I Am Not on Wikipedia

But in a blind test, apparently ChatGPT knows who I am.

Alexis Smolensk, the creator of The Campaigners and author of the long-running blog The Tao of D&D, is known in the tabletop RPG community as a deeply opinionated and fiercely analytical voice. Here’s a broad sketch of what he’s like, based on his public work:

🎲 Passionate About D&D—Especially Old-School

Alexis is a vocal proponent of old-school Dungeons & Dragons, particularly AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). He has written extensively about his own long-running campaign, world-building techniques, game mechanics, and DM philosophy.

🧠 Analytical and Intense

His blog posts are often long, dense, and philosophical. He dives deeply into the structure of role-playing games, game design, and the social dynamics at the table. He treats D&D almost like a literary or academic subject, with essays that challenge assumptions and encourage deeper thinking.

😤 Confrontational but Honest

Alexis can be blunt—sometimes to the point of being controversial. He doesn’t hesitate to criticize popular trends in modern RPGs, especially anything he sees as “softened” or less rigorous than the old-school approach. He has a reputation for rubbing some people the wrong way, but fans appreciate his clarity and conviction.

🎨 Creative and Independent

Beyond blogging, he writes books (like How to Run: An Advanced Guide to Managing Role-Playing Games) and produces tools for DMs—economic systems, trade tables, etc.—designed to enhance realism and depth. The Campaigners comic is another outlet for his sharp humor and critique of the RPG scene.

So, hits all the usual points, essentially saying,  "I don't always agree with what Alexis says, but..."

Couple days ago I received this comment, related to this post about the collapse of formal schooling and role-playing culture:

"I ask because I want help understanding this article: you don’t want to learn from experience not to step on a mine (understandable), but what’s wrong with making mistakes in D&D? Not everything can be learned through the experience of others. You can’t learn to swim by reading a book about swimming, for instance."

No belittling of the reader, but it makes the point rather keenly and I can't let it go.  Nothing in the post states in any way, shape or form, "making mistakes is bad."  This is just not a part of the academic analysis taking place.  Mistakes are absolutely going to happen, and it's just as equally true that we shouldn't allow ourselves to lose heart or feel that mistakes suggest anything about our character and intelligence.  That was assumed.  Let me assure the reader that, if I don't in fact condemn something specifically, it's not being condemned in some insinuative, sly, implied, passive-aggressive or veiled manner. You may trust me — if I don't like something, I'm not going to hedge around it.  No, it's my style, officially accredited by the internet, my nature is to drag it into the fucking light and kick it until there's blood and vomit on the floor.

Additionally, there is also nothing in the post that suggests learning is done by "book."  The word "book" appears four times during the post, twice as "rulebook", once as "splatbook" and once as "game books."  Therefore, no, I wasn't suggesting that learning how to swim, or any other thing in existence, ought to be done by book.

At a bar last night I was struggling to make the point that most domestic fights that happen between couples who have been together twenty years or more (as I have) aren't because we're "tired" or "old," it's because we're simply unable to stop reacting to some crap that was dumped into our heads prior to the age of 15.  For example, to use myself, I was "challenged" so often and so acerbically by peers, by teachers, by family, sometimes by strangers, that I developed a pattern that a dog has when someone cruelly taunts it day after day.  It snaps viciously, because it's been lifted into a perpetual state of anger.  If this blog had a flag, it would feature a knee jerking beside a rabid dog, on a red flag with a white bar sinister.

We all have this crap in our nature.  "Booklearnin' ain't the answer to stuff," and "I can't help that I make mistakes and this guy says it's bad."  That's all it is.  Too many adults and older people holding us accountable for mistakes that just weren't that important, too many people shoving books at a student instead of instruction, and 30 years later we're slapping other people with that unfairness.  We don't even know we're doing it.

tl;dr is so telling.  It's comprehensible that someone wouldn't want to read my 4,000 word posts about why the hobby culture is systematically going down the toilet.  On the front of it, it feels like it's trashing the hobby, though it isn't, and anyone who's seen the depth and insanity of this blog, my wiki, and the ludicrous commitment I have to this game should be able to guess that maybe, just maybe, I actually love the game quite a bit and it's just the people pissing on my game getting slapped around... but okay, sure, I'm being negative, the hobby is being mentioned, the guy uses a lot of 1400+ SAT words.  I get it.  It does go on too long, for most.  It's fair if it's not read.

The declarative, "tl;dr" is the telling part.  I'm not ranting here, just noting.  "I didn't read it — you shouldn't either."   The "hobo code" of the 19th century was a system of symbols developed by itinerant workers, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This visual language was used to silently communicate important information to fellow travelers, marking houses, fences, sidewalks, or gates with chalk or carvings. The symbols conveyed messages such as "generous," "dangerous," "overly religious," or "unsafe to sleep here." For example, a cross might indicate a religious household likely to preach, while a smiling cat signaled a kind-hearted woman inside. That's all this is. A designation placed to encourage others who are "like me" to dislike what I don't like, so that, once again, our disapproval is turned into a badge that we can wear proudly as evidence of what we believe.  That's all it is.

The difficulty in raising D&D, complex as it is, to the level of an "almost like a literary or academic subject" (chat dearly loves to equivocate) is that to do so, others must accept that as a meaningful principle.  Others must be able to release their assumptions as a given and embrace something that "isn't" as something that "ought to be."  That's very difficult, particularly if the landscape systematically and commercially infantilises the same project at every opportunity.  And, importantly, that infantilisation is largely, "almost" universally, seen as a good thing.

Sorry about this, Griffin, but I promise, no kicking.

Eight days ago, Griffin wrote this comment to Heretic:

"You have been in the past somewhat dismissive of the old-school side of indie D&D, and for decent reasons. Lost in the past, re-arguing the same things, running the same modules, etc. It is not ideal, but I do believe that it provides something of a foundation away from the current mainstream malaise of D&D as Brand. I know a good amount of people on Tumblr that push strongly against the current 'Brand D&D' based on their experiences with the more old-school stuff, and most of them aren't old enough to have played/experienced it back when it was new stuff. So at the very least it keeps the starting line in view for those future people that want to progress along the right lines of thought."

I don't pull this to attack it.  The comment represents a fairly substantial number of those people connected to the hobby who both comprehend and don't understand what I'm doing here.  Yes, of course, old school D&D as written is vastly superior to the present-day alternative.  Yes, of course, it is a better starting line than 5e.  Again, not the subject of the blog post.  In any way.

I used "old school" D&D as a "starting line" 46 years ago.  Many others did as well.  It's practicality as a starting line is not a point of contention.

But since 1979, there are one helluva a lot of other "starting lines" that have been put in place, not related to later edition D&D, that are far-and-away better than old-school D&D.  All of them, like old D&D, would certainly need a LOT of work.  Ten years, at least, to remotely get them to a place where I was 25 years ago.  But you could take Pathfinder, Swords and Sorcery, Palladium and a host of others... you could even take JB's Five Kingdoms, roll your sleeves up, cut the stupid bits, shore up the weak spots, start writing your own rules for stuff not covered, and end up with a product way, way in advance of what you'd get if you started with Mentzer or the White Box set or AD&D.

This assuming that at the outset what you knew of Mentzer and what you knew of Pathfinder were exactly the same: that is, that you barely knew the name of either product and nothing whatsoever of the premise.  For a lot of people here, old D&D's a better starting line than any other alternative because it was more pervasive in their youth, and we tend as human beings to be predjudiced towards things we know.

But...

I'm not writing blog posts and putting together a wiki and sets of maps so that others can simply ignore all that and see what they would come up with in 44 years, starting back with the old school stuff.  I rush to point out that I started at 15... and I don't mean I started playing, I mean that at the age of 15 I began deconstructing the game with the intent of changing it.  My parents were fanatics about changing the rules to boardgames, including scrabble, monopoly, stock ticker, billionaire and others, so that my inculcation into a culture of "if the rules don't offer the best possible game, change them" began at the age of, well, at about the same time I gained consciousness.  So while ya'll are talking, as adults, about using old school game systems as starting line, let me just point out that I am almost 61 years of age.  So get on with it, you haven't got as much time as you think you do.

On that same thread, I answered Griffin with this:

"I haven't any reason to need a "starting line." Nor has anyone else who trusts me, and realises that 18 years of this blog provides more content, more direction, more hard sense and practical advice than the whole of the Dragon's repertoire and everything else produced by TSR besides.  I'm your starting line. And if you'd just done what I told you to do when you first encountered this blog, you wouldn't be telling me about the starting line of the old-school stuff now."

I think that's more than a good answer.  I think that it, and the fact that it was met by crickets, is exactly the reason D&D is in the shape it's in.  Because I'm not nobody.  I'm not using a few dozen youtube videos to prop up that statement, nor a game system designer with 9.2 million in funding whose churned out products basically serve as an accessory for fans.  I'm not popular, I'm not reviewed or featured in TTRPT journals, nor cited in broader OSR conversations, but I am not nobody.

Those who are here, who are reading this, know what I am and what I've been doing.  And it seems a little... um... blind, let's say blind... to propose that what I need to do, after the work I've done, is acknowledge that something that's 40-45 years old is a good starting point.  On a blog post not talking about old school D&D, but IS talking about taking a baton and running it forward.

Whose baton, exactly, does the reader think I was talking about?  Gygax's?  Well, I guess if you can find it in the dirt.