(15/41: 1993) M. DAVID CLARK (1965–2025)
Super Dave
Mark “David” Clark was born on January 20, 1965, in Winter Haven, Florida. He died on March 15, 2025, in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, at the age of sixty. He was a combat medic who served in both the Navy and the Marines. He earned a degree in Broadcasting Communications from Murray State University. He was a published poet. He was the iconic voice of WMMG radio in Brandenburg, Kentucky, for thirty-two years — known to his community as “Super Dave.” He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, and by every account, a man who gave his all in every circumstance.
He also designed one of the most mechanically inventive role-playing games of the 1990s.
The 1993 World Wrestling Federation Basic Adventure Game was Clark’s only tabletop game credit. He designed it, published it through Whit Publications, and then went back to his radio station in rural Kentucky and kept doing his real job for three more decades. He never designed a second game. He never attended conventions as a guest of honor. He never wrote a designer diary or gave a GDC talk. He was a small-town broadcaster who happened to solve a design problem that nobody in the RPG industry had ever tackled.
This is the entry for that game, and for the man who made it.
The Problem Nobody Knew Existed
In 1993, the RPG hobby had combat systems for everything. Swords. Guns. Spaceships. Giant robots. Kung fu. Superpowers. Vampires punching werewolves. But nobody had built a system for professional wrestling, because nobody had recognized the design problem hiding inside it.
Professional wrestling is scripted. The designated loser cooperates with the designated winner. He “sells” his opponent’s moves during the match. When the time comes for the big finish, he obligingly positions himself so the winner can execute the finisher. The drama is choreographed. The outcome is predetermined. The audience knows this and watches anyway, because the performance is the point.
Now put that on a tabletop. Two players sit across from each other with character sheets and dice. There is no designated loser. Nobody is going to stand around and let the other guy win. The cooperative fiction of professional wrestling collides with the competitive reality of a role-playing game.
Steve Jackson Games’ Pyramid magazine — the premier RPG review publication of the era — identified this precisely: “The WWF Roleplaying Game faced a design challenge that I don’t believe any other RPG has ever tackled; namely, how to do a competitive simulation of a non-competitive event.”
Clark looked at that collision and built something no one had seen before.
The Weardown System: Damage as Escalation
Every RPG combat system in 1993 worked the same way. You start at full strength. You take damage. You get weaker. Eventually you fall down. Hit points, wound levels, health tracks — the specific implementations varied, but the fundamental logic was universal: damage diminishes you.
Clark inverted it.
The WWF Basic Adventure Game introduced the Weardown System, where taking damage doesn’t weaken you — it unlocks you. As your Weardown value increases, more powerful maneuvers become available. You can’t execute a Tombstone Piledriver on a fresh opponent. You need to wear them down first — body slams, suplexes, working the crowd — building toward the moment when the devastating finisher becomes mechanically possible.
This is not how combat works. This is how drama works.
In a wrestling match, the biggest moves come at the end. The performer is at their most physically depleted and their most dramatically powerful at the same moment. Clark’s system captured that paradox mechanically. The Weardown curve replicated the dramatic arc of a professional wrestling match — the slow build, the escalating offense, the near-falls, the explosive finish — through pure game design rather than narrative fiat.
No RPG had done this before. Not GURPS. Not Champions. Not Rolemaster. Not Palladium’s Ninjas & Superspies. Every martial arts and combat system in the hobby assumed the same thing: damage makes you worse. Clark built a system where damage makes the game better.
The Pyramid reviewer called it “one of the most comprehensive hand-to-hand combat systems ever designed.”
A combat medic who understood what the body endures. A broadcaster who understood dramatic timing. A wrestling fan who understood that the story peaks when the body breaks. All three converged in a single mechanical insight that inverted thirty years of RPG design convention.
Two Hundred Moves and the Taxonomy Problem
The Weardown System was the structural innovation. The maneuver catalogue was the engineering.
Clark designed over 200 individual wrestling maneuvers with more than 300 variations. Each maneuver was classified by type — strikes, grapples, holds, aerial attacks, submissions — and gated by Weardown level. This wasn’t a list bolted onto a generic system. It was a complete combat taxonomy built from scratch for a genre that had never had one.
The taxonomy had to solve a specific problem: wrestling moves look different but often function similarly. A powerbomb and a Razor’s Edge are both elevated slam finishers. A crossface and a sharpshooter are both submission holds. Clark needed categories broad enough to encompass the full vocabulary of professional wrestling while granular enough that Bret Hart played differently from The Undertaker.
The result was a level-gated system where a wrestler’s finishing move sat at the top of a mechanical pyramid. You couldn’t jump to the finish. You had to build through the mid-card, working increasingly powerful moves as the Weardown accumulated. This created the natural match rhythm that makes professional wrestling compelling — and it did it through mechanics rather than storytelling.
For a man who spent his professional life building radio segments — knowing when to hit the break, when to stretch the pause, when to bring the energy to its peak — the structural instinct tracks. Broadcasting is timing. Wrestling is timing. The Weardown System is a timing engine.
Kayfabe at the Table
The second innovation was quieter and, in retrospect, more prescient.
The WWF Basic Adventure Game included rules for pre-match interviews, backstage segments, and crowd interaction. Players didn’t just wrestle. They cut promos. They worked the audience. They played characters who were themselves playing characters — the kayfabe layer that defines professional wrestling as a performance art.
In 1993, this was radical. The dominant RPG paradigm was immersion — you are your character, the fiction is real within the game space. Clark built a system where the fiction was explicitly fictional within the fiction. Your wrestler has a “real” personality and a “ring” personality. The interview segment is a performance. The crowd reaction is a mechanical outcome of how well you performed, not how well you fought.
This is a meta-narrative structure that the indie RPG movement wouldn’t discover for another decade. When Nathan D. Paoletta built World Wide Wrestling in 2015 using Powered by the Apocalypse, he was working in design space Clark had opened twenty-two years earlier. When indie designers talk about “playing to the audience” or “the character as performance,” they’re articulating ideas Clark had already mechanized in a licensed wrestling RPG that most of them have never read.
The social interaction system also had a cultural echo. Some of the terminology Clark codified — the mechanical language around “foreign objects,” interview segments, and match stipulations — filtered into actual WWF broadcasting. Not canonical the way Bill Slavicsek’s Star Wars sourcebooks became Lucasfilm’s internal bible. But the game gave formal structure to concepts the wrestling industry had left informal, and some of that formalization bled back into the product it was simulating.
A broadcaster influencing broadcasting. Through a game.
The One-Game Designer
Clark designed the WWF Basic Adventure Game for Whit Publications, a small RPG publisher he appears to have founded or co-founded. The company also published Mutazoids (a post-apocalyptic sci-fi RPG), Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards RPG (1992, written by Edward Bolme), and various sourcebooks. The editorial team for the WWF game included Jeff Arnett, Midge Bacon, Bill Littlepage, and Chris Wilkey — the last two of whom appear elsewhere on this list for their own contributions to the hobby.
The Pyramid review noted that Whit had acquired the license for a Mortal Kombat RPG using the same basic rules system. Whether that product shipped is undocumented. If it did, it would represent the Weardown System’s extensibility — proof that a combat engine designed for wrestling could adapt to other fighting contexts.
The 156-page core rulebook was the sole edition. Several sourcebooks were advertised in the back of the book; their publication status is unconfirmed. The game spawned successors in the wrestling-game space — the Raw Deal collectible card game (2000, Comic Images), the WWE: Know Your Role! d20 RPG (2005), Nathan Paoletta’s World Wide Wrestling (2015) — but Clark didn’t design any of them. He opened the design space and left it for others.
Then he went back to WMMG and spent the next thirty-two years being Super Dave.
There’s something clarifying about that. Most designers on this list are career professionals. They work for publishers, attend conventions, build portfolios across decades. Clark was a radio broadcaster in Brandenburg, Kentucky, who designed one game because he loved wrestling and understood what made it work as drama. He didn’t pursue a design career. He didn’t need to. He said what he had to say in 156 pages and moved on.
He was also a published poet. That feels right. The Weardown System has the structure of verse — the controlled build, the measured escalation, the devastating final line. A poet’s sense of form applied to a wrestler’s sense of timing.
The Honest Assessment
M. David Clark designed one game. The scoring is honest about what that means.
The draft arrived with scores of Invention 7, Architecture 4, Mastery 4, and Adjustments +1 for a total of 16. The methodology corrects this to 15. Invention holds. The other three pillars shift — one up, two down — netting minus one.
Architecture moves from 4 to 5. The draft scored Clark’s single product at “rough to broken,” but the evidence contradicts that. The Pyramid reviewer called the combat system “one of the most comprehensive hand-to-hand combat systems ever designed.” Over 200 maneuvers with 300+ variations, level-gated by Weardown state, with an integrated social mechanics layer for promos and crowd interaction. That’s not rough. That’s not broken. It’s a functional system with genuine depth — but one product, one edition, zero propagation. Architecture 5: it works.
Mastery moves from 4 to 3. The methodology is explicit: a designer who made one brilliant game and stopped is a 2-3 on Mastery, regardless of that game’s quality. The 10,000-hours threshold is real. Clark designed one game and returned to his broadcasting career for thirty-two years. The quality of the WWF Basic Adventure Game earns the higher end of the one-game range — a 3 rather than a 2 — because the craft is genuinely visible. But the 10,000-hours line sits at 5, and one product cannot demonstrate the sustained refinement that Mastery demands.
Adjustments move from +1 to +0. The draft claimed “Industry Founding” for Whit Publications. That trigger doesn’t exist in the methodology. Running the actual checklist: no longevity (one game, one year), no full-time design career (broadcasting was his profession), no formal awards (a Pyramid Pick is editorial recognition, not a competitive award), no branded name, no cross-genre success, no commercial success at the $10M threshold, and no design propagation. None of the seven triggers activate.
The net effect: Architecture gains one point, Mastery and Adjustments each lose one. Total moves from 16 to 15. The score is accurate.
The Scoring Case
The Hidden Pattern
M. David Clark built what he knew.
He knew broadcasting — thirty-two years of live radio, building segments, timing breaks, holding an audience through pacing and personality. He knew combat medicine — the Navy, the Marines, what happens to the human body under stress. He knew wrestling — a lifelong fan who understood that the art form is performance, not fighting.
The Weardown System is all three. The broadcaster’s sense of dramatic pacing. The medic’s understanding of physical escalation. The fan’s knowledge that in wrestling, the most devastating moment comes when the body is most broken.
He wasn’t a game designer who happened to like wrestling. He was a broadcaster, a veteran, a poet, and a wrestling fan who happened to design a game. He brought everything he was to a 156-page rulebook, and what came out was a mechanical idea that nobody in the professional game design industry had ever conceived.
Then he went home and got back on the radio.
That’s the purest form of game design there is. Not a career. Not a portfolio. Not a brand. Just a person who saw something no one else saw, built it, and moved on.
What Remains
The Weardown System — the only RPG combat engine in history where taking damage makes you more dangerous, not less. A structural inversion of thirty years of design convention, invented by a combat medic who understood what the body endures and a broadcaster who understood dramatic timing.
The kayfabe layer — pre-match interviews, crowd mechanics, the character-playing-a-character structure that indie RPGs wouldn’t discover for another decade.
Two hundred wrestling maneuvers. Three hundred variations. One complete taxonomy of a performance art form, translated into dice and paper.
A Pyramid Pick. A design space opened. A problem solved that no one else had identified.
One game. One designer. One hundred and fifty-six pages.
The methodology measures what you built and whether others built on it. Clark built a single mechanical idea so original that no one in the professional game design industry had conceived it. The people who built after him — Paoletta, the Raw Deal team, the Know Your Role designers — entered a design space he opened. They used different tools to work in it. But the space itself is his.
That’s a different kind of legacy. The score is honest about its limits.
Total: 15 points. Year: 1993.
Total: 15 points. Year: 1993.
That’s a different kind of legacy. The score is honest about its limits.