D. Vincent Baker
Who Is D. Vincent Baker?
David Vincent Baker grew up in Provo, Utah, deep in Mormon country—fifth- and sixth-generation Latter-day Saint, descended from pioneers and the early Utopianists of Orderville. At nineteen, he walked away from the church rather than serve a mission. That departure, the weight of inherited stories and the decision to stop carrying them, would echo through everything he designed.
He landed in western Massachusetts, married fellow designer Meguey Baker, and started Lumpley Games in 2001—a kitchen-table publisher operating from Greenfield. The name came from a family nickname. The output was small, handmade, and relentlessly experimental. Baker wasn’t trying to compete with Wizards of the Coast. He was part of The Forge, the online design community founded by Ron Edwards, where a generation of designers argued about what RPGs could be if you stopped assuming they had to work like D&D.
Most Forge designers published one or two games and moved on. Baker kept building. kill puppies for satan. In a Wicked Age. An unpublished dice experiment called Otherkind that he tinkered with for four years and never released as a finished game. He was prototyping in public, testing ideas that didn’t have names yet. Then, in 2004, he published the game that made the indie RPG world pay attention. Six years later, he published the one that changed it.
Invention No. 1
Trigger-Based Moves Framework — Apocalypse World (2010)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 8Here is how every RPG before Apocalypse World worked, more or less: the Game Master describes a situation, the player says what they want to do, and then everyone looks at the rulebook to figure out which skill or stat applies and what to roll. The rules are a reference manual. You consult them when something comes up.
Baker flipped the architecture. In Apocalypse World, the rules are organized as discrete modules called moves. Each move has a specific fictional trigger—a thing that happens in the story. “When you go aggro on someone” is a move. “When you read a charged situation” is a move. When the trigger fires, you roll 2d6 plus a stat. On a 10 or higher, you get what you want. On a 7 to 9, you get it but there’s a cost, a complication, a hard choice. On a 6 or below, the GM makes a move of their own, and things get worse. Three tiers: full success, partial success, failure. No consulting a reference manual. The fiction triggers the rule. The rule shapes the fiction. The loop is closed.
Nothing before this organized RPG rules as trigger-based procedural modules. Ron Edwards’s Trollbabe (2002) and Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel (2002) had success-with-complications, but neither built the entire game out of discrete move units. Baker’s own Otherkind Dice experiments (2003–2007) were the direct mechanical ancestor—roll dice, assign them to different outcomes—but he never published them as a complete game. Apocalypse World was where everything crystallized. The framework spread fast. Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel built Dungeon World (2012). Avery Alder built Monsterhearts (2012). Michael Sands built Monster of the Week (2012). John Harper took the framework further and built Blades in the Dark (2017), spawning its own derivative system called Forged in the Dark. Over 500 products on DriveThruRPG use the Powered by the Apocalypse label. Shannon Appelcline called it one of the two great indie RPG systems, alongside FATE. Classification: INVENTED. No predecessor. Hard ceiling of 8—the RPG Fathers (Arneson and Gygax) hold the 10s, and only subcategory founders reach 9. Baker hits the wall for a system-level innovation, and he hits it clean.
Invention No. 2
Escalation Conflict Resolution — Dogs in the Vineyard (2004)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7You play God’s Watchdogs—young gunslingers sent by the Faith to ride into frontier towns and set things right. The setting is an alternate nineteenth-century American West, inspired by early Mormon history. The game is about moral authority: how far will you go to protect the faithful? The mechanics exist to answer that question at the table, in the moment, under pressure.
Conflict works like poker. Both sides roll all their dice up front—pools drawn from stats, traits, and relationships. To act, you Raise: push forward two dice, narrate what you’re doing. Your opponent has to See the raise by matching or exceeding your total. If it takes three or more dice to See, you take Fallout—damage, consequences, things that carry forward. If you can See with a single die, you reverse the momentum. Here’s the turn: at any point, you can escalate. Shift from talking to shoving. From shoving to fighting. From fighting to gunfire. Each escalation adds new dice to your pool—you get stronger. But the Fallout severity ratchets upward with each level. Words bruise. Fists break bones. Bullets kill. The system mechanically models how conflicts spiral out of control, and it forces you to decide, in character, whether winning is worth what it costs.
No RPG before Dogs in the Vineyard used poker-style raise/see bidding for conflict resolution. No RPG had built a mechanical escalation ladder where the stakes and the power and the consequences all climb together. The game also codified the principle Baker called “say yes or roll the dice”—if there’s no real conflict, the GM just says yes and moves on. (Nobilis in 2002 had a similar concept, but Baker formalized it as a binding design rule.) Dogs won the 2004 Indie RPG of the Year and the Innovation Award, and was shortlisted for the Diana Jones Award. Baker later withdrew it from sale over discomfort with its Mormon-adjacent themes, but released a genericized version called DOGS in 2019. The raise/see mechanic was adopted by Burning Empires, Diaspora, and Lady Blackbird. Its broader influence—the idea that conflict mechanics should model moral and narrative escalation, not just tactical outcomes—rippled across the entire indie RPG movement. Classification: INVENTED. Clean first. No predecessor for either component.
What Those Things Built
The thread connecting Baker’s two inventions isn’t mechanical—one uses poker dice, the other uses 2d6. It’s philosophical. Both inventions insist that the fiction comes first and the rules exist to serve it. In Dogs, you don’t roll to hit; you raise the stakes of a moral argument until someone folds or someone dies. In Apocalypse World, you don’t consult a skill list; you do something in the story and the move fires. Baker kept asking the same question across both designs: what if the rules didn’t describe what your character can do, but instead responded to what your character is doing?
That question turned out to be load-bearing. Before PbtA, the dominant paradigm in RPG design was the universal resolution system—one mechanic for everything, from picking a lock to persuading a king. After PbtA, an entire school of designers started building games where each fictional situation has its own bespoke rule, triggered by the narrative, producing outcomes that push the narrative forward. It’s a different way of thinking about what a rulebook is. Not a physics engine. A story engine.
Baker did this from a house in Greenfield, Massachusetts, publishing through a company named after a family joke. No venture capital. No corporate backing. Lumpley Games was a kitchen-table operation that rewired an industry. The Forge community gave him peers and arguments and an audience. His wife Meguey gave him a co-designer for the second edition and a creative partner across decades. But the two core inventions—the ones that landed—were his.
Score 8. Two classified innovations. Portfolio: 8, 7. Pioneer. Toolmaker. The designer who taught RPGs to listen to their own fiction.