while securing the route through it. Once secured, it must be occupied. The base camp slowly extends and expands into the Moon Pool in the wake of the expedition's sweeper teams. Meanwhile, the surface camp can now expand into a small armed town secured by a tower or motte as valuable resources extracted from below get used to build up the surface plant; maybe this becomes the seat of a rising adventurer's claim of dominion.
Does this slow the process? Sure.
Does this also make it something other than futile throwing of Polish mine detectors into the field? Also yes.
There is a considerable lack of a sense of agency at play here. A lack of currency does not mean a lack of economy; those prices become abstract Units of Account, used as a measure, but realized instead through non-coinage forms of exchange: oaths, contracts, in-kind barter, etc. as we see in a lot of tribal and clan-based societies.
This is a fantasy of agency- of being the Man in Command. Act like it.
