The Accident That Changed Everything

In the spring of 1967, a physics student at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, found a forgotten book in the University of Minnesota library. The book was Strategos, an 1880 military simulation manual by Charles A. L. Totten. David Wesely was twenty-two years old, a member of the Midwest Military Simulation Association, and looking for a better way to referee wargames. What he found instead was the seed of an entirely new art form.

Two years later, Wesely ran a Napoleonic miniatures game set in the fictional German town of Braunstein. He assigned individual roles to nearly twenty players—not just generals, but a town mayor, a banker, a university chancellor. The players were supposed to pursue military objectives. Instead, they started talking to each other in character. When two of them challenged each other to a duel, Wesely improvised a ruling on the spot. He thought the whole thing was a disaster.

The players disagreed. They asked him to run it again.

The First Game Master

What happened in that room had no name yet. There was no term for a game where each player controlled a single character, pursued personal objectives, and relied on a referee to adjudicate actions that no rulebook anticipated. Wesely had created the role-playing game—the one-to-one identification of player and character, the open-ended action resolution, the referee as living system—without realizing he was inventing anything at all.

Dave Arneson was in the room. He took the concept, moved it into a fantasy setting called Blackmoor, and ran with it. Gary Gygax took Arneson’s work, systematized it, and published Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The rest is a fifty-year industry. But the ignition point was Braunstein. Arneson said so himself, repeatedly and on the record. Jon Peterson’s meticulous historical research confirms it. The entire RPG lineage—every character sheet, every dungeon crawl, every campaign—traces back to a physics student who thought his experiment had failed.

The Career That Wasn’t

Here is where Wesely’s story diverges from nearly every other designer on this list. He didn’t build on Braunstein. He didn’t publish it. There has never been an official Braunstein rulebook. The concept was a scenario, not a system—a set of principles held in one man’s head and shared through play.

Wesely’s actual published design credits are modest. Strategos N (1968, published 1970) was a compact Napoleonic miniatures ruleset developed with other MMSA members—an adaptation of Totten’s framework, competent but not groundbreaking. Valley Forge (1976), published by TSR, applied similar principles to the American Revolution. Source of the Nile (1978), co-designed with Ross Maker and published by Discovery Games, was the most creatively ambitious of the bunch—an exploration game with procedural hex generation that won two Charles S. Roberts Awards. A handful of aerial combat titles followed for Discovery Games. In the early 1980s, he ported arcade games to the ColecoVision.

Game design was never his profession. Wesely served in the military, studied physics, worked in software. He ran Braunstein sessions at conventions for decades—Gary Con, ArneCon, private gatherings—preserving the form through oral tradition rather than publication. He collaborated with the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary team to ensure the history was recorded. But he never became a full-time designer, never built a company around his invention, never systematized what he’d created into something others could buy off a shelf.

What the Scoring Sees

The invention score is the maximum. No frame of reference existed for what Wesely did in 1967–69. He assembled elements—individual character roles, open-ended action, referee adjudication, personal objectives—into something nobody had seen before. People literally said “what is this?” Dave Arneson adopted it wholesale. The entire RPG industry is downstream. By every criterion in the methodology, this is a 10.

Architecture tells a different story. Braunstein was never a system. It was a scenario with improvised rulings, held together by one referee’s judgment. The published designs—Strategos N, Valley Forge, Source of the Nile—are competent wargames but not structurally remarkable. What propagated from Wesely was a concept, not a framework. Arneson built the framework. Gygax built the cathedral. Wesely lit the match.

Mastery reflects the thin published record. The designs show competence but not the arc of refinement—rough to polished, early to mature—that marks a master craftsman. Game design was an avocation, not a vocation. The 10,000 hours of focused design time simply aren’t visible in the output.

The Scoring Case

Total: 25 points. Year: 1967.

The Hidden Pattern

The inventor who didn’t claim his invention. Every element of the RPG — individual characters, personal objectives, referee adjudication — appeared in a game Wesely thought had failed. He lit the match and walked away. Arneson carried the fire. Gygax built the furnace. Wesely went back to his day job.

The pattern is the gap between ignition and ownership. Wesely created the conditions for an entire medium and never tried to control what grew from them. He kept running Braunsteins at conventions for decades — preserving the form through oral tradition while others built empires on its foundation.

What Remains

Braunstein. The name of a fictional German town that became the name of a concept that became the origin point of an entire medium. Still played at conventions, still passed through oral tradition, still unwritten after nearly sixty years.

The entire RPG industry. Every character sheet, every dungeon crawl, every campaign world traces back to a physics student in Minnesota who thought his experiment had failed. Dave Arneson said so. Jon Peterson confirmed it. The lineage is clear.

25 points. 1967. The match-lighter.

He created the role-playing game in a room where nobody knew what a role-playing game was. Then he let someone else build the industry. The invention score is the maximum. Everything else is what he chose not to become.

A physics student found a forgotten book, ran an experiment, and thought it failed. The players asked him to do it again. Fifty years of games followed.