(21/41: 1995) Dave Williams
Inside the Bullpen
Alderac Entertainment Group in the mid-to-late 1990s was one of the most productive creative environments in tabletop gaming history. A small staff of designers — John Wick, Dave Williams, Rob Vaux, Pat Kapera, jim pinto — sat in the same offices and spun out product lines that would define a generation of card and role-playing games. Dave Williams was in the middle of it, from the very beginning.
He was one of seven co-creators of the Legend of the Five Rings setting in 1995, alongside John Zinser, Dave Seay, Ryan Dancey, DJ Trindle, Matt Wilson, and John Wick. L5R became something unprecedented: a collectible card game where tournament results shaped the narrative canon of an entire fictional world, which in turn drove a role-playing game, a miniatures line, and a fiction series. Williams wasn’t building one product. He was helping build an ecosystem.
Roll and Keep
The mechanical contribution that carries Williams’s name most directly is the Roll & Keep dice system, co-designed with John Wick for the L5R RPG. The concept is elegant: roll a pool of dice, keep only some of them, add the kept results. The tension between what you roll and what you keep creates a decision point in every action — players constantly weigh risk against certainty, ambition against safety. It became the signature mechanic of the L5R RPG and endured across multiple editions.
Roll & Keep worked because it served the setting. In a world built on samurai honor, political intrigue, and the tension between duty and desire, a mechanic that forced players to choose what to hold onto and what to let go carried thematic resonance beyond its mathematical function. The dice told the story the world was already telling.
The Card Game Architect
Beyond L5R, Williams designed across AEG’s expanding card game catalog. The 7th Sea CCG (1999), co-designed with Dan Verssen and Erik Yaple, brought the swashbuckling RPG world of Théah into collectible card form. Warlord CCG followed in the early 2000s, adding another strategic card game to the AEG stable. City of Heroes CCG (2005) translated a massively multiplayer online game into tabletop form, with Williams serving as lead designer — his most independent design credit.
His earlier work included Beyond the Wall (1995) for Chaosium’s Pendragon line, a detailed sourcebook on the Picts in Arthurian Britain. That credit places Williams in the RPG world before AEG, suggesting a designer who arrived at the card game boom with existing tabletop credentials.
The Honest Assessment
Williams was consistently a collaborative designer rather than a solo auteur. Every major credit — L5R, 7th Sea CCG, Warlord — lists multiple designers. Roll & Keep is co-credited with Wick. The L5R setting has seven co-creators. This doesn’t diminish the work, but it makes it difficult to isolate Williams’s specific contribution from the collective output of an extraordinary team.
City of Heroes CCG, his most independent credit, received mixed reviews — praised for novel mechanics but criticized for feeling thin in play. It suggests a designer whose strengths were amplified by collaboration and whose solo work, while competent, didn’t reach the same heights as the team efforts.
The Scoring Case
Invention (5): “Notable Contribution”
Co-created the L5R setting — one of the most influential fictional worlds in tabletop gaming, where CCG tournament results drove RPG canon in a feedback loop nobody else was doing at that scale. Co-designed Roll & Keep, an elegant dice system with thematic resonance. But consistently collaborative — one voice among several on every major project. Strong creative contributor within team frameworks, not sole architect. 5.
Architecture (5): “Notable Construction”
Roll & Keep is a clean, enduring mechanic that served its setting well across multiple editions. The L5R ecosystem required cross-product architecture spanning CCG, RPG, and miniatures lines — a structural challenge Williams helped solve. 7th Sea CCG, Warlord CCG, and City of Heroes CCG show sustained structural design across card game systems. Always within collaborative frameworks, but the structural output is consistent and functional. 5.
Mastery (6): “Strong Craft”
A decade of professional output from 1995 to 2005 as a core staff designer at AEG, plus earlier Chaosium work. Moved fluidly across RPGs, CCGs, and miniatures game contributions. The AEG era placed him alongside some of the best designers of the period — Wick, Vaux, Kapera, pinto — in a creative environment that demanded constant production across multiple product lines. Steady, productive, versatile craft across formats. 6.
Adjustments (+5):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: +1 — Published designs from 1995 (Beyond the Wall, L5R) through 2005 (City of Heroes CCG), spanning a decade.
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +0 — No documented design credits beyond the mid-2000s.
- ■ Full-time career: +1 — Staff designer at AEG, game design as primary profession.
- ■ Awards: +1 — Legend of the Five Rings CCG won the Origins Award for Best Collectible Card Game (1996). Williams was a co-creator of the game and its setting.
- ■ Branded name: +0 — L5R is beloved in gaming circles but does not pass the grandmother test for mainstream name recognition.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1 — RPGs (L5R RPG, Pendragon sourcebook), CCGs (L5R, 7th Sea, Warlord, City of Heroes), and miniatures game contributions (Clan War). Distinct tabletop formats.
- ■ Commercial success: +1 — The L5R franchise across CCG, RPG, miniatures, and fiction products exceeded $10M lifetime retail revenue.
- ■ Design propagation: +0 — Roll & Keep was influential but primarily used within the L5R ecosystem rather than widely adopted by other designers.
- ■ Field stewardship: +0 — No documented mentorship programs, convention founding, or organizational infrastructure work.
Total: 21 points. Year: 1995.
The Hidden Pattern
Williams’s career maps the rise of the creative bullpen model in tabletop gaming. AEG in the late 1990s functioned less like a traditional publishing house and more like a writers’ room — a small group of designers generating interconnected product lines at extraordinary speed. Williams thrived in that environment, contributing to systems that were greater than any individual designer’s vision.
The pattern is symbiosis. Roll & Keep worked because it served L5R’s themes. L5R’s CCG worked because tournament results fed the RPG. The RPG worked because the world had the depth of a setting built by seven minds. Williams was never the solo star, but he was consistently the designer who made collaborative systems cohere.
What Remains
Dave Williams helped build one of the most successful creative ecosystems in tabletop gaming history. Legend of the Five Rings — as setting, as CCG, as RPG, as miniatures game — was a product of collective vision, and Williams was there at the creation, contributing mechanical innovation and world-building that endured across editions and format changes.
The Roll & Keep system still carries his name. The L5R setting, now owned by Fantasy Flight Games, still builds on foundations he helped lay. The AEG bullpen scattered across the industry, but the products they built together remain some of the most ambitious cross-format achievements in the medium’s history. Williams was part of that. Consistently, reliably, collaboratively part of that.
21 points. 1995. The Roll & Keep architect of Rokugan.
In a room full of brilliant designers, the one who makes their ideas work together is doing the hardest job of all.