The Boundary Worker

Stan! has spent over three decades working at the boundary between the RPG hobby’s core audience and everyone who hasn’t arrived yet. This is his essential pattern, the throughline that connects every game he’s ever designed.

Born Steven Brown on October 16, 1964, in Brooklyn, New York, he was raised in Wantagh, Long Island and attended Binghamton University. He sold his first professional work in 1982—cartoons and articles about tennis. He spent the 1980s doing fan and amateur gaming work before selling his first game-related material in 1989. He joined West End Games as a staff member in 1995, working as a graphic designer and line editor alongside Ed Stark and Bill Olmesdahl on Paranoia and Star Wars RPG products. He wasn’t designing core systems yet. He was learning production craft, absorbing design principles from colleagues, understanding how games move from concept to table.

The name “Stan!” with the exclamation mark became his professional identity. A Long Island kid who never lost the punctuation.

Over his career, he would hold staff positions at TSR, Wizards of the Coast (where he rose to Senior Game Designer and Creative Director), and Upper Deck Entertainment. He co-founded three game companies: The Game Mechanics in 2002, Super Genius Games in 2007, and Rogue Genius Games. He adapted over 200 manga volumes for Viz Media. He designed the Warriors RPG for HarperCollins, published as bonus material in the back of Erin Hunter’s Warriors novels. But the through-line of the career is game design, and specifically, game design aimed at expanding who gets to play. Each project asked the same question: how do we get someone who doesn’t play RPGs to start?

Cards Instead of Dice

Stan!’s most mechanically creative period came at TSR and early Wizards of the Coast, between 1996 and 2002. The SAGA system was TSR’s attempt to create an alternative to dice-based resolution during the CCG boom of the mid-1990s, using cards to attract the Magic: The Gathering audience. The original Dragonlance: Fifth Age implementation came in 1996 and was primarily the work of William W. Connors and Skip Williams. They designed the core system—including the hand-as-health mechanic, where players held a hand of cards representing both their available actions and their vitality. Taking damage meant discarding cards. An empty hand meant unconsciousness. This wasn’t just a different randomizer. It changed the relationship between a player and their character’s decline. In a dice-based system, you roll and hope. In SAGA, you watch your options shrink. The desperation is mechanical, not just narrative.

After Connors and Williams designed the core system, they stepped away. Stan! became the lead designer for the SAGA team for the rest of its run. His contribution was the SAGA Fate Deck accessory (1997, co-designed) and the adaptation of the system for Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game (1998, co-designed with Mike Selinker, Michele Carter, and others). He refined the hand-as-health mechanic but did not originate it.

The card system featured player-facing mechanics where the GM rarely plays cards—though when players use the “dangerous suit” (Dragons in Fifth Age, Doom in Marvel), the Narrator receives those cards and can play them as negative effects on later player actions. Players make most resolution decisions, which inverts the typical power dynamic of most RPGs. Community members have called the Marvel SAGA system “bloody brilliant” and said “no game mechanic has ever captured the feeling of four-color superhero comics quite the same way.” Card-based RPGs existed before SAGA—Castle Falkenstein came out in 1994 with card-based resolution. The integration of hand management with character health was a fresh synthesis by Connors and Williams. What Stan! brought was the creative leadership that made Marvel SAGA one of the system’s most beloved expressions.

The Pokémon Inversion

In 1999, Stan! and Bill Slavicsek co-designed the Pokémon Jr. Adventure Game for Wizards of the Coast. It was sold at Target for $11 during the absolute peak of Pokémon mania, an extremely rare mass-market retail placement for anything resembling an RPG. Most RPGs live in specialty game stores. This one sat on the toy shelf.

The design contained a clever structural inversion: at key decision points, children—not the adult GM—described the world, settings, and outcomes. This made sense because the kids know the Pokémon world better than their parents. The adult facilitates. The child narrates. The adult is learning from the child. This flips the traditional RPG power structure where the GM holds all authority.

Christian Lindke of Geekerati called it “possibly the best introductory role-playing game ever written.” Whether or not that’s exactly true, the design solved a genuine problem: how do you get a seven-year-old to engage with the structure of role-playing when the 300-page rulebook is a non-starter? You let them be the expert. You make the system simple enough that a child can hold the rules in their head.

Stan! returned to this problem a decade later with the Warriors Adventure Game, a solo-designed RPG based on Erin Hunter’s Warriors children’s book franchise. The Skills vs. Knacks system continued the commitment to elegant simplicity for young audiences. It was nominated for the 2010 ENnie Award for Best Free Product. The Warriors Adventure Game is Stan!’s clearest solo design credit, and it demonstrates what his design instincts produce when freed from corporate team dynamics: accessible systems, genre-native mechanics, low barriers to entry.

d20 Modern and the Attribution Question

d20 Modern in 2002 is Stan!’s highest-profile design credit. It’s also his most clarified. The game adapted D&D 3rd Edition’s d20 engine for non-fantasy settings: spy thrillers, horror, science fiction, urban fantasy. Two genuine structural innovations made it work.

First, ability-based character classes replaced archetype-defined classes. Instead of “Fighter” or “Wizard,” you chose Strong Hero, Fast Hero, Tough Hero, Smart Hero, Dedicated Hero, or Charismatic Hero. This enabled genre-agnostic character building. Each class was mechanically distinct but not genre-locked. Second, an abstract Wealth system replaced currency tracking with a purchasing-power bonus. The abstraction freed game time for actual play.

RPG.net reviewers noted the system “winds up feeling like a skill-based system with a really nice balance between a pure class/level based system and a pure skill system.” The modular talent tree system was called “d20 Modern’s innovation” by EN World. The core rulebook later achieved Platinum bestseller status on DriveThruRPG.

But Stan! himself has clarified the attribution. Jeff Grubb’s 2022 retrospective states: “The game system was designed by Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, and Charles Ryan, aided by Chris Perkins and Stan! Brown.” Stan! confirms this is accurate: “I consulted deeply on the core game, but wasn’t one of the main designers.” The ability-class concept was Slavicsek’s. The wealth system and talent trees were the core team’s work, not Stan!’s.

Stan!’s biggest contribution to the core game was campaigning for the inclusion of the Tough Hero. The original design didn’t have it—the team couldn’t see a meaningful differentiation between Strong and Tough heroes. Stan! came up with and pushed for the Strong/Tough definitions that ended up in the final game. It’s a meaningful design contribution that completed the ability-score coverage, but it’s one class within a system designed primarily by others.

The Institution Builder

After leaving Wizards of the Coast, Stan! co-founded The Game Mechanics in 2002 with Rich Redman and JD Wiker. The company produced d20 Modern supplements—Modern Player’s Companion, Modern Magic—that EN World praised as “expertly polished.” These supplements deepened the d20 Modern ecosystem with expanded talent trees, debt and credit mechanics, and equipment systems that felt genre-native rather than fantasy-adapted.

In 2007, he co-founded Super Genius Games with R. Hyrum Savage. They later brought Owen K.C. Stephens in as a partner. The company became a top publisher of Pathfinder-compatible PDF products, releasing weekly supplements. Paizo developer Sean K Reynolds described their work as “fun, playable, and of excellent quality.” When Super Genius Games dissolved, Owen Stephens formed Rogue Genius Games as a separate entity and invited Stan! in as a partner. Between the two companies, they published hundreds of supplements across multiple lines and created sustainable income for dozens of freelance designers.

This institutional work matters because it created publishing infrastructure. Owen Stephens, who went on to become Starfinder Design Lead at Paizo, credits his connection with Stan! as formative for his independent publishing career. Stan! didn’t just design games. He built the economic systems that let others design games.

He is a member of The Alliterates, a writers’ group founded in Lake Geneva during TSR’s heyday and now primarily active in the Seattle area. Its membership includes Jeff Grubb, Matt Forbeck, Steve Winter, and other industry luminaries. His professional network reads like an RPG industry directory.

The Legacy Phase

The d20 Modern framework proved durable. In 2022, Evil Genius Games explicitly recruited Stan! and Jeff Grubb to develop Everyday Heroes, a direct spiritual successor to d20 Modern, updated for 5th Edition mechanics. The ability-based class architecture survived intact. The Wealth system survived. The game launched via successful Kickstarter and has spawned licensed modules for Rambo, Total Recall, Escape from New York, The Crow, and others. Twenty years between d20 Modern and its acknowledged successor. The framework held.

In January 2024, Stan! launched “50 Years in the Dungeon,” a weekly podcast and livestream where he interviews major D&D designers while live-drawing cartoon homages to classic art. Over 74 episodes featuring guests including Chris Perkins, Steve Kenson, Ed Stark, and Matt Forbeck. This represents a deliberate transition from active designer to industry elder and historian. The veteran who was there for most of it is now documenting the story.

The Honest Assessment

Stan! reviewed this article and corrected his own attribution downward in every case. He confirmed that the SAGA hand-as-health mechanic was Connors and Williams’s innovation, not his. He confirmed that the d20 Modern core system—including the ability-class architecture, wealth system, and talent trees—was designed by Slavicsek, Grubb, Redman, and Ryan. He clarified that his biggest contribution to d20 Modern was the Tough Hero class definition, not the FX systems previously attributed to him.

What Stan! claims as his own: lead designer of the SAGA team after its creators stepped away, including the Marvel SAGA adaptation. Co-designer of the Pokémon Jr. Adventure Game. Sole designer of the Warriors Adventure Game. Substantial consulting on d20 Modern. Co-founder of three game companies that published hundreds of supplements. These are real contributions—but they are contributions of refinement, adaptation, and institution-building rather than original mechanical invention.

The revised score reflects a designer who is honest about his role in collaborative work, whose craft evolved steadily across three decades, and whose institutional contributions amplify his impact beyond what any single game credit captures.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Stan! is a bridge builder. Not between systems, but between audiences. SAGA bridged the CCG audience into RPGs—and Stan! led the team that made it work for superheroes after its creators moved on. Pokémon Jr. bridged children into tabletop role-playing through mass-market retail. d20 Modern bridged D&D players into non-fantasy genres. The Warriors Adventure Game bridged children’s book readers into RPG structure. The Game Mechanics, Super Genius Games, and Rogue Genius Games bridged freelance designers into sustainable publishing.

His career is one long act of expansion, always working at the boundary between the hobby’s core and whoever hasn’t arrived yet. Every major project addressed the same question: how do we get someone who doesn’t play RPGs to start? That’s a different skill than designing the perfect system for the people who already play. It requires translation, reduction, empathy for the confused newcomer. Stan! spent three decades doing that work. The hobby is larger because of it.

What Remains

The SAGA system—Connors and Williams’s hand-as-health mechanic brought to its fullest expression under Stan!’s creative leadership in Marvel SAGA. The d20 Modern framework—ability-based classes, abstract wealth, modular talent trees—designed by Slavicsek, Grubb, Redman, and Ryan, preserved twenty years later in Everyday Heroes with Stan! and Grubb recruited to carry it forward. The Pokémon Jr. Adventure Game—possibly the first RPG for an entire generation of current designers. The Warriors Adventure Game—proof that an RPG can live inside a children’s book franchise. Three co-founded companies that published hundreds of supplements and launched careers. Seventy-four episodes of “50 Years in the Dungeon”—the industry’s history, told by someone who was there.

And a career built on one consistent principle: the door should be wider.

The methodology measures what you designed and whether others built on it. Stan! designed bridges—between audiences, between formats, between the RPG hobby and the mainstream. Some of them carried traffic for decades. That’s architecture of a different kind. The score captures the game design. The career captures everything else.

Total: 21 points. Year: 1995.

Total: 21 points. Year: 1995.

The methodology measures what you designed and whether others built on it. Stan! designed bridges—between audiences, between formats, between the RPG hobby and the mainstream. Some of them carried traffic for decades. That’s architecture of a different kind. The score captures the game design. The career captures everything else.