dragging and dropping pwads on brutal doom

some work and some don't. will anyone shine some light on this?
thanks

The best way to put it is that no one WAD is written with every other WAD in mind. Functionality can be overwritten, lumps squashed together without care, with the end result being a big mess that may or may not work at all. Occasionally you'll have WADs that specifically aim for a certain degree of compatibility (Valiant had a separate version designed to work with weapon mods) but as a rule of thumb you shouldn't expect them to work and be happily surprised when they do.

Otherwise, you'll have to provide more details if you want a better answer. Are they refusing to boot up at all? Is it just messing with the gameplay? It's important to read the text file of a given PWAD to understand what is being changed, as there's a list of Yes/No descriptions with regards to new maps, sounds, music, monsters, et cetera.

Good answer. Thanks. Mostly I wanted to make sure there wasn't something I was missing or I could make all pwads work by merely doing X. All the pwads I made work. Many of the master levels don't and any pwad I tried from Dr Sleep doesn't work.

That might be an entirely different issue than what CapnClever described (his description would only apply to wads involving advanced features that end up working improperly due to interferring with BD features, which for example the master levels definitely aren't). Those particular wads you've mentioned might just contain maps in other than MAP01 slots, or be for a different IWAD than Doom 2 or whichever IWAD you are selecting to be launched. If you simply start such a wad and go to MAP01, it will contain just the stock Doom 2 one. (Is this what happens to you, and what you call "don't work"? If so, then CapnClever's description is completely irrelevent to your problem, indeed.) You need to warp to the further slot, either via cheats or command line parameters or a launcher, to play the custom map. Respectively, in case of a different IWAD, quit the game and launch it again with the proper IWAD. The wad's textfiles should tell you which IWAD are the wads for and which map slots they occupy.

scifista42,

with your help I got it done

Good job