(27/41: 1988) LESTER W. SMITH
The Memo That Changed Everything
In 1985, a part-time proofreader at Game Designers’ Workshop dropped a two-page memo on Frank Chadwick’s desk.
Lester Smith had been hired to check spelling. His medical training as a Licensed Practical Nurse made him oddly useful — he could annotate margins about anatomical accuracy in game manuscripts. Marc Miller gave him a freelance assignment: write Beanstalk, a 48-page Traveller: 2300 adventure already two months behind schedule.
Smith delivered the adventure. Then he wrote the memo — a structural critique of the entire 2300 line with specific suggestions for revision. Chadwick hired him on the spot as lead designer for what became 2300 AD.
The revised game earned critical praise the original hadn’t. Jim Bambra’s Dragon review noted it as a genuinely improved science-fiction RPG. The organization and adventure design guidance Smith added transformed a promising but rough product into something that worked at the table.
He’d shown his fundamental skill: taking existing frameworks and making them clearer, faster, more usable. He would spend four decades doing exactly that across every format the hobby produced.
The Horror Before The X-Files
Dark Conspiracy (1991) was Smith’s first fully original design, and it arrived four years before Fox Mulder opened his first case file.
Marc Miller wanted a horror RPG with an environmental conscience. Miller and Chadwick were military history guys — they didn’t want to write horror themselves. They gave Smith complete creative freedom beyond that ecological theme, and he built the game in nine months while simultaneously attending graduate school.
Smith used tabloid newspapers as adventure seeds. He constructed a near-future America ravaged by a Greater Depression — corporate-controlled metroplexes surrounded by lawless rural zones where dimensional barriers had thinned. His setting provided a mythological rationale for why mid-century UFO movies showed benevolent aliens while modern fiction showed malevolent ones: the barriers had shattered, and something darker was coming through.
The critical innovation was structural, not thematic. Dark Conspiracy ran on GDW’s Twilight: 2000 engine — a military simulation system. Smith wanted to design from scratch with unique dice mechanics, but the house system mandate forced him to adapt tactical combat for supernatural horror. The constraint produced something genuinely new: action-horror, where players fought eldritch threats with heavy ordnance and the tension came from resource management against overwhelming odds, not from helplessness.
Call of Cthulhu said: you will lose your mind. Dark Conspiracy said: you have enough ammunition for three encounters, and there are five between you and dawn.
Delta Green and Hunter: The Reckoning would explore this territory later. Smith got there first — accidentally, because a constraint forced him to solve the wrong problem and he found the right answer.
The Dice That Almost Saved TSR
In 1991, Smith left GDW for TSR. The reason was simple: he couldn’t feed his family on their salary.
His first TSR project was Bughunters (1993) for the Amazing Engine universal system — synthetic humans hunting aliens, influenced by Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner. He co-designed Planes of Chaos (1994) with Wolfgang Baur, a 240-page Planescape boxed set that demonstrated he could work within established settings while contributing distinctive content.
But Dragon Dice (1995) defined his TSR legacy.
Jim Ward saw the potential for collectible dice at Toy Fair. When licensing a German designer’s concept failed, TSR pivoted to original development. Smith drafted a 14-page vision document for the world of Esfah, drawing from Tolkien, John Brunner, and Roger Zelazny. Jennell Jaquays created the iconographic artwork that made the dice legible as game pieces.
The design was genuinely inventive. Smith encoded all unit statistics directly onto die faces using custom iconography — no reference charts, no lookup tables. Each die was its unit. The elemental system created an intuitive rock-paper-scissors meta: Water extinguishes Fire. Fire burns Air. Air erodes Earth. Earth absorbs Water. Death touches everything.
This was a new product format. Not a board game with dice. Not an RPG with dice. A game where the dice themselves were the entire game — collected, traded, and deployed like cards in Magic: The Gathering, but resolved through rolling rather than playing.
Dragon Dice won the 1995 Origins Award and generated millions for TSR. It was displayed floor-to-ceiling at FAO Schwarz. Interplay produced a computer adaptation. For a brief window, it looked like TSR had found its answer to Garfield’s CCG revolution.
Then came the collapse. TSR overproduced the Firewalkers expansion. Random House informed TSR they would return several million dollars’ worth of product. The game’s returns contributed directly to the financial crisis that ended with Wizards of the Coast acquiring TSR in 1997. Smith’s greatest commercial success became part of the company’s obituary — not because the game failed, but because the business model around it did.
Dragon Dice‘s afterlife proved more durable than TSR itself. SFR Inc. purchased the rights in 2000 and has maintained the game for twenty-five years, releasing fourteen additional factions with full backward compatibility to every original TSR die.
Smith invented a format. The format survived its creator’s departure, its publisher’s death, and a planned disposal in a German landfill.
The Industry’s Utility Player
Smith’s freelance credits read like a tour of every major publisher of the 1990s and 2000s.
FASA: co-designed MechWarrior 2nd Edition with Mike Nystul. Contributed to Harlequin for Shadowrun, which won the 1991 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Adventure.
West End Games: Star Wars d6 adventure material, including the Tapani Sector sourcebook.
Pinnacle: Five years of Deadlands contributions — Book o’ the Dead, Skinners, Marshal’s Handbook.
He edited Gary Gygax’s Dangerous Journeys: Mythus (1992) at GDW — a significant trust given Gygax’s famously expansive prose. He co-founded Fast Forward Entertainment with James Ward during the d20 boom. At Imperium Games, he served as Chief Developer for Marc Miller’s Traveller 4th Edition.
This is the career of a player every team wants — the designer who can walk into any system, any publisher, any genre, and produce professional work on deadline. Not flashy. Dependable. The kind of reliability that keeps an industry running.
The Haiku of Role-Playing
Since 2011, Smith has operated Lester Smith Games as what he calls a “bucket-list hobby publishing project.” His signature creation is the D6xD6 RPG, which he describes as “the haiku of role-playing games.”
The system uses a single stat called Focus and one dice mechanic: roll 1d6 multiplied by 1d6, yielding a range of 1–36. The elegant inversion: roll high for skills your character knows, roll low for skills they don’t. Characters with few skills are specialists — better at what they know. Characters with many skills are generalists — better at improvising. Character creation takes five minutes and fits on a business card.
Smith explicitly connects this minimalism to his poetry practice. He served two terms as President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and has published multiple collections of formalist verse. He argues that a probability curve is a stanza and a resolution mechanic is a couplet — that the mathematical constraints of dice create the same productive tension as the structural constraints of a sonnet.
Thirty-plus professional settings now exist for D6xD6, contributed by designers including Steve Winter and Matt Forbeck. Thirteen successful Kickstarter campaigns have funded projects from the D13 RPG to the Bookmark No HP RPG — a system playable from a single bookmark where failed rolls degrade your die size instead of subtracting hit points.
Smith doesn’t launch a Kickstarter until the game is written. In an industry plagued by vaporware crowdfunding, that discipline is its own kind of invention.
The Honest Assessment
The draft submitted scores of Invention 8, Architecture 8, and Mastery 8 with +3 in adjustments. The methodology corrects the pillars downward by one point each and the adjustments upward by three — arriving at the same total through a very different profile. The original draft over-credited the design work and under-credited the career facts.
Invention drops from 8 to 7. The 8 threshold requires documented adoption — other designers copying the mechanism into their own work. Dragon Dice invented the collectible dice game format, but the format remained essentially one game rather than spawning a genre. Dark Conspiracy‘s action-horror synthesis anticipated Delta Green, but temporal priority is not the same as documented adoption. The step-die lineage from Sovereign Stone through Serenity to Cortex is real but indirect, and Earthdawn used step dice before Smith did. Multiple meaningful innovations, noticed by the field, not adopted wholesale. That’s Invention 7.
Architecture drops from 8 to 7. This is the same structural issue that caps Greg Porter’s EABA at Architecture 7: quality without propagation. Dragon Dice‘s thirty-year backward compatibility across three publishers is genuinely impressive engineering. But the methodology’s dual test requires both quality AND adoption by other designers. The collectible dice format didn’t propagate. Dark Conspiracy used GDW’s house engine, not Smith’s own architecture. D6xD6 is elegant but self-contained. Excellent systems within their scope that didn’t become templates for others.
Mastery drops from 8 to 7. This was the tightest call. The craft arc is visible — proofreader to adventure writer to lead designer to format inventor to minimalist philosopher-designer. But the methodology weighs solo-authored depth heavily, and a significant portion of Smith’s forty-year career is freelance contributions within other people’s systems: Deadlands supplements, Star Wars adventures, Shadowrun modules, Planescape settings. His key solo originals — Dark Conspiracy (house engine), Dragon Dice, D6xD6 — are solid but the solo-authored body of work doesn’t reach the depth the methodology requires for 8.
The adjustments tell the opposite story. The draft claimed +3, missing three real triggers and inventing one that doesn’t exist in the methodology. The corrected +6 reflects a career more impressive in its factual footprint than the draft acknowledged.
The Scoring Case
Invention (7):
“People noticed.” Dragon Dice encoded all unit statistics directly onto custom-iconography die faces, creating a genuine product category — the collectible dice game. Dark Conspiracy’s action-horror synthesis merged tactical military combat with supernatural horror years before Delta Green or Hunter: The Reckoning explored similar territory. D6xD6’s inverse competency mechanic — fewer skills means higher mastery — is an elegant inversion of conventional design logic. Multiple innovations across multiple formats, each opening new design space. But none became a widely adopted standard. The collectible dice category remained essentially one game. The action-horror influence is temporal, not documented. Meaningful innovation, noticed by the field, not adopted wholesale. That’s a 7.
Architecture (7):
“Built to last, built for itself.” Dragon Dice’s architecture has proven itself across thirty years and fourteen faction expansions under three different publishers, with full backward compatibility to every original TSR die. That’s exceptional durability. Dark Conspiracy sustained an active fan community for over three decades and has been acquired by Mongoose Publishing for new editions. D6xD6 supports thirty-plus settings from a single-stat core. The systems are well-built within their scope. But the dual test requires propagation — other designers building on the architecture — and that evidence is thin. The collectible dice format didn’t spawn imitators. Excellent within scope, not a template for others.
Mastery (7):
“Skilled professional.” Forty years of continuous professional output across six major publishers. Multiple quality games with personal craft driving results. The progression from revision work (2300 AD) through original system design (Dark Conspiracy) through format invention (Dragon Dice) through minimalist elegance (D6xD6, Bookmark RPG) shows a recognizable design philosophy refined over time — constraint as catalyst, compression as power. Five Origins Awards across different publishers and formats demonstrate consistent peer recognition. But solo-authored depth is the limiting factor: much of the body of work consists of freelance contributions within other people’s systems. The key solo originals are real but fewer than a forty-year career might suggest.
The Hidden Pattern
Lester Smith designs the way he writes poetry — inside constraints.
GDW mandated the Twilight: 2000 engine for Dark Conspiracy. The constraint produced action-horror. TSR mandated collectible components after Magic‘s success. The constraint produced Dragon Dice. Retirement and health limitations mandated smaller projects. The constraint produced bookmark RPGs and business-card character sheets.
Every time someone hands Smith a box he has to work inside, he finds a way to make the box itself interesting. The memo on Chadwick’s desk wasn’t “here’s my game.” It was “here’s how to make your game better.” The D6xD6 system doesn’t say “here are your options.” It says “fewer options make you stronger at the ones you have.”
This is formalist thinking applied to probability. A sonnet’s fourteen lines aren’t a limitation — they’re a compression engine that forces every word to carry weight. Smith’s games work the same way. The fewer moving parts, the more each part matters.
He lost Dark Conspiracy to Mongoose in 2025. His most famous creation now belongs to someone else. But the design philosophy that produced it — constraint as catalyst, structure as liberation — still belongs to him, and it’s still producing work.
What Remains
Dragon Dice — the format that survived its creator, its publisher, and a planned burial in a German landfill. Still played, still expanded, still backward-compatible after thirty years.
Dark Conspiracy — the action-horror synthesis that got there before Delta Green, before Hunter, before The X-Files. Now being revived by Mongoose Publishing for a new generation.
D6xD6 — proof that a complete RPG can fit on a business card and still support thirty settings.
And a design philosophy that treats constraints like sonnets: the tighter the form, the more powerful the content.
Forty years. Five Origins Awards. Six publishers. One consistent insight: the tighter the rules, the freer the play.
27 points. 1988. The polyhedral poet — working inside the box, making the box matter.
The methodology is honest about the gap between innovation that’s noticed and innovation that’s adopted. Between systems built to last and systems others build on. Smith’s work lives on both sides of that line — durable, inventive, and its own.
Total: 27 points. Year: 1988.
Total: 27 points. Year: 1988.
The methodology is honest about the gap between innovation that’s noticed and innovation that’s adopted. Between systems built to last and systems others build on. Smith’s work lives on both sides of that line — durable, inventive, and its own.