Is David Wesely the Origin of Polyhedral Dice in RPGs?

Reviving an old interview almost lost to time

This interview by Claude Clyde L. Rhoer, III of David Wesely was uploaded on August 30, 2010. The original mp3 interview file from episode 60 of Rhoer’s Theory from the Closet show can be found on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20131220174736/http://www.theoryfromthecloset.com/shows/tftc_show060.mp3

The discussion about polyhedral dice runs from approximately 01:21:37 to 01:30:50. Wesely tells the story of seeing numbered plastic geometric solids in his high school geometry class, later connecting them to a 12-sided teetotum referenced in Totten’s Strategos. Wesely bought a set of polyhedrals from the Edmund Scientific catalog for about $6, and introduced them to the Twin Cities gaming group.

As far as Wesely’s attitude toward protecting his intellectual contributions to the hobby versus sharing things, he says quite clearly around 01:39:21, “[S]o here I am. I gave my gift to the world, right? This is it. Never mind. I don’t get no credit or I don’t get any money for it. There you go. Um, so but that was the, uh, that was the thing with the dice.” There’s also an earlier moment at 01:20:11 where he expresses a similar attitude more casually, when Arneson asks permission to run Braunstein games while Wesely is in the Army: “Dave, I don’t own it. Have fun.” And at 01:27:16, he explains why he never pursued a copyright on polyhedral dice: “I’m not running out and putting in a copyright for that ‘cause everybody already knows it, right?”

Finally, Dave Wesely draws a parallel between himself and scientist Joseph Henry. Henry is unknown while inventor Samuel Morse got credit for inventing the electric telegraph. At around 01:36:34, Wesely tells the story about Henry actually inventing the telegraph, Morse commercializing it, then coming back to Henry for help with a technical problem. Henry gives him the solution (hang the wires on poles with glass insulators) and when Morse offers to cut him in, Henry declines, saying he’s a scientist and his work is free for everybody.

This interview was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license and thus I am obligated to share this information using the same license. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

I have posted the interview on both YouTube and Rumble. For YouTube, I added a subtitle file (.srt) so translations to other languages should be immediately available. Sometimes text remains on the screen. I cannot see anything in the subtitle file that would cause this kind of screen artifact to appear so I believe it is a YouTube issue.

YouTube —v

Rumble link: https://rumble.com/v7a4kfa-is-david-wesely-the-origin-of-polyhedral-dice-in-rpgs.html

Mandatory Self-Promotion

The interview was transcribed using ElevenLabs and then I cleaned up a few things with Claude. Claude was also able to generate a subtitle file so this will hopefully be available in other languages immediately upon processing.

It cost $22 $24.15 to gain enough credits on ElevenLabs to be able to process this interview. If you like the work I am doing to preserve the hobby, please check out one of my products:

Dragons Beyond
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/464791/Dragons-Beyond

Midwest Fantasy Wargame
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553613/midwest-fantasy-wargame-the-primeval-rpg

Men in Metal
https://www.amazon.com/Men-Metal-rules-medieval-miniatures/dp/B0F5RM23CC

Interview Transcript

00:00:00,480 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] [upbeat music] You’re listening to Theory from the Closet, recorded in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin.

00:00:14,760 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] Theory from the Closet is a role playing game show that covers theory, design,

00:00:22,740 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] and the issues that arise through play.

00:00:30,720 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] [upbeat music] Okay, um, I tried really, really hard with this one, um, because I was so excited about the, uh, content. Um,

00:00:43,500 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] but it’s beyond my ability to really get it cleaned up well. Um,

00:00:51,720 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] so, uh, I think the content’s worth listening to. Um, this rec- was recorded on a Amtrak train coming into Gen Con 2010

00:01:03,200 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] and, uh,

00:01:05,000 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] you know, I did what I could, but it was a noisy situation. If there’s any, uh, editing masters out there that’d like to give it a try, um, let me know and I can try to get the, uh, the, uh, WAV file to you. It’s about a gigabyte. Um,

00:01:24,120 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] anyways, uh, without further ado, uh-

00:01:28,520 [David Wesely] Yes

00:01:28,960 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] … talk to Major Wesley. Okay. Welcome to Theory from the Closet. I’m Clyde and today I have David Wesley, also known as Major Wesley.

00:01:40,000 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] Um, and I’m gonna ask him a bunch of questions. So what I’d like to do is start with, um,

00:01:47,160 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] uh, I’d like to start before Braunstein, Braunstein.

00:01:51,760 [David Wesely] Braunstein.

00:01:52,890 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] Braunstein.

00:01:52,890 [David Wesely] [laughs]

00:01:52,900 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] That’s gonna be hard for me.

00:01:54,260 [David Wesely] Yeah.

00:01:54,320 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] Um, and-

00:01:56,280 [David Wesely] And you’re from Wisconsin, a good German state.

00:01:58,620 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] And I, I’ve got a lot of good German family too, but I, I still can’t, still can’t do it. Um,

00:02:06,500 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] let’s start, I’d like to know what war games were like before you, uh, you made that. Here, let me hand-

00:02:11,740 [David Wesely] Okay

00:02:11,750 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] … let me pass this over.

00:02:12,820 [David Wesely] All right. Well, what war games were like before Braunstein. Oh, well, that, that can go back a long ways. Um, I got into war gaming in 1958 when I came across a copy of Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg game, which was a, a cardboard war game, map board game about the Battle of Gettysburg, obviously. Um, I’d gone down to the local bookstore to buy a copy of Tarzan and the Ant Men or something. I was a big Tarzan fan, and I was buying one at a time in hardbound. And, um, I was 13 at the time, and I saw this cool looking game with a cannon on the cover, and I opened it up and read it, and it had this 16-page rule manual that just seemed just the most sophisticated thing in the world to me. And so I decided to buy that instead of the Tarzan book, and then I found a few friends I could talk into trying to figure out the rules and, um, and we played this board game for a while. And then Avalon Hill had a couple of other titles, and I bought those, and we played those. And, you know, when we were 13, we didn’t have a lot of real historical knowledge. We kinda knew there was a Civil War and who, which side won, and that it was fought 100 years roughly before that. You know, it’s 1860, and I’m doing this in 1958.

00:03:26,340 [David Wesely] And, um, most of the gaming at the time that I was involved in, um, consisted of playing the, you know, the board games you get from Avalon Hill. There were a couple of other things that were on the market in those days from the more established game companies. Risk, for example, came out in that period. Um, and trying to what else there was. It was,

00:03:50,380 [David Wesely] uh, American Heritage Games brought out a couple of very badly designed games about the American Civil War and the War of 1812 and stuff, and we all tried them and just shook our heads and said, “This is really, this is really junk,” you know? So most of the gaming was up to that point, from like ‘58 until ‘63, when I’m gonna gradu- graduate from high school. Uh, we moved from Rochester, Minnesota, which is a small town, there weren’t many people to play games with, up to, uh, the Twin Cities, and most gamers at that time were people who had at some point found an Avalon Hill game and who were subscribing to the Avalon Hill Journal, the, the company magazine, and were reading the Opponents Wanted column in the back to try to find somebody else who’d play the games because it was a pretty esoteric thing to do. Um, I got the kids in the chess club in my high school playing the games, and you were always trying to find another opponent for a game, right? And most people, they weren’t really that turned on by them, but, you know, you’d find a certain group of people who were interested, thought it was kinda cool. And of course, as you get older and you learn more about history, you start reading books about the Civil War or whatever, so it, there’s a little more tie into it.

00:04:58,660 [David Wesely] Then in the, um,

00:05:01,600 [David Wesely] about the same time frame, around 1960, a book came out, I think it was called How to Play War Games with Miniatures, um, by one of the editors from,

00:05:13,720 [David Wesely] I can’t remember now, a big magazine. He, name Joyce. Joseph Morschauser was the author’s name, and he was an editor with, um, Time or Newsweek, one of those. And there was like a one-page issue, a one-page mention of him and his guys playing games with lead soldiers in the magazine that caught our eyes, and he read the book, and it told you how to, you know, hand paint lead miniatures from various historical periods and play battles with them. And there were people out there that we’d never heard of who were our fathers’ age, who’d been playing games, fairly serious war games with lead miniatures since,

00:05:50,600 [David Wesely] well, some people say since H.G. Wells wrote his book, Little Wars, back around World War I. Um, and, um, in my library at St. Paul, Minnesota, I found a book wr- published in the 1920s called Sham Battle-Which was an attempt to be a little bit more sophisticated about your gaming than H.G. Wells was. But there was this, there was this small group of guys who’d been playing games and writing rules. Fletcher Pratt, the noted science fiction author, had been doing, um, um, uh, naval war games with model ships in, I think, Chicago area in the, um, 1940.

00:06:24,444 [Clyde] New York.

00:06:24,774 [David Wesely] New York, was it? Okay. Um, and, um,

00:06:28,664 [David Wesely] so all this had been going on, but, you know, when you’re, when you’re a teenager, you don’t know much about stuff, right?

00:06:33,884 [Clyde] Right.

00:06:34,274 [David Wesely] And so gradually we’re finding, oh, there’s all these, there’s stuff going on out there, right? So we started,

00:06:40,164 [David Wesely] we started buying lead miniatures from a manufacturer in California named Jack Scruby.

00:06:46,044 [David Wesely] Um, and just like everybody else in these hobbies, they had fanzines. They were dirt cheap, you know, $1 a year subscription for your six page a month fanzine, or six page a quarter maybe fanzine. Um, and it would have a write-in thing reporting on the glorious achievements of your whole battalion of hand-painted grenadiers of the last battle.

00:07:08,524 [Clyde] [laughs]

00:07:08,614 [David Wesely] And, um, also it would have advertisements for, “I’m stuck in Bismarck, North Dakota. I can’t find anybody. Is there anybody within 200 miles of me who wants to play war games?” Right?

00:07:17,484 [Clyde] So were the, the, do you think the magazines were, um, the retellings you were talking about were kind of an attempt to add s- story to what was going on a little bit, or?

00:07:28,644 [David Wesely] Well, it was. There was a certain amount of imagination i- in doing these games. I mean, you know, what, what are you actually, you’re pushing pieces of lead around on the table and you’re rolling dice against the probability table, right? And so you, you kind of want to imbue this with some

00:07:41,404 [David Wesely] e- em- emotional and historical context. And to the degree that you’re writing your own rules and you’re trying to model history, you’d like them to work out sort of the way that battles really did in the period you’re modeling.

00:07:52,554 [Clyde] Right.

00:07:52,564 [David Wesely] But for a lot of people it

00:07:55,344 [David Wesely] … And I wasn’t real sophisticated at the time, but I could figure this out. A lot of people, it was the social atmosphere of the game. Just there are a lot of people who play bridge because they desperately want to win and beat everybody. There are people who play poker because they want to make a lot of money. But the most people who do that, because it gives you an excuse to sit around and do something with the other guys and drink some beer while you’re doing it, and, and you don’t, you don’t make a lot or lose a lot of money, well, unless you have a gambling addiction problem. Um, but you just do it as a social activity. And that was, and that was pretty evident to me even then. There were a lot of people who were into gaming, didn’t really care a lot about the sophistication of the rules, just wanted an excuse to get together.

00:08:31,254 [David Wesely] And there was, because the Civil War Centennial had just come and gone, there was a lot of interest in that as a historical period, and they thought it was cool. So Civil War was one of the biggest things you were painting up little armies to do. And the Napoleonic Wars were another big era of history.

00:08:46,584 [Clyde] What, what scale was that?

00:08:48,604 [David Wesely] Most of the people that we were with were buying their stuff from Jack Scruby, and Scruby made figures in several different scales with different purposes. He made really large figures for people who wanted to paint up an officer of the Imperial Guard in 1811 uniform with every last little detail on them. Big, big artistic figures, right? And then he made more modest ones about 54 millimeters high, which were the size of the old Britains company lead soldiers.

[Note: Britains refers to the well-known toy soldier manufacturer, W. Britain]

00:09:16,724 [Clyde] Wow, that’s-

00:09:17,244 [David Wesely] And those were, again, really there for people who wanted to paint up, put a lot of time into painting each model. Then he made 30 millimeter figures, which were the sort of the standard size from Europe at that time,

00:09:29,054 [David Wesely] though we didn’t quite understand that’s why he had that size.

00:09:31,674 [Clyde] [laughs]

00:09:31,704 [David Wesely] But that’s what had been k- popularized at around the turn of the century for toy soldiers in Europe. And then a 30 millimeters, uh, a little, like an inch and a quarter. And then he made 20 millimeter figures, and he said that they’re not really great detail on them, but if you want to make war games armies and not spend your whole life painting, a 20 millimeter figure can be painted pretty fast, right?

00:09:52,194 [Clyde] Right.

00:09:52,244 [David Wesely] So we were all buying Jack Scruby’s 20 millimeter figures and playing in that scale. The other, the other source was the Airfix company.

00:09:59,564 [David Wesely] Um, Airfix, the British model, plastic model company, had, while I was in high school, and maybe a little before that, started bringing out little, um, 172nd, which would be 25 millimeter tall, um, World War II infantrymen, uh, sets, and Germans and British and Americans and so on from World War II, and American Civil War figures, and a whole line of other stuff. And they were dirt cheap. They were made out of a fl- a safe flexi plastic that children won’t get poisoned when they chew on.

00:10:32,514 [Clyde] Oh.

00:10:32,524 [David Wesely] But unfortunately, which you can spend about 10 minutes painting because the paint will flake right back off it again the first time somebody looks at it cross-eyed. So we had a love-hate relationship with the Airfix figures. They were dirt cheap. You can get 50 of them for like 98 cents, as opposed to 10 cents a piece for the, for the lead ones. And, um, you could, and, and 10 cents was a, was pretty cheap in the leads, lead figure market, too. I mean, a 20 millimeter was 10 cents a piece or, or 15 cents per cavalryman. That was like a bargain compared to what you could pay.

00:11:03,984 [David Wesely] So anyhow, we had this mix of available figures. Everybody was sort of interested in, in various historical periods, but the, the, the three dominant ones are the American Civil War and World War II and the Napoleonic era. And people were making figures to go with those. And there were groups, again, of people who were older than we were. In Ohio, I think, there was a company that was making a lot of lead miniatures for the Napoleonic era. Is that what they did? There were guys in Chicago doing this who were old enough to be my dad. You know, it was just sort of a group. But

00:11:35,864 [David Wesely] it was a rapidly growing hobby.

00:11:40,904 [David Wesely] As for what the gaming was like, well, now we get into, uh, social things. Uh, the, the, like I said, a lot of people were doing it just for the s- the socializing aspect. They didn’t really care a lot about the rules. Others of us who were really crazy about history wanted to get everything li- every last detail right, and so we were constantly trying to come up with better rules. And there were no well-established standardized rules. The Avalon Hill games, well, you played according to the rules that were on the box, right?

00:12:08,304 [Clyde] Right.

00:12:11,576 [David Wesely] But from the miniatures battles, there were a lot of quickie knockoff sets of rules from people. But if you were historically oriented the way I was, you’d be, “Oh, that’s completely wrong. You can’t really fire four times as far with a rifle as with a musket, and the cannons ought to be able to shoot further.” And you know, so you were constantly fiddling with the rules. Also, the rules had loopholes in them like nobody’s business. They were not well-crafted, so you were constantly finding dumb things in the rules, exceptions, and then you got the new group of people in there were the rules lawyers who would argue every last little detail all night long in an effort to not be defeated.

00:12:49,236 [David Wesely] So

00:12:50,956 [David Wesely] a group like ours, which by

00:12:53,976 [David Wesely] ‘65 had probably grown to about 30 people who were gaming. I’m kind of pulling that out of my… Let me think. No, actually it’s a little too early. ‘65 was the first time another thing happened. I responded. I got a letter from somebody who had been buying lead figures from Jack Scruby and had written back to Jack and said, “Do you have… Give me a list of all your customers in Minnesota so I can try to get them all together.” And so I was contacted by this, again, like 55-year-old guy who was trying to organize a group.

00:13:25,056 [Clyde] Right.

00:13:25,996 [David Wesely] And so seven of us, wow, seven, got together at his house, and I had maybe two other people I knew who played board war games and were messing around with Airfix figures with me. And about half the people in the group were more interested in painting collectible figures and hand-building obscure aircraft that you couldn’t buy plastic kits for than they were doing war games. But we got together, and from that group, we started then attracting more bodies. And so from April of ‘65, when we got together for that first meeting, to ‘68,

00:14:00,416 [David Wesely] we had expanded by leaps and bounds, and we brought in a lot of people we found who were advertising, looking for opponents in the journal without knowing there were people in town like us who would read the ad and get in touch with them. And so we were gathering a group together, and we were doing battles, and several of us were trying to write a better set of rules than the ones that we’d been able to find, um, uh… I almost said on the internet, which didn’t exist back then. You kind of, you found out these things existed because they were listed in ads for them in the cheap fanzines, right?

00:14:28,666 [Clyde] In the fanzines or-

00:14:29,056 [David Wesely] And so you’d write off a letter to some place, send them 10 bucks, and they’d send you 25 mimeographed pages of rules, and you’d read, play them two games. You’d go, “Well, these things really stink,” or whatever, right? And then you’d try to write your own.

00:14:41,676 [David Wesely] So we’re going through all that stuff, and we are fighting ever more ambitious and complicated battles.

00:14:47,956 [David Wesely] And

00:14:50,536 [David Wesely] then things just sort of started building. We got into,

00:14:55,316 [David Wesely] um,

00:14:58,036 [David Wesely] we got…

00:15:00,116 [David Wesely] Socially within the group, there were various, always various strains between the people who just wanted to play and didn’t want to argue, and the people who wanted to argue, they loved to argue, and, and the ones who absolutely had to win it, and the ones who didn’t care much, right? And there was just social interaction things going on there that, you know, now that I’m 65, I look back and I go, “Yeah, [laughs] well, we’re a bunch of teenagers. What the hell?” You know, it’s stupid. I mean, the older guys within our group who were playing the games were

00:15:27,276 [David Wesely] 25, 26, right?

00:15:29,396 [Clyde] Yeah.

00:15:29,636 [David Wesely] Bunch of dumb kids [laughs] I assess now, right? At the time, they were the old guys. All right. And then there were, there were guys like me who by, you know, 60, ‘65, I’m 20, and I’m, I’m sort of the transition point between the small group of older guys and the much larger group of high school age kids that have keep, keep joining. We keep recruiting these kids, and like average recruiting age is like about 15 or 16, right?

00:15:55,336 [David Wesely] And

00:15:57,216 [David Wesely] we were working, trying to come up with good rules, and we had a lot of conflicts going on and battles that would never end because as soon as one or another of the guys was losing, he’d just start an argument about the rules, and it would go on till 2:00 in the morning when he’d throw in the towel. And I said, “Well, we got to do something about this.” Now,

00:16:16,216 [David Wesely] one of the things that had brought us together

00:16:19,736 [David Wesely] was a book published in 1880, Strategos: The American Game of War, which is a 340-page

00:16:30,275 [David Wesely] manual for playing war games that was intended by its author as the training manual for war games for the US Army.

00:16:37,736 [Clyde] That’s, uh, the one by Charles Adiel Lewis Totten.

00:16:40,416 [David Wesely] Right.

00:16:41,116 [Clyde] Okay.

00:16:41,776 [David Wesely] And we got together because one of our guys that was in our group was a student at the U of M and had looked in the card catalog there and found under war games, there was actually like an entry, and there it was, right? [laughs] Yeah, that was what happened.

00:16:57,446 [Clyde] Okay.

00:16:57,956 [David Wesely] You’d look for, uh, under war games in those days, you would come up with an anti-war movie called The War Game,

00:17:06,296 [David Wesely] or you would find, um, uh, a thing about mathema- the mathematical principles of s- of, uh,

00:17:17,076 [David Wesely] gaming theory,

00:17:19,616 [David Wesely] and if you have the University of Minnesota, you actually found a book about war gaming, right?

00:17:23,066 [Clyde] Okay.

00:17:23,096 [David Wesely] That was a really limited group. So he’d found it. He’d gone down the stacks. He pulled it out. In those days, when you checked out a book at the U of M, there was a card in the back, and you signed your name on it and handed the card in so they’d know who had the book, right?

00:17:34,846 [Clyde] Right, right.

00:17:34,876 [David Wesely] Well, he looked, and there were people’s names on it with the dates, right?

00:17:38,786 [Clyde] [laughs]

00:17:38,816 [David Wesely] So he didn’t bother to look for the people who’d signed it out in 1905, [laughs] but he had four people who’d signed it out in the last four years. So he contacted them, and that brought three new faces into the group we hadn’t met before, students at the U.

00:17:55,196 [David Wesely] And all of us who had never heard the book before, of course, had to quick take a look at it, and most pe- about 342 pages. The biggest thing from Avalon Hill is 16 pages long. This is insane, right?

00:18:05,016 [Clyde] Right.

00:18:05,416 [David Wesely] And most of our handwritten attempts would run 20 pages, right? But we looked at it, and I said, “This is unbelievable. I mean, the guy’s got page after page of the work in here. He, uh, he analyzed the results of these different battles to come up with those tables, and this has got to just be like the bee’s knees for-Ultimate in sophistication, and by 1880s standards, it certainly was, right? It’s, they had really beat itself silly over the statistics in the American Civil War and weapons trials in 1870s-

00:18:34,870 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:18:35,130 [David Wesely] … and everything else to make these rules.

00:18:37,700 [David Wesely] But it was so monstrously complicated, we all agreed no one, we could never manage to play those games.

00:18:43,220 [Clyde] Right.

00:18:44,060 [David Wesely] Well, now a year or so has passed from our first having seen those, and there are these stresses that are kind of really making the gaming just too annoying and unsatisfying of an evening. And I said, “Okay, we’re gonna go back and look at this again.” The cornerstone of these rules was that there would be a referee

00:19:04,920 [David Wesely] who takes care of making sure the game keeps running, and you can’t stand around and argue with him. He says-

00:19:10,980 [Clyde] Okay, wait, wait. Just before you get to it-

00:19:13,250 [David Wesely] Okay

00:19:13,250 [Clyde] … I wanna make sure I see numbers on this.

00:19:15,440 [David Wesely] Do you see numbers?

00:19:18,680 [Clyde] Okay, good.

00:19:19,440 [David Wesely] Okay.

00:19:20,020 [Clyde] I just, before you get to that part-

00:19:21,820 [David Wesely] It’s fine

00:19:21,870 [Clyde] … I wanted to make sure. Sorry.

00:19:23,180 [David Wesely] Well, the cornerstone o- of s- the Strategos, you have a referee. I mean, he’s probably a colonel, but [laughs] in any case, right, it’s a military setting. It’s, he says, “Go,” so you don’t argue with him, right? And even if you don’t actually outrank, he doesn’t actually outrank everybody, he’s still empowered to make the decisions and keep things going and make, “No, no argue. Okay, well, write that, or we’ll talk about it next week,” right? And go on, right?

00:19:46,780 [David Wesely] So I said, “Okay, let’s try to do this. Let’s try to have a referee. That seemed like a good idea.”

00:19:52,780 [David Wesely] So we did a couple of games with that, and we blundered around on the thing about, can the referee play in the game? No, obviously, he can’t be on either side in the battle ‘cause he’d be biased.

00:20:01,720 [Clyde] Right.

00:20:02,380 [David Wesely] And darn, I refereed last week. Uh, I have to referee all the time. When do I get to play? [child laughs] And, um, various

00:20:10,220 [David Wesely] things and, “Oh, let’s not have a referee. Let’s just vote on it,”

00:20:13,580 [David Wesely] whereupon the guys who like to argue will campaign for the rest of the evening instead, right? And so the guys who really wanted to do nothing but argue just wouldn’t go along with the idea of being a referee that wasn’t them, and they didn’t wanna be the referee ‘cause they didn’t get to play.

00:20:27,540 [Clyde] ‘Cause they didn’t get to win.

00:20:27,920 [David Wesely] So, uh, th- right. The referee can’t win, and the referee doesn’t get to play, and so it’s no fun to being told things by some other guy, and so they, they packed up and huff and pu- marched off, which was frankly good riddance. [laughs] Uh, but we, um, we then got a group that was amenable to the notion of having a referee running the games. Now the problem is, who wants to be the referee? [laughs] Well,

00:20:50,720 [David Wesely] a couple of things came out of that. One of the things that Totten had said was that in addition to s- deciding all these questions and helping everybody do the, the tedious computations, and they, fiendishly computation. There were no hand, no handheld calculators then, right? So he has these tables, and if your,

00:21:07,960 [David Wesely] if your battery of artillery is firing shrapnel at 2,000 yards at a line of enemy cavalry that are approaching in, in, uh, in skirmish order, executing a wheel to the left, you have about nine different multipliers you look up and apply to the circumstances to come out exactly how many cavalry you can afflicted up to the point when you have to check their morale according to table five with, with two D6, and then after you come back from that result, then you determine whether they continue the maneuver as intended, or they now change. And according to what they then do, you afflict more casualties at another rate, you know. Well, this is pretty tedious computation, but we all thought that was kinda fun, at least those of us who could do lots of mathema- uh, lots of multiplications in our head or use a slide rule. And so we were just cruising along, and the people who just wanted to game were just gonna roll with it and just let us tell us how many guys that got killed, right? [laughs] Um, but one of the things that Totten said… I’ve got, I wandered off there. One of the things Totten said was that in addition to the mechanical running of the game, he also takes care of providing intelligence from civilians or, um, other unforeseen decisions that will happen during the game, things that chan- chance and so on play a part in warfare, and that the referee basically was empowered to create the scenario that you’re going to be fighting. He plans out the battle.

00:22:31,780 [Clyde] Right.

00:22:32,000 [David Wesely] Here’s the, don’t always do historical battles, which you pretty well know what you’re supposed to do if you read the book, right?

00:22:37,790 [Clyde] Right.

00:22:38,520 [David Wesely] So he would come up with a scenario. He would say, “Here’s what our circumstances are. Here’s, you start, you start here. These forces can come in as reinforcements, and your objective is to capture the bridge over this river,” or whatever it is, right? He’d set it all up. And he would know all the things that you wouldn’t know till you got there. Can your, if your object is to capture that bridge over that river, okay, fine. But it turns out that, you know, once you check it out, you’ll find out you can wade across the river ‘cause it’s dry season.

00:23:03,540 [Clyde] Right.

00:23:03,940 [David Wesely] Um, and, uh, and things like that. And some of those are just derived from what has happened in historical battles. You know, people are madly defending some bridge, and it turns out you didn’t have to fight over it because you could’ve waded right around it. [child talking] So the referee knows all this cool stuff. He invents the battle. He comes up with particularly cute battles with surprises and twists. Does this sort of sound like something, right?

00:23:28,270 [Clyde] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:28,300 [David Wesely] Okay.

00:23:28,670 [Old Busybody] You’re still talking about those parses, aren’t you?

00:23:31,900 [David Wesely] [laughs]

00:23:32,450 [Clyde] [laughs]

00:23:33,800 [David Wesely] And we had, we had one great line that those of us who were in the gaming group back then

00:23:38,600 [David Wesely] w- still enjoy, which is the phrase, “What did the Cossacks see on the road?” Somebody sent his Cossacks out sweeping off the board to, to a position from which they could check out the road that would be used by the enemy for reinforcements.

00:23:52,160 [David Wesely] And they go back there, and eventually a messenger comes back and it says they see nothing on the road. Ha, there’s nobody coming that way, right?

00:24:00,080 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:24:00,740 [David Wesely] Sorry. The bad news is that a, in a, a whimsical referee said, “There was nothing on the road.” The rain had made the road so impassable that no one was traveling on the road. The enemy troops were all marching parallel to the road across the fields. [laughs] Nothing is on the road, right? So I’m, you know, it’s kind of cruel, but in any case. So things were going on-Like that. Now, so we’re getting into these games where there’s a referee who runs things. At that point, some of us found that the compensations of being the referee but knowing what’s going on and having fun with the players-

00:24:36,212 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:24:36,262 [David Wesely] … offset the, “I never get to be a commander.” Furthermore, if there were a few of us who liked that enough to do it all the time, or rather, you could always find a referee because one of about four of us would be willing to go do that.

00:24:50,052 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:24:51,172 [David Wesely] So the other guys would get to play as players periodically. You didn’t always get stuck with being the permanent eternal referee. You know, you traded that job off, but it was just a small circle in, of, of, of people who enjoyed the refereeing thing and had imagination to create useful battles. It wasn’t just the, “Oh, well, I guess we’ll just have a, like a, like a big hill in the middle and you’re all gonna fight over it.”

00:25:12,272 [David Wesely] You know? And-

00:25:13,112 [Clyde] Right

00:25:13,122 [David Wesely] … yeah, right. So

00:25:15,292 [David Wesely] you came up with, with this. Now, of course, you know, the years have gone by, and we all now understand how many people there are who can make, be competent dungeon masters and how many who can’t, right? And that was, that was, uh, p- presaged that, right? So we have a group, and we’re playing these battles. We also were really fascinated by the notion of ever greater scope and scale. Now, among the four people who were reasonable referees, right, I was one, and another one was David Arneson-

00:25:46,652 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:25:47,312 [David Wesely] … who was going to become famous later.

00:25:49,052 [Clyde] Right. Right

00:25:50,352 [David Wesely] And so we’re doing this stuff. Arneson is doing up games. He started, he’s now embarked upon a really ambitious program, and he’s got a campaign going.

00:26:00,432 [David Wesely] Campaign, in the period language, at least as used within, you know, Minnesota, was, a campaign was a related series of battles.

00:26:12,072 [David Wesely] Some groups would just agree that they were going to do the battles of a real campaign, you know, the, the, the 11 battles of the Isonzo River in World War I or something. And then the guys who win the most of them win the campaign.

00:26:24,402 [Clyde] Right.

00:26:24,412 [David Wesely] That would be one way. But most people, the feeling was no, campaign is the grander scheme of things. You, you don’t just have a s- preset piece, se- series of battles. You have the reason why the, the French are invading Italy in 1797. You have the Austrian’s positions are here, and the French are here, and the various minor states are allied with them or not with them. And, um, you’re confronted by the strategic questions that Napoleon has in the 1797 campaign, rather than just, we’re gonna fight the Battle of Lodi, Bridge and the Battle of Marengo. Um, and so you wound up fi- fighting battles in other towns at other places you could cross the river because people maneuvered differently.

00:27:04,152 [Clyde] Now, were these, were, were they being set up so that they, uh, were based on the, uh, the results of what had happened before, too?

00:27:12,612 [David Wesely] Uh-

00:27:12,912 [Clyde] Or based on-

00:27:13,592 [David Wesely] Yeah

00:27:13,992 [Clyde] … mainly on history?

00:27:15,541 [David Wesely] Well, initially, they were based on history.

00:27:17,852 [Clyde] Okay.

00:27:18,012 [David Wesely] And then we branched out from that into, okay, we’re gonna take a step back, and we had the first great Napoleonic campaign-

00:27:25,422 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:27:25,422 [David Wesely] … in which everybody got to be the head of one of the countries of Europe, and by this time, we’re running, you know, 30 people, right? Everybody got to be the head of one of the countries in Europe except a few countries that really big got to have committees. Uh, England, for example, was, was, was, was a democracy anyhow, got like five players who had to kind of argue with each other about what they’re gonna do. And, um, and there were some factions. I mean, revolutionary France isn’t really just a one-man show. Um, but each of them got a budget, and several of the people in the group, um, um,

00:27:59,992 [David Wesely] Dave Arneson, who was a history major and came up with these phenomenally great sources of stuff at the University of Minnesota library to find out how much does it cost to build a warship in that period, and, and how many tons, there’s how much the crew, and the, the supplies-

00:28:13,172 [Clyde] What’s, what’s the, the-

00:28:13,442 [David Wesely] … and all the other things, right?

00:28:14,752 [Clyde] What’s, what’s it displace and-

00:28:16,212 [David Wesely] Right, and-

00:28:16,761 [Clyde] … requirements and all that

00:28:17,292 [David Wesely] … and so you could, you could give somebody a budget of, of, of, uh, a quarter of a million pound sterling.

00:28:23,722 [Clyde] [laughs]

00:28:24,142 [David Wesely] And okay, you know, it’s up to you to outfit the navy you think you wanna have for this, right? And he’d build so many 74s and so many frigates and, you know.

00:28:33,712 [Clyde] Right.

00:28:33,802 [David Wesely] So we had these completely hypothetical, um, armed forces being built up based on these big master price lists, and everybody would organize them, and then they’d negotiate with each other, and it was quite informative to see how much, um,

00:28:49,972 [David Wesely] uh, how much

00:28:52,132 [David Wesely] in that… Okay, in a monarchy period, how much history derives not from national interest in the kind of cosmic sense that we would think of today-

00:29:03,832 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:29:04,292 [David Wesely] … but personal attitudes towards individual people.

00:29:07,972 [Clyde] Yes.

00:29:08,432 [David Wesely] Right? And it’s, and, you know, there’s a certain amount of tongue in ch- not tongue in cheek, right, a certain amount of poking at, um, the Kaiser in 1914 writing these cousin, Cousin Nicky letters off to the Tsar of All the Russias, and it’s a personal just me and you make up our minds about whether to have this war or that kind of a approach, and it looks so, so insane, right? ‘Cause of course it failed. But it’s not out of touch. It’s just that the last vestige of the we royal guys run Europe, and we decide when we go over each other, war with each other or not, it isn’t the great German drang nach westen versus the rock, Pan-Slavism that’s going on here. It’s how do you feel about me, right? [laughs]

00:29:51,822 [Clyde] Right. Right.

00:29:52,032 [David Wesely] Um, so anyhow, they, we set, he set the campaign up, and it ran for a fair period of time. Um, and it’s against that backdrop of that ongoing campaign where he’s getting ever, ever bigger sets of data coming in from everybody every week-

00:30:09,432 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:30:09,442 [David Wesely] … with all this complicated decision-making and everything,

00:30:12,892 [David Wesely] and he’s now really got himself into the I’m the referee day in, day out, every single day, never got to play a game situation. Now,

00:30:21,512 [David Wesely] that’s one parallel strand of the move into role-playing games. I’ll back up a little bit.My piece of it was that I had in the, in the, the, the kind of the lean days when there were few people to play games with, I’d come across a book about the theory of games called The Complete Strategist, which you’ve probably written down somewhere.

00:30:42,892 [Clyde] Yes, I have.

00:30:43,632 [David Wesely] I’d come across a book about conflict resolution called Conflict and Defense, which had, which had all sorts of … It was heavy reading. Oh gosh, it was heavy reading, and I wasn’t really crazy about it. I bought it ‘cause I thought it would be a … when we built war gaming. And it was about, it was about gaming, but it did express, it, it had some important ideas that I thought were cool. [coughs]

00:31:07,252 [David Wesely] And of course I had some Strategoes. So on the one hand, I have the referee mechanics from the Strategoes games. On the other hand,

00:31:17,012 [David Wesely] I have this curiosity that’s been piqued by the games theory book, which is a lot of fun, and which told, which, which pointed out that you can have games in which I have, like, five different strategies I could pursue and you have four.

00:31:29,912 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:31:30,292 [David Wesely] And you can make up a matrix, and you, the values as a consequence of I do this and you do that, here’s what happens, and I assign a value to it. And when you can off- if you can fill that in, and the author was very clear about this, if you can fill those numbers in so you can really assign a, a numeric value of worth to you for each of the possible outcomes, then you can use mathematics to work out what the best strategy for either side is. In many cases, it turns out there is one best strategy for each side, that if they do anything else, the other side will, will hurt them more.

00:32:00,682 [Clyde] Okay.

00:32:00,712 [David Wesely] And you’ll wind up what’s called a saddle point, where you both just, I play strategy four and you play strat- your strategy D, and that we always do that over and over ‘cause anything else we do would hurt worse, right?

00:32:09,902 [Clyde] Right.

00:32:11,012 [David Wesely] But in a lot of cases, it’s not that simple, and if, if I’m playing four and you’re playing D, you can go, “Oh, well, I’m [laughs] gonna stop playing D now. I wanna play B.” And then I can go, “Well, he’s got a probability gonna play B next, so I’ll play…” You know.

00:32:22,712 [Clyde] Right, right.

00:32:22,852 [David Wesely] And you get a, you know, acute method, um, mathematical methods for picking out the best ratio of strategies. That said, that’s a bit of a mathematical abstraction. But it did give you ways of analyzing game options and life decisions and things that proved to be very handy. One of the things he had in there h- was a comment that, “Now, that’s great. I spent the whole book describing how I’ve got two sides. It’s a two-player game.

00:32:47,752 [David Wesely] But in the real world, there are two things that, that we haven’t touched on at the last chapter,” and then he just waves his hands and says, “And mathematicians haven’t done a very good job of solving these.” The one of them is the N-player game, where there’s not just two sides.

00:33:03,072 [Clyde] Where N is more than two.

00:33:04,152 [David Wesely] N is more than two.

00:33:05,202 [Clyde] Got it.

00:33:06,212 [David Wesely] Everybody’s out for something, and each one, he wants to do the best he can for himself. And a lot of the assumption in the two-player game is if I get $5, I took it away from you.

00:33:14,972 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:33:15,532 [David Wesely] And therefore, your strategy is simple. You want to avoid giving me the $5. But in an N-player game, if I have a strategy where I get $5, and you look at it, “Oh, yeah, but you get it from him, not me. That’s fine by me.” Right?

00:33:29,422 [Clyde] Right.

00:33:29,872 [David Wesely] Whole different decision goes through, and they weren’t having, they weren’t doing very well in analyzing that with the pre-computer era.

00:33:35,122 [Clyde] Yeah, it’s a lot more complicated.

00:33:36,412 [David Wesely] Right.

00:33:36,552 [Clyde] A lot more complicated problem.

00:33:38,172 [David Wesely] Another thing that he pointed out was that the real world is not a zero-sum game. Many times it is. You know, either we own Wake Island or the Japanese do. [laughs]

00:33:49,342 [Clyde] Right.

00:33:49,852 [David Wesely] But in, in other cases, it’s, um, it’s a case of which is, which is easier? For me to go to war to take that oil well or for me to go out and explore for oil? [laughs] The, um, so

00:34:03,472 [David Wesely] that, that is another thing he said we don’t do well on games theory strategy on, right? But it opened up concepts of things you could try to do in a game. Now, the Conflict in Defense guy’s book,

00:34:14,392 [David Wesely] he liked the idea of conflict resolution through negotiation. And one of the things that he made a point of was that in conflict situations, that he was looking at people actually trying to deal with. You have, for example, the union and the, the company.

00:34:31,602 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:34:32,092 [David Wesely] Okay. If you have the union guys sit down and write down the five things they wanna get, it’s, “Well, we want more pay.” Right?

00:34:38,932 [Clyde] Right.

00:34:38,962 [David Wesely] “We want, we want better medical benefits. We want, um, we want more vacation. Uh, we want safer working conditions, and we want, um, families included in our, in our, uh, insurance programs,” right?

00:34:52,192 [Clyde] Right.

00:34:53,672 [David Wesely] You go to the management, and they, “Okay, what’s the five things you want?” “Well, we wanna reduce costs,” right? “And we want our guys to, to work longer hours and not complain when we have to do overtime to, to meet deadlines,” and you know, they, they come up with a list of stuff.

00:35:07,852 [David Wesely] His point was it’s not simply they want higher wages and we don’t wanna give them higher wages, which is the cl- classic newspaper view, right?

00:35:15,212 [Clyde] Right.

00:35:15,972 [David Wesely] There’s five things they want. There’s five things you, you want to get.

00:35:20,832 [David Wesely] Now, you get an impartial soul who doesn’t have any face to lose in this thing, and he can sit down and he can go through it, and he can say, “Okay, uh, you guys, well, what’s, of the five things you said you wanted, what’s the one that really, really drives you?” You know, he’s saying, “Do, does, is higher wages the only thing you’d want? If you had to give up on one thing, what would it be?” Right? And you go back to management, and, “So one thing you had to give up on, what would it be?” Right? And it turns out that, you know, if you’ll, if you’ll include their families in the insurance program, and the insurance company tells you, tells the management, “Well, it’s gonna cost you X million dollars a year,”

00:35:53,732 [David Wesely] and the, and the, uh, the workers say, “But, you know, that’s, like, really a key point for us. We want those families on that insurance.”

00:36:00,852 [Clyde] Right.

00:36:02,772 [David Wesely] “Well, okay, let’s see what we can do here.” You get done negotiating, and the workers get better insurance rates, and they get, they get more vacation every year, and you don’t raise the pay.

00:36:16,052 [David Wesely] And they go away saying, “Hey, we got three out of five. That wasn’t bad.” Right?

00:36:19,482 [Clyde] That’s what, that’s what happened our, my last union session, that exact thing.

00:36:23,232 [David Wesely] So that’s the kind of thing he’s advocating, is the notion that I have many objectives in the world, not just one,

00:36:29,332 [David Wesely] and you have many, not just one.And we don’t necessarily go head-to-head on every single one of those issues. And even if there’s some degree of conflict, there’s some stuff where you’d be happy to give me what I want if I will give you the thing you most want. And between us, we can work this out. And I looked at it and I said, boy, what a thought. Multiple player games where everybody has their own objectives and they don’t automatically conflict with everybody else and they conflict in

00:37:00,952 [David Wesely] oddly interactive ways.

00:37:04,092 [David Wesely] That would be neat to try to do that. So then I mulled that over for a long time.

00:37:10,132 [David Wesely] And then we’d had a number of games, increasingly sophisticated refereed war games.

00:37:18,112 [David Wesely] One of them I did was the Battle of Bladensburg. Bladensburg is the battle that’s fought between the invading British army in 1814 and the American troops that are defending Washington. And after the Americans lose it, the British go in and burn Washington, D.C. That really happened, okay?

00:37:37,672 [David Wesely] One of the things I learned while reading a history about that is that something that greatly contributed to the Americans losing that battle was that nobody was in charge

00:37:46,932 [David Wesely] or everybody was in charge.

00:37:49,592 [David Wesely] They had, on the battlefield, they had the President of the United States,

00:37:54,772 [David Wesely] the Vice President, the Secretary of War, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army, the head of the Ordnance Branch, a Navy Commodore,

00:38:07,212 [David Wesely] a General of

00:38:13,652 [David Wesely] Maryland Militia, a General of District of Columbia Militia, and no General of Virginia Militia, but they had, was it Virginia? Okay, I think it’s the Virginia Militia General who’s too sick to get there. He’s coming, but he’s got his gout and he’s riding slowly. And he sends this lieutenant ahead of him

00:38:35,812 [David Wesely] with orders to get up there and straighten things out. And the lieutenant arrives and with the authority of the General vested in his little 19-year-old body, runs around countermanding everybody’s orders every time he finds a Virginia unit. He tells it to go someplace else.

00:38:53,712 [David Wesely] And every, they’re having enough trouble getting all of the cooks to coordinate as to what they’re going to do. And at one point, the President of the United States starts across a bridge into the town of Bladensburg because he’s going to ride up there and find the Generals and have a meeting with them. And at the last second, the guys who are guarding the bridge stop him and point out that the British are holding the town.

00:39:13,892 [David Wesely] So it is a wonderfully chaotic situation. So I set that up and gamed it out one time where I had 14 people in the game. Some of them have a particular battalion that they’re commanding, and it’s here, there, or elsewhere on the board. And other people are officers, including Lieutenant Francis Scott Key, who’s riding around handing out stupid instructions to everybody he runs into. He has the authority to tell any Virginia unit to go any place he wants to tell it to, and he has no rational plan. He’s making it up as he goes along, right?

00:39:43,272 [David Wesely] And these guys, it’s this mad scramble. And the British side, there’s two guys, and they agreed on how to split their command, and each of them command a piece of the British forces, and they work nicely, and they win the battle. No shock, right? But

00:39:55,812 [David Wesely] so we’ve done a battle like that, right, where everybody’s pulling in different directions.

00:40:01,432 [David Wesely] And that was kind of fun. And so then we got down to the Braunstein game, where I got the guys together. We had a large number of people come over to my folks’ house that night. And I said, this is my chance to try that everybody goes every which way game.

00:40:16,112 [David Wesely] So I briefed them. As everybody came in, I started giving them briefings of what they were going to be doing.

00:40:23,341 [David Wesely] And I had a tabletop, 12 by 6 tabletop, all set up with the model houses and paper roads and all the other beautiful terrain. And I had trays full of miniature soldiers all set up off to one side. And I had copies of the rules, and I had dice and all the usual paraphernalia laid out.

00:40:40,992 [David Wesely] And the first guy comes in, and I tell him, okay, you’re this

00:40:45,332 [David Wesely] captain in the French Lancers. And Braunstein commands this important bridge over the Braunwasser River. And you’ve been sent out ahead of the army to find out what the defenses are like, right? So the rest of your Lancers will come on the board, and you go back and get them. But you’re here to make sure that your guys aren’t riding into a trap. So you’re going to go into the town in disguise and find out what’s going on. Oh, that’s cool. Okay, sure, right? And then I grab another guy, and I tell him, okay, and you’re the head of the Prussian Jaeger regiment that’s been dispatched down here to reinforce Braunstein. And you’re ridden ahead, and you’re going to arrive all by yourself, and the troops will be following shortly. Okay, so far it’s a meeting engagement. Advance guards are coming in, right? The next guy I grab is you’re the mayor of Braunstein. And last night there was a student riot in several of the taverns. And your

00:41:37,372 [David Wesely] law enforcement commander, who doubles as your chief of police, called out the guards and went in and broke heads and rounded up a whole bunch of students and threw them in jail.

00:41:44,852 [David Wesely] And this morning you have to talk to him. The tavern owners are all up in arms because they say he wrecked their taverns in the process. Him and his guys helped themselves to a lot of free beer after they, quote, saved the taverns. And they want money. And the chancellor of the university wants to talk to you because he doesn’t like his students getting beat up. And, you know, suddenly these people are getting non-military roles right and left, right? So we have a chancellor. We have a mayor. We have a chief of police, in effect. We have

00:42:15,272 [David Wesely] the Baron of Braunstein is going to be showing up shortly. He has things he’s working on, nothing to do with anybody else. And we have a banker who’s got a

00:42:25,012 [David Wesely] bank full of money. He’s afraid it’s going to get confiscated if the French invasion arrives. And so all these different civilian jobs. And I had about nine people planned for this.

00:42:35,012 [Clyde] So each one of them basically had several. Not ethical dilemmas, but dilemmas that they had to-

00:42:42,008 [David Wesely] Right

00:42:42,208 [Clyde] … they had to deal with.

00:42:43,108 [David Wesely] Right.

00:42:43,508 [Clyde] Choices they had.

00:42:43,558 [David Wesely] They’re usually not ethical dilemmas, but they are problems about-

00:42:46,378 [Clyde] Dilemmas

00:42:46,378 [David Wesely] … trying to strike a ba- strike a balance between the vic- con- conflicting interests, right?

00:42:51,468 [Clyde] Right, right.

00:42:51,748 [David Wesely] Uh, they’ve made clear to the mayor that the tavern owners are real important to his repeated re-election ‘cause they will give out lots of free drinks to his buddies at, on election days, right?

00:43:00,688 [Clyde] Right.

00:43:01,068 [David Wesely] It’s made clear to him that he really likes the banker to be on his side because he’s got the money, and at the same time … And there’s all these different people, right? And so they’re gonna be each strumming for their own thing. The tavern owner’s gonna try to extort all the money they can out of the mayor under the circumstances. Um-

00:43:16,348 [Clyde] Scary

00:43:16,358 [David Wesely] … and I set this up, and I had about

00:43:19,028 [David Wesely] nine different roles that were thought out as to how they would interlock with each other and what they’d interfere with and who’d, who’d be the sort of the likely allies and who wouldn’t. Then just to really stir the pot, I cast against type.

00:43:34,248 [David Wesely] You know, casting against type wasn’t the thought, the term I had in mind, a more sophisticated analogy. But basically, I picked people out who ought to be cooperating with each other because they had mutual interests, but I took people who didn’t much like each other for those roles.

00:43:48,728 [Clyde] [laughs] Okay.

00:43:50,188 [David Wesely] So, um, the, uh, rabidly patriotic Student A, who was the, um, obvious

00:43:58,508 [David Wesely] … who, who was involved in the beginning of the riot between his backers and Student B, the ra- the radical, pro-French revolutionary student, right?

00:44:08,048 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:44:08,528 [David Wesely] They, their, their fight had started over the stuff last night. Now, Student A really ought to be chumming up with the forces of law and order, right? Well, because they, he should be saying it’s these radical r- red cap wearing revolutionaries that are responsible for all this and try to get them hanged or kept in jail or whatever. But because he doesn’t get along well with the guy who’s playing the head of the Prussian Jaegers-

00:44:36,748 [Clyde] That, that people would normally associate with, right

00:44:37,598 [David Wesely] … right, um, they didn’t hit it off well at all, and, um, and things develop along entirely different lines than it, they would have if they, if they just said, “Well, it’s, you know, obviously we want to team up here,” right?

00:44:49,248 [Clyde] Right.

00:44:49,397 [David Wesely] So, you know, a lot of things happen. Now, that was the good side. The bad side for me was this. I got the game going,

00:44:56,068 [David Wesely] and I expected maybe nine people, and like 22 people showed up.

00:45:00,548 [Clyde] Wow.

00:45:00,928 [David Wesely] So I start making up new roles and just pulling on my left ear as fast as I can talk.

00:45:06,028 [Clyde] Can you, uh, just hit really quick, well, one of the things that I was interested in is you said that, um,

00:45:13,168 [Clyde] originally you created the non-combatants as a joke.

00:45:17,028 [David Wesely] Well, I figured you’re gonna do this once. The guys are going to play along with this thinking any- everybody would get briefed, well, you know, until the troops you’re gonna be commanding get on the board, ‘cause it’ll be a meeting engagement. Well, I want you to take care of this for me. It wasn’t the first time that we had had to come up with something like a cavalry patrol comes out, and it’s gonna ask some local farmer where you can get across the river. And I’d grab one of the guys who didn’t have a particular role in the game, and it wasn’t decided which side he was gonna be on for the battle. And I’d say, “They wanna, they wanna find out where the fords are in the river, and you’re a local farmer. Now, you know, it’s up to you whether you cooperate with them or you mislead them. It’s up to you. I just let you go do it,” right?

00:45:55,888 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:45:56,348 [David Wesely] So everybody’s kind of looking at it as that kind of thing, right?

00:45:59,598 [Clyde] Right.

00:45:59,688 [David Wesely] Oh, we’ll be, we’ll be pushing the lead around the table and shooting at each other pretty soon. And I figure we’re gonna run this thing until they all go, “Wait a minute. Where the hell’s the battle?” Right? And if they say, “Well, nothing happened in there. Why don’t we just…” Okay, I’d let the troops come on, and I’d pull the plug on the complicated stuff ‘cause it was obviously a dud, right? Instead, I got it going.

00:46:18,768 [David Wesely] I had this insane idea that I could run the game by just sitting in a room off to one side where I had, I had a map that I was working with. And I’d have the people come in. I’d show them the tabletop with all of the stuff, and I’d say, “Okay, you’re where you’re located,” and move a little lead figure to show where they were. And I’d say, “What are you planning to do next turn, and who are you talking to?” And then send them out, and the next guy come in and report to me, and I’d keep track of everything that’s going on.

00:46:41,428 [David Wesely] This is not a practical way to run a game.

00:46:45,188 [David Wesely] But, um, shortly, people started showing up out of turn

00:46:50,768 [David Wesely] [laughs] and coming in. The g- thing that got me was when the Jaeger commander and Student A came in, and they said, “We’re gonna fight a duel. How do we do it?” I said, “You’re gonna what?” And it was like, “Yeah, so-and-so, there’s this, the, the, the, the Student A, the champion, the, the head of the fencing team, has challenged the colonel to a duel.” And I said-

00:47:10,528 [Clyde] Gosh. [laughs]

00:47:11,698 [David Wesely] … “Well, okay. Here, you know, you get to roll two D6, and you get to roll three D6.” “Why does he get to roll three D6? I’m the head of the fencing club.” And I said, “Yeah, only he’s like a professional soldier, and he’s killed several people already.” [laughs] And you know what? He ran him through, and that was the end. My Student A was carried out on a, carried out on a slab. That was the end of him. Um,

00:47:35,688 [David Wesely] so, um, I say you can’t do worse than Student A. [laughs] So anyhow, they suddenly I realized something’s happening out there in the big room where we’re supposed to just be sitting around schmoozing, and, and they’re all madly interacting with each other. They’re wheeling and dealing, conniving and scheming. The plot is developing in ways I’d never have thought of.

00:47:52,508 [Clyde] And they’re not really, they’re not really paying attention to-

00:47:54,568 [David Wesely] And they’re not telling me about it. [laughs]

00:47:56,818 [Clyde] And they’re not paying attention to the lead on the board anymore so much.

00:47:59,768 [David Wesely] Yeah, well, it, you know, it, they, they don’t care that, that, that nothing’s showing up for them to push around. They’re busy doing their thing with each other, right?

00:48:06,338 [Clyde] Right.

00:48:06,368 [David Wesely] I mean, the university chancellor is busy sabotaging the old cannon that sits out in front of the university in case anybody tries to fire it off. And, um, and that wasn’t part of his instructions, but there he is. [laughs] He’s doing it.

00:48:18,448 [Clyde] Right.

00:48:18,988 [David Wesely] And, um, there’s just a million and one things. That’s an interesting looking building right going past. What in the world? Has somebody turned a barn into a church or … Oh, I see. No, it’s just a, just an interesting window pattern. Okay.

00:48:34,408 [David Wesely] Well, anyhow, so they’re, they’re going-

00:48:35,738 [Clyde] No, that’s a, that’s a cross.

00:48:37,948 [David Wesely] It’s a what?

00:48:38,908 [Clyde] That’s a cross.

00:48:39,248 [David Wesely] It really is a cross?

00:48:40,268 [Clyde] I think so.

00:48:41,148 [David Wesely] It’s hard to say. I don’t see any signs on the building that make it clear

00:48:46,224 [Train Conductor] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Our first station stop is Dyer, Indiana in just a few minutes.

00:48:52,984 [Train Conductor] Our time out of Dyer is 6:58

00:48:56,244 [Train Conductor] Central Time, and the time now is 6:43, so we have plenty of roll time if you’d like to exit the train to stretch-

00:49:02,144 [David Wesely] Jump out and take a stroll

00:49:02,954 [Train Conductor] … or smoke a rolling circle.

00:49:03,544 [David Wesely] Yep. [laughs]

00:49:04,584 [Train Conductor] If you’re going to do so, please use the handrails when you exit-

00:49:07,204 [David Wesely] This is good

00:49:07,614 [Train Conductor] … and exit only where you see a uniformed Amtrak employee.

00:49:11,664 [Train Conductor] Please do not wander from train side so that you do not hear the all aboard call from the conductor. Several staff will be waving at you from the rear of the train as we depart Dyer.

00:49:20,814 [David Wesely] [laughs] He’s fun.

00:49:22,584 [Train Conductor] 6:58 departure, Dyer is next.

00:49:25,144 [David Wesely] We were traveling across the country many years ago. Uh, we’re up in North Dakota, and there’s a blizzard going on outside. We’re in an Amtrak train, and this guy comes on, and he says, “Hello, this is Stewie. I’m your lounge car attendant, and I want to announce the opening of the new swimming pool on the third floor of our lounge car. Anyone reporting up to the lounge car in beach attire will be given a free drink.”

00:49:50,424 [Clyde] Yeah.

00:49:50,844 [David Wesely] And some people go walking past us in swimming suits after a little while, all headed up the aisle, right? In the end, there’s a little party going on up in the lounge car. He’s giving out free drinks to all the people in swimming suits. [laughs] It was fun, right? What a, what a

00:50:06,804 [David Wesely] unstuffy attitude, right? He was a lot of fun. But back to this, so here I am, and I’ve … I, I realize that I’ve totally lost control. That all of my intricate plans about how I was gonna score everybody have gone down the drain, and besides which, I’ve now created, like, an extra 13 characters that I never thought about before the game, and I don’t know how they interact and what it’s gonna do to the balance of the game and everything else. And finally, it’s about 2:00 in the morning, I called everybody in and said, “Okay, okay.” I said, “I was gonna have you in here. I was gonna tell you who won the game. But I have to say I’m sorry. It’s gotten completely out of hand. I have no idea who won the game.” And everybody’s saying, “Oh, that’s okay. We had a great time.” And I was like, “Oh gosh, that’s nice of them.” [laughs] You know?

00:50:46,274 [Clyde] Yeah.

00:50:46,324 [David Wesely] That’s decent of them. And now I was off… I was, by that point, I had started in graduate school, and I was just home on holidays, right? So I went off to school. The next coming back they said,

00:50:58,124 [David Wesely] “When are you gonna do another Braunstein game?” And I said, “Well, you guys didn’t…” “No, we thought it was great. Everybody wants another one.”

00:51:06,104 [David Wesely] I said, “Well, okay.” So then I went back to college, and I had months before the next holiday, and I thought about it, and I came back, and I had planned it all up. I knew exactly what I had to do. I wasn’t gonna get out of control next time I go away. I was gonna absolutely control everything I did. Nobody was gonna breathe without getting my approval, and we were gonna make that game work right so I could figure out who won. Unfortunately, I only tried it out on four people, so they didn’t tell everybody how rotten it was.

00:51:31,944 [Clyde] [laughs] Yeah.

00:51:33,004 [David Wesely] And I tried to dust it off and pretty it up a little more, again, on, on some people who were very patient and tried to play it with me, and it was just terrible.

00:51:41,204 [Clyde] Is it because at this time you’re still seeing it as a war game?

00:51:44,624 [David Wesely] Well, it’s because I’m seeing it as an exercise in being able to score the performances and having it that you only do exact specific things for which I know what the score is.

00:51:54,944 [Clyde] Ah.

00:51:56,104 [David Wesely] And, um, your choices of what you can do are no longer kind of whatever comes into your head. It’s, it’s you got A, B, or C, right? And then I get to go where… I evaluate them against each other and roll some dice and work out how many points I got, and it’s… And it was really slow. And people just couldn’t get into the swing of it. They, they didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it, and it was a dud. So I went off, and I said, “That has really not worked. What am I doing wrong?” And then it hit me. The key thing was to let them do what they wanted to do.

00:52:28,774 [Clyde] What they wanted to do, right.

00:52:29,254 [David Wesely] Never mind who wins.

00:52:32,204 [David Wesely] And it took me a while before I realized that the, the… There’s a slogan that applies to that, that I didn’t appreciate then, and which is usually said,

00:52:41,224 [David Wesely] usually said to mean something else, but it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.

00:52:46,944 [Clyde] Right.

00:52:48,164 [David Wesely] And, or maybe I should say it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s that you play the game. But in any case, that everybody enjoyed the playing, and it wasn’t the winning or losing was not the powerful thing. I mean, there are some people who are really, once again, ruthlessly motivated to show people up, right? They definitely took pleasure in the fact that they managed to really ace that guy who was playing a banker, because they don’t particularly like him or whatever.

00:53:10,724 [Clyde] Right.

00:53:11,284 [David Wesely] But most people would just be in there, and they’d be playing for the sake of playing, and they’d get involved, and they’d enjoy it. Now, to leap forward in history a while, think about all the Dungeons & Dragons adventures you’ve ever had explained to you or told to you with enthusiasm, right? “So we cast the teleport spell on the thief, and we elevated him up the side of the tower so he could look in the window we couldn’t climb up to. And he checked in there, and darned if there wasn’t a black dragon in there who just fried him, right? And when he fell back down, the dragon comes out, and he plunges down and hits us.” Yeah?

00:53:47,054 [Old Busybody] Do you, do you know I thought my husband could talk a lot, but you have outtalked my husband.

00:53:54,864 [David Wesely] Well, I’m glad to hear that, ma’am.

00:53:56,604 [Old Busybody] You have talked nonstop for an hour.

00:54:01,484 [Old Busybody] And I thought, I thought he could talk a lot, but you have beat him.

00:54:08,744 [Old Busybody] [laughs]

00:54:10,424 [David Wesely] Well, was it really bothering you? We could move.

00:54:13,444 [Old Busybody] No.

00:54:14,264 [David Wesely] Okay.

00:54:14,554 [Old Busybody] I’m up there, but I have heard every word you have said.

00:54:20,103 [David Wesely] [laughs]

00:54:20,714 [Old Busybody] And I told him, I said, “Nick, I thought you could talk a lot,” but I says, “I found a man that can outtalk you. I’ll have to tell the kids.”

00:54:31,984 [David Wesely] Well, if he needs help, just hand him a microphone and tell him he’s being interviewed.

00:54:35,824 [Old Busybody] Huh?

00:54:36,044 [David Wesely] [laughs]

00:54:36,074 [Old Busybody] [laughs]

00:54:40,604 [David Wesely] Whoo.

00:54:42,244 [Old Busybody] Nonstop.

00:54:45,084 [David Wesely] Like I said, you’re gonna have to edit this. [laughs]

00:54:47,804 [Old Busybody] How in the world can you talk without taking a breath?

00:54:53,500 [Clyde] Well, I’ve been lecturing for years

00:54:57,100 [Old Busybody] Well, I’m an RN and I used to [laughs] and I didn’t take a breath

00:55:22,760 [David Wesely] Well, I guess I offered to leave and she didn’t say yes, so we’ll just carry on

00:55:26,480 [Clyde] Yeah.

00:55:29,620 [Clyde] [laughs] We’ll take that out, I am in front of the

00:55:32,500 [David Wesely] Yeah, but there you go. You know, it’s kinda,

00:55:36,820 [David Wesely] I trying to give you what you asked for here. Anyhow,

00:55:40,580 [David Wesely] um,

00:55:43,260 [David Wesely] so that was, that was the point where I had to tell you, you know, here are these D&D games where they, that they tell you all about how the whole party got wiped out, right?

00:55:50,200 [Clyde] Right

00:55:50,840 [David Wesely] And they had a great time.

00:55:54,380 [David Wesely] They lost, they got killed, they, whatever, only two of them survived, whatever happened, right?

00:55:59,190 [Clyde] Right

00:55:59,280 [David Wesely] It was, it was the biggest thinking disaster they’ve had in years of gaming, and by golly, it was so cool the way it worked out that, that, you know, we all got killed, whatever, you know. And you say to yourself, “It’s obviously it’s not winning and losing [laughs] that’s driving these guys.”

00:56:11,640 [Clyde] Right

00:56:13,200 [David Wesely] So I didn’t perceive all of it, but I perceived that you had to give them their heads and get on with it.

00:56:17,560 [Clyde] Okay

00:56:18,000 [David Wesely] So the next time I set up a game, it was more structured than the first Braunstein. I had a better idea of where all the characters were and what their capabilities were, and it actually had some more

00:56:29,040 [David Wesely] combat stuff in it. You’re struggling for control in this coup d’état in this Latin American country, mythical Latin country. Um,

00:56:38,720 [David Wesely] or rather the ri- the situation is ripe, there’d be a coup d’état. There doesn’t necessarily have to be one. The people who will potentially carry it out may or may not decide to go try it out for size.

00:56:51,120 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:56:51,920 [David Wesely] And, um, we ran that, and they did, and then it came to blows, and there were, there were tanks cruising up and down the street getting shot at by, by-

00:56:59,140 [Clyde] Right, right

00:56:59,380 [David Wesely] … armored cars and stuff like that. But, um, it wasn’t a guaranteed that it was gonna happen that way. The sides decided to pick up the way they were gonna do things. The, each guy decided what he was gonna do, and he, that, that, that happened.

00:57:11,940 [David Wesely] And, um,

00:57:14,240 [David Wesely] in that game, however, there were a lot of people who didn’t have any military units under their control, whose purpose in life was to hand out propaganda leaflets or whatever.

00:57:22,680 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

00:57:24,020 [David Wesely] And the ultimate, uh, victor of the whole game, and that’s been written up and everything’s on the internet, was Dave Arneson, who was one of the players-

00:57:31,180 [Clyde] Right

00:57:31,720 [David Wesely] … and who c- caps the,

00:57:35,080 [David Wesely] b- besides convincing the minister of the treasury to give him a million American dollars out of the vaults of the treasury, and gets a free helicopter ride out of the country with his ill-gotten gains, adds, rubs salt in the wounds by throwing his, his leaflets out of the helicopters that flies over the cities-

00:57:51,020 [Clyde] Right

00:57:51,030 [David Wesely] … and are scattered all over town, right? It was just, everybody agreed that whatever the scoring system I thought I was using was, that he’d definitely walked off with the game, right? [laughs] Other people wound up running the country, but by golly, he got away with lots of money. [laughs] So, so now that was, uh, what was very much a watershed in terms of,

00:58:09,980 [David Wesely] of, of, of role-playing games, right?

00:58:12,940 [David Wesely] So now I’m gonna, giving you all that historical background on where we led up to it, and how we got there, and probably one question has now been answered, correct? [laughs]

00:58:21,460 [Clyde] Actually, no, you covered a lot of-

00:58:23,020 [David Wesely] Okay

00:58:23,640 [Clyde] … a lot of the, uh, points that I was gonna ask.

00:58:26,760 [David Wesely] Okay.

00:58:47,660 [Clyde] Okay. Let’s, uh, let’s move on then to, uh, talking about self-publishing then.

00:58:54,400 [David Wesely] Oh, well, that’s interesting. Okay.

00:58:55,670 [Clyde] That’s something that, uh-

00:58:57,720 [David Wesely] Uh

00:58:57,880 [Clyde] … you didn’t do with Braunstein, but you did with-

00:58:59,720 [David Wesely] No

00:58:59,729 [Clyde] … uh, Strat- Strategos and-

00:59:02,660 [David Wesely] Right, and with Bombers & Battleships-

00:59:04,810 [Clyde] Bombers & Battleships

00:59:04,900 [David Wesely] … that nobody’s ever seen

00:59:06,160 [Clyde] And then the second, Valley Forge.

00:59:08,640 [David Wesely] Right, and then Source of the Nile. Um, and, uh, well, first off, in, in the 1960s, it was virtually all there was, was self-publishing. We didn’t appreciate in those days that the Avalon Hill company, that we thought it was this gigantic publishing empire, right-

00:59:26,180 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

00:59:26,190 [David Wesely] … consisted of, I think, four people who had really gone in over their head on, on trying to break into the game publishing business in competition with the established Parker Brothers and most of those.

00:59:39,540 [Clyde] Gotcha

00:59:40,660 [David Wesely] And who, in fact, in 1963, uh, about the time I’m graduating high school, they go bankrupt, and they’re taken over by their principal, uh, principal creditor, who sees a real possibility in what these poor guys have tried to start up as a future activity, even though they’re losing money at the time.

00:59:58,840 [Clyde] Right

00:59:59,120 [David Wesely] Having sunk all the money into games and not being able to get the games to stay out on the shelves on the typical toy store outlets that they had to reach, right?

01:00:09,000 [David Wesely] And he was the printer that they owed most, more money to than anybody else. So he went around to the other 13 companies they couldn’t pay and took over their debts from these other guys, paid them off, and he kept them on as a captive account for his printing company.

01:00:24,660 [David Wesely] So yeah, they’re losing money technically, but it’s coming into my left pocket instead of my right pocket, so it’s not as bad as it seems. And we will print their games when we have a hole in our printing schedule, and we didn’t have anything else to do that week anyhow.

01:00:38,180 [Clyde] Ah.

01:00:38,190 [David Wesely] And, you know, so he, he, he gets to run the company as a most possible loss, with a staff of just a couple of people who keep selling games by mail. And, you know, it just, just cuts it way back, but he keeps it alive.

01:00:51,640 [David Wesely] And so from 1963 to ‘68 or thereabouts, the Avalon Hill company that we all think is this giant publishing enterprise, and we sending in handwritten manuscripts of games we think they’d love to publish.

01:01:04,220 [Clyde] Right.

01:01:04,780 [David Wesely] Right? [laughs] And they’re all saying, “Thank you very much, but we already have a game about the hunt for the Bismarck” or whatever, right? Um-These guys are,

01:01:14,504 [David Wesely] these guys are hardly better than we are except that they blew a whole lot more of their money, right? I mean, they were drawing the people who could mortgage their house in order to lose it on, on running a company kind of a thing, right?

01:01:24,874 [Clyde] That’s kind of the story of-

01:01:26,704 [David Wesely] Oh, yeah. So many of the game companies have, have, have lived and died.

01:01:29,954 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:01:30,004 [David Wesely] Now, during that period, SPI gets started by a bunch of gamers who are willing to sleep on the floor and pay themselves nothing in order to publish their games.

01:01:39,904 [Clyde] Right.

01:01:40,144 [David Wesely] And again, we’re out in the sticks, and we think they’re another real company with, like, corporate offices and limousines [laughs].

01:01:48,404 [Clyde] Right.

01:01:49,124 [David Wesely] Um, so, uh, you know, e- everything is self-published to all practical purposes at that time. There’s, um-

01:01:59,004 [Clyde] So it was, it was less, less, less of an ethic and more of a just not, uh, not having any choice.

01:02:06,484 [David Wesely] Yeah. It, w- you know, if there’s… There is no real game industry. We, we could go to Al- we could go to, uh, uh, Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley and say, “Here, I’ve got this really cool game about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu,” or whatever-

01:02:19,784 [Clyde] And they would be-

01:02:20,314 [David Wesely] … and they’d go, “Yeah, right”

01:02:21,864 [Clyde] Right.

01:02:21,884 [David Wesely] Right. Mom’s gonna buy that for her nephew for Christmas, right? I don’t know.

01:02:26,164 [Clyde] Right.

01:02:26,224 [David Wesely] Um, and there were one or two people who succeeded by some means or other in convincing, um, the big game companies that this war game thing that was kind of gathering a little steam over in a corner might be worth going into because there were big companies who did publish

01:02:45,624 [David Wesely] war kind of strategy games that came out during that period. Um,

01:02:52,164 [David Wesely] there was something called Summit, and there was another one called Conflict, and there had been games from during World War II. The big game companies had published some not very sophisticated war games-

01:03:03,184 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

01:03:03,544 [David Wesely] … that you can f- barely find hidden away somewhere in a junk store somewhere nowadays.

01:03:08,124 [Clyde] Right.

01:03:08,684 [David Wesely] So there are a few of these, you know, there’d been ventures in that direction from established publishers, but they were very rare. For the most part, they could make a lot more money by knocking off another game for the 6 to 12-year-old crowd and for family games playing things, and not all of the games they were making were despicable. I mean, Careers was a cool game in which you had variable objectives for the different players.

01:03:30,524 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:03:31,064 [David Wesely] And, um, I thought that was neat. And Clue was a good game. There were, there were certainly good games out there.

01:03:36,934 [Train Conductor] Okay, ladies and gentlemen, our next station stop will be Rensselaer. I’m unfortunately taking the siding for a freight train. We’ll have to hang out in the siding for a few minutes.

01:03:41,864 [Train Conductor] Not sure exactly how long that delay will be, but we do appreciate your patience.

01:03:45,784 [David Wesely] Well-

01:03:45,944 [Train Conductor] And Rensselaer will be next once we get rolling again,

01:03:49,364 [Train Conductor] probably about an hour after we get rolling

01:03:51,384 [David Wesely] … but in, in the 1960s,

01:03:54,984 [David Wesely] um, the Xerox machine, if it’s been invented, we don’t, none of us can seen one.

01:04:01,474 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:04:02,544 [David Wesely] And if you produce anything in bulk, you use a mimeograph machine-

01:04:07,044 [Clyde] Gotcha

01:04:07,054 [David Wesely] … which is a clunky predecessor to it in which you have to type up these very messy, uh, transfer masters that you then-

01:04:15,164 [Clyde] And that’s, that’s the one with the-

01:04:15,534 [David Wesely] … run through a special ink-

01:04:16,833 [Clyde] … the wheel, right?

01:04:17,514 [David Wesely] You turn a crank, and they come out one at a time, all, all purple and blurry, okay?

01:04:21,164 [Clyde] Gotcha.

01:04:21,944 [David Wesely] Okay, so that was the state of the art in, at, in the, in the, in the mid-’60s,

01:04:28,004 [David Wesely] and I came up with a set of rules for World War II air and naval combat that I called Bombers and Battleships.

01:04:37,544 [David Wesely] And I

01:04:39,744 [David Wesely] hand-produced that in a gigantic run of maybe two dozen copies, maybe even 100 copies, I don’t remember now, but it was very small,

01:04:49,224 [David Wesely] uh, with the assistance of, uh, Dave Arneson, who had, uh, access to a mimeograph machine. Uh [laughs], and we sold a handful of copies, and mostly we just gave them away to guys in the group to play battles with, right?

01:05:01,704 [Clyde] Right.

01:05:02,664 [David Wesely] Um, we had been using one of the commercially available, one of the really pioneering commercially available sets of rules, Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game, which he published in 1940-

01:05:13,184 [Clyde] Okay

01:05:13,724 [David Wesely] … and which was just barely available because when Fletcher Pratt died, he was a very successful author,

01:05:22,104 [David Wesely] and any attempts to reprint his naval war game, which was-

01:05:25,904 [Clyde] Would have got you sued.

01:05:26,944 [David Wesely] Well, uh, not only us sued, but anybody who seriously thought of trying to bring it back out or pri- print it again, you know, make another, another printing of it-

01:05:34,684 [Clyde] Hmm

01:05:34,694 [David Wesely] … and pay royalties and all that-

01:05:36,004 [Clyde] Yeah

01:05:36,164 [David Wesely] … would be told by his estate that they expected it the kind of royalties that Mr. Pratt’s other works commanded-

01:05:42,164 [Clyde] Yeah

01:05:42,174 [David Wesely] … which were, like, serious money, right?

01:05:45,884 [David Wesely] And so you could find a handful of surviving copies from back then, but that was about it, and indeed, I think there were some, like, knock-offs floating around, right? But

01:05:58,784 [David Wesely] they were, they were pretty rare because you couldn’t Xerox them, and nobody was gonna go stick his neck out so far as to, like, set up an offset print run of the things that-

01:06:05,934 [Clyde] Right, right

01:06:05,934 [David Wesely] … that would attract attention, so you saw a few. Somebody would type the whole thing out on mimeograph masters. Boy, there’s tedious work for you. Um, and it was certainly not nicking into their, his estate’s revenues at all. Now, in the years since then, it finally came around to where somebody did finally reissue them, and you can buy them nowadays.

01:06:26,384 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:06:26,604 [David Wesely] And they are extremely sophisticated given, again, his pioneering in a total vacuum-

01:06:32,144 [Clyde] Right

01:06:32,924 [David Wesely] … um, modeling of battleship and cruiser and destroyer gun, gun-to-gun kinda combat.

01:06:39,084 [David Wesely] It was what we did, uh, late 1930s, um, and he used… Naval War Games Group used these to fight,

01:06:46,864 [David Wesely] you know, significant battles in which, um, I understand he had this kid named Isaac Asimov as one of his gamers [laughs] and another one was, um, um, uh, L. Sprague de Camp. And, you know, he had a bunch of people, well, in- including, you know, retired Navy officers and stuff were playing these battles, and they were, they were pretty well done. And also, uh, not available to us at the time, the US Navy War College had been doing battles since the, the turn of the century, and they had rules, but they weren’t just handing them out to people.

01:07:16,284 [Clyde] Right.

01:07:17,084 [David Wesely] Um, so there was, there was things going on out there. Well, we got the, the Pratt ones, and we were really impressed. This was a good system. There was no argument with what the rules said and not much fiddling with them. We just went ahead and did it the way it said, but there was no reasonable provision for using airplanes.I mean, he basically did World War I with World War II ships, you know. He had thrown in a last little bit about AI, where you can, like, have airplane models, and you put them on stands, and people have to estimate the range of the airplane to shoot it down, and… But it was really not a very good modeling of how airplanes operated with-

01:07:49,654 [Clyde] Right

01:07:49,894 [David Wesely] … ships. So I set up my own set of rules for air-to-air combat and for, uh, airplanes dive bombing or torpedo bombing ships, you know, and that sort of thing. Okay, so I published that. And then that was my first crack at it, and it was like a real small cash outlay. I was a student at the– a grad student at the time there. And then the next time around,

01:08:11,734 [David Wesely] um, Strategos N was the– I had sat down with the Napoleonic, uh, war games that we’d been playing, and actually I’d done this before Promise of Battleships. But I had, as I said, it was Strategos, and I’d tried to, like, strip the three hundred and forty pages down to just the essential tables and the, basically, the things we’d done and to try to backdate the weapons into eighteen hundred instead of eighteen eighty, and which I was not very good at doing, but I tried. And, um, I turned those out, and we used them for gaming within our group in the Twin Cities for Arneson’s giant Napoleonic campaign and stuff, along with enormous masses of information that Arneson dug up for the strategic level, like how much did the battleship cost and things, right? Um,

01:08:54,774 [David Wesely] and those were our tactical rules for fighting the battles, and we used them a lot. And eventually,

01:09:02,374 [David Wesely] try to think, I ran off a set, the same deal. It was like I went to a local job shop and had them offset print like a hundred copies, which was about as much as I could afford to pay, and it’s lousy, uh, economies of scale there, right?

01:09:18,124 [Clyde] Right.

01:09:18,674 [David Wesely] They probably were five bucks a piece for, for the rather small set of s- you know, twenty pages or whatever it was long. But we needed them for use in the group. So I did those, and we sold a few to other people who hear about them and want to get a copy, and we’d mail them to them.

01:09:32,214 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:09:33,354 [David Wesely] Again, it’s not a money-making ac-activity for me. So it’s self-publishing, very much vanity press kind of thing, or at least you’re just doing it for your own use.

01:09:44,014 [David Wesely] Uh, later on, once Dave Arneson had a company going of his own, this is now jumping ahead ten years, right, post TSR, he did a reprint run with all the assets of much more modern stuff and a lot more money and a bigger run of them, and those are kicking around, and people have them with nice, nice illustrations and all those sorts of things. Um, the third thing, the Valley Forge II.

01:10:08,534 [David Wesely] Now, I’ve gone off to the Army, and I’ve come back from the Army, and TSR has been born and is running along, and

01:10:16,934 [David Wesely] people are talking to me and Gary about, “You know, you ought to take Westy’s Napoleonic rules and print those and sell those.” And Gary has an inspiration. He says, “No, we’ll do instead, next year is nineteen seventy-six, and it’s the same– a bicentennial, and everybody’s gonna want us to do fl- American Revolutionary War battles.”

01:10:36,854 [Clyde] Right.

01:10:37,884 [David Wesely] “So what you gotta do is rewrite them as American Revolutionary War rules.” So

01:10:43,514 [David Wesely] I said, “Darn, that’ll be fun.” So I rewrite the whole thing. I give him a hundred and fifty-page manuscript called The Redcoats Are Coming.

01:10:53,034 [David Wesely] He is a bit flabbergasted at my having covered every imaginable thing about how to do siege warfare and build fortresses, and I’ve just gone nuts on this thing.

01:11:04,914 [David Wesely] Then he takes it off my hands, and he says, “I think we ought to call the new game Valley Forge. That’d be a great name.” And I said, “I don’t know, Gary. I don’t… Valley Forge isn’t even a battle. You don’t fight a battle at Valley Forge. I mean, the name of the game like Valley Forge just sort of implies you’re gonna have this wonderful game where you get to, like, see how many doji you freeze off.” It’s not gonna be fun at all.

01:11:28,294 [David Wesely] Uh, but he said, “Oh, but Valley Forge is so cool.”

01:11:32,974 [David Wesely] And I said, “Yeah, I just don’t… I really gotta come up with something else.” So we’re fine. So that’s, that’s that, and we carry on.

01:11:41,074 [David Wesely] Now, I’m back in the Army by this point,

01:11:44,034 [David Wesely] so I’m sort of intermittently available to talk to him.

01:11:47,774 [David Wesely] And as we approach the magic date for Gen Con nineteen seventy-six, where he was gonna release this thing, I get one last… Uh, I, I won’t go through the, the, the enormous trouble I went through just trying to get a contract negotiated and signed. That touches on a long and sad story about the Byzantine struggle for power within TSR and how my contract became one of the,

01:12:12,934 [David Wesely] one of the pawns in that game

01:12:15,694 [David Wesely] between Gary and other people who kept blocking getting things done. But ultimately, we got it signed. We got the thing gonna be published, and I get a last-minute call from Gary. He says, “Oh, we found out we can’t call it Redcoats Are Coming ‘cause somebody else calling their game Redcoats, and it’d confuse things, so we’re gonna call it Valley Forge.”

01:12:36,394 [David Wesely] Okay, and he brings it out with this glorious full-color cover of Washington reviewing the troops.

01:12:42,814 [David Wesely] Doesn’t have much to do with Valley Forge, and has even less to do with it when you find out it’s the painting of, of President Washington reviewing the troops at the Whiskey Rebellion in seventeen ninety-four.

01:12:53,634 [David Wesely] But it looked cool, and it was in the public domain. And you know you have to have a color cover to sell the thing.

01:12:59,434 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:13:00,294 [David Wesely] So he brought the thing out, but among other blunders, they cut down a hundred and fifty pages to, like, eighteen pages,

01:13:08,774 [David Wesely] and they lost page nine between typesetting and printing. So there’s an abrupt change in subject at the bottom of the page that isn’t renewed, and you don’t find out the first part, half, the first half page of cavalry never appears, or the last half page of artillery, or whatever it was, right? It was like they really messed up bad. And at the time, at the time, I thought it was just screaming incompetence on the part of the guys who put it together. Later, I came to see that against the general backdrop of destruction and subversion of Gary and his projects by people in the company at that moment, and recognized that I had been

01:13:51,138 [David Wesely] targeted as yet another person to drive away from Gary by

01:13:56,758 [David Wesely] Springhall.

01:13:57,618 [Clyde] Okay.

01:13:57,938 [David Wesely] That’s what I’m saying. So it was too bad. I, I was fortunate in that because I didn’t live and work at TSR like most of the other guys associated with it did.

01:14:08,358 [David Wesely] Um, I was really a small, small, a small fish

01:14:12,918 [David Wesely] in the, in the purges there, and I didn’t really care a lot. I was off being an army officer at the time, right? I was just annoyed, you know, but it wasn’t like they crushed me or deprived me of a job or something.

01:14:23,948 [Clyde] Right.

01:14:25,558 [David Wesely] Anyhow, so that went down. So I came back to him and I said, “Well, the original plan, and we said we’re gonna have to shorten it for publication, was we were gonna do it in three volumes, just like we did the three volumes of Dungeons & Dragons and other things.

01:14:38,018 [David Wesely] So when are we gonna do the second volume and put in an errata for all the mistakes you made on the first one?” And the answer was, “We decided it’s not selling,

01:14:46,137 [David Wesely] so we’re not gonna do it.” And I had to agree that the seventh, the Bicentennial was a commercial disaster.

01:14:52,898 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:14:53,778 [David Wesely] N- oh, nothing that they brought out for the Bicentennial was a success. Avalon Hill’s 1776 game that came out like two years before the Bicentennial was moderately successful, but everything else just sunk like a rock.

01:15:06,178 [Clyde] Hmm.

01:15:07,318 [David Wesely] And so I couldn’t complain that it was their idiocy that caused it. But I felt that I wanted vindication, so I then self-published Valley Forge 2 so as to bring out a 26-page errata for an 18-page set of rules.

01:15:25,518 [David Wesely] And

01:15:27,158 [David Wesely] Valley Forge 2, well, I was playing two. At this point, there were major firings going on at TSR,

01:15:34,358 [David Wesely] and one of the guys who got removed

01:15:37,438 [David Wesely] was, um… Actually, he, he quit before they got around to firing him. He could see the handwriting on the wall. So David McGarry, who had done a bunch of this kind of work for TSR, was available. I was off being an army officer, and I talked to McGarry, and McGarry said, “You know, you can give me, you know, the money and I can get the thing printed. I know how to do it. I know people who do printing. I know layout artists and all that.” Fine. So I gave him 1,000 bucks that I figured I could afford to lose on my vanity publishing here.

01:16:05,598 [Clyde] Right.

01:16:06,068 [David Wesely] And he was gonna run off however many copies he could get. Well, he called me a few weeks before 1977 Gen Con and said, “Well, Dave, it works out like this. The costs have been higher than I thought they were, and we’re only gonna be able to get you…” Let me think if I can get the numbers right now.

01:16:24,087 [David Wesely] “We’re only going to be able to get you

01:16:28,198 [David Wesely] 300 copies,

01:16:30,998 [David Wesely] which would mean that it’ll effectively cost you $3.33 a copy.”

01:16:35,348 [Clyde] $3.33, right.

01:16:36,798 [David Wesely] And I said, “Well, I w- suppose I was gonna sell them for, like, five,” I said. He said, “Yeah, but remember, in a discount to a store, you’ve gotta give 40% off.”

01:16:45,978 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:16:46,928 [David Wesely] “Oh, yeah. I’d lose money on every copy.” He said, “Right, but if you give me another $600, I can get 1,000 copies. Then they’ll only be about 60 a piece, and I can discount them in the regular way and, you know, still show some profit on each one.” And I thought, “That sounds good to me,” da-da-da, da-da-da-da. So I went in.

01:17:06,918 [David Wesely] He was perfectly honest about the numbers. He didn’t line his pocket or anything. I’m not saying that. He just gave me advice. The thing I didn’t understand then but is an important lesson is I should have asked, “And what will it cost us if we sell those babies out like hotcakes and I want another 1,000 copies next month?”

01:17:27,238 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:17:27,528 [David Wesely] And the answer would’ve been,

01:17:30,398 [David Wesely] “Well, gee, I guess another $650.”

01:17:35,418 [David Wesely] In other words, there’s no, almost no downside to my not buying any more copies right now.

01:17:41,038 [Clyde] Right.

01:17:41,558 [David Wesely] ‘Cause all the setup costs for a small print run like that, you’re 50 bucks or something, right? So instead of getting 1,600 copies and hoping they’ll all sell, I could’ve got 300 copies and found out they’re gonna sell at all.

01:17:55,758 [David Wesely] I got 1,600 copies. In the first couple of months, I sold the whole lot of them to all the people who had a Valley Forge and wanted to get it straightened out,

01:18:04,898 [David Wesely] and then they stopped selling.

01:18:07,598 [David Wesely] And my total sales were just about 300 copies. Now, that includes ones that I discounted, but in the end, I could’ve finished off losing, like, 100 bucks on the deal instead of losing, like, well, 1,500 bucks [laughs] on the deal.

01:18:20,678 [Clyde] And eventually, eventually you had to mulch them, right?

01:18:24,458 [David Wesely] Oh, yeah. Well, act- actually, what I actually did is I’d given them to a distributor-

01:18:27,638 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

01:18:28,518 [David Wesely] … to see if he could find anybody who’d take them. And he saw me at, like, Origins, and he said, “Dave, I still got all those boxes.” And I said, “Herb, you can do whatever you want to with them. You don’t have to pay me or buy them. You can just use them for anything you want.”

01:18:43,218 [Clyde] To get them off your tax, uh-

01:18:45,068 [David Wesely] Right. And that was– Right. So he could basically take them out of the warehouse. He could turn them into sawdust, and he could write off a ta- take a tax or whatever he was gonna do with them, right? I said, “That’s fine, Herb. I, I dropped them off on you on the way to Origins.” I went up from Origins one year, and like a year later, he’s hardly moved any of them. And I went, “That’s fine. They, they, they’re, they’re turkeys.”

01:19:02,898 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:19:03,038 [David Wesely] So I’ve got like, you know, six copies I shoved on a shelf at home. That’s, that’s the, that’s the world supply. Well, not the world supply ‘cause there’s 300 copies out there somewhere, right?

01:19:11,478 [Clyde] Right.

01:19:12,358 [David Wesely] So that was a, that was a disaster in a way, but it was a learning curve, and it only cost me 1,600 bucks, and I got some of the money back.

01:19:20,678 [David Wesely] So…

01:19:22,948 [David Wesely] And I learned a couple other things out of it, too, that was good because I learned, for one thing, I didn’t know what the discount structures were.

01:19:30,638 [Clyde] Yeah. I’ve covered that before.

01:19:32,318 [David Wesely] I had no idea what you paid for discounts, and that, that taught me a bunch of those things. It taught me a lot about how things get accomplished. And so the next time it was time to do a game, Ross and I did Source of the Nile.

01:19:44,618 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:19:45,922 [David Wesely] Those lessons all came back, and we had a much better idea of how the world was gonna operate, and how we were going to business, and what we were risking, and what we were willing to risk, and how much work it was gonna be. Yeah, and that worked out. You can interview him all about that.

01:20:00,182 [Clyde] Okay.

01:20:00,762 [David Wesely] The other thing I would say is that we got to a point, I did the Braunstein games, and we did a few of them, and then I went off to the Army.

01:20:10,622 [Clyde] Right.

01:20:11,382 [David Wesely] And Arneson said to me, um, “Is it okay if I run Braunstein games while you’re gone?” I said, “Babe, I don’t own it. Have fun. It’s set up in your dad’s basement anyhow, right?”

01:20:21,902 [Clyde] Right.

01:20:22,622 [David Wesely] And, um, at the time, I was, I didn’t, I figured I’m going in the Army. There’s a war on in Vietnam. I’m gonna go over there and die, so [laughs] I’m really not too worried about the future ownership of Braunstein.

01:20:34,202 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:20:34,422 [David Wesely] This whole role-playing game thing that’s gonna happen, I’m not looking down the road that’s at. Um, so I said, “Fine,” and I left. And when I got back and I was still all in one piece, they had by that point gone on and started playing,

01:20:48,762 [David Wesely] uh, Blackmoor.

01:20:49,642 [Clyde] Right.

01:20:50,502 [David Wesely] And there’s an obvious sort of take off there, Braunstein to Blackmoor, right?

01:20:55,322 [David Wesely] So is that you or somebody else who has that link there?

01:20:57,662 [Clyde] I don’t know.

01:20:59,082 [David Wesely] So anyhow, that, that brings you up to there. Now, person who was here for the transition from back when we were doing the Napoleonic games through the first Braunstein, he was in it, and so on, is Ross, and he can probably fill you in great on all the things that happened thereafter.

01:21:14,962 [Clyde] What, what time are we at?

01:21:16,822 [David Wesely] What time are we at? I don’t know.

01:21:18,432 [Clyde] It’s gotta be at the top there.

01:21:19,242 [David Wesely] You, you, you want it. You can read it.

01:21:21,322 [Clyde] So we’re at 1:20.

01:21:24,082 [David Wesely] Right.

01:21:25,202 [Clyde] Let me get-

01:21:26,122 [David Wesely] Couple more particular questions

01:21:27,642 [Clyde] … couple, yeah, a couple more things-

01:21:28,842 [David Wesely] Okay

01:21:28,852 [Clyde] … ‘cause I’d, I’d rather be prepared to talk to someone than completely unprepared like I am right now.

01:21:34,552 [David Wesely] Yeah. Okay, okay.

01:21:34,642 [Clyde] Uh, let’s talk about, uh,

01:21:37,342 [Clyde] the invention of polyhedral dice.

01:21:40,302 [David Wesely] Okay.

01:21:41,162 [Clyde] That’s something that you’ve been credited with.

01:21:43,362 [David Wesely] Yeah. Yes, a- and I, I am sort of the inventor of polyhedral dice, and I think it’s, you know, aside from the fact that a six-sided dice is a polyhedra and people-

01:21:53,902 [Clyde] Yes, yes

01:21:53,931 [David Wesely] … have been using for centuries, and therefore somebody invented at least one of them, right?

01:21:57,402 [Clyde] No, but-

01:21:58,062 [David Wesely] But okay

01:21:58,762 [Clyde] … D4, DA

01:21:58,952 [David Wesely] … what happened, what happened was that when I was in high school, we had a geometry class, and they had these little plastic solids with numbers on the face to show us what the five regular polyhedra invented by the ancient Greeks were, right?

01:22:16,002 [David Wesely] Couple of years go by, I’m wargaming. I have the Tauben [Totten?] rules, and he has a table. A lot of tables are the rolling six-sided dice, three six-sided dice, subtract the largest one and multiply by the smallest one, junk like that to come up with distributions, right?

01:22:28,982 [Clyde] Right.

01:22:30,382 [David Wesely] Actually, it wasn’t that sophisticated, but he’s got rolling two D6 or rolling one D6, and in the table, you’re looking things up, and then it was, they were rolling a six D6 thing for one thing, right?

01:22:38,972 [Clyde] Right.

01:22:39,622 [David Wesely] So he’s got those, and then he has one table that uses a 12-sided teetotum instead,

01:22:46,342 [David Wesely] and typically in his rules, if you work out some attack, and it turns out the odds are seven to three in your favor,

01:22:55,602 [David Wesely] you have a problem. If the odds were four to two in your favor, you’d roll a six-sided die, one, two, three, four, you win. Five, six, I win. Okay? But if it’s seven to three, that doesn’t add up to six, so he had several convoluted ways of solving that. But one of the things he has is this table. He says, “You need a 12-sided teetotum, and then one through seven, you win, and eight, nine, 10, I win, and 11 and 12, we r- we, we, we do it again,” right?

01:23:21,302 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:23:21,802 [David Wesely] And oh, d- cool, right? And I said, “That’s great. What the hell is a 12-sided teetotum?”

01:23:26,942 [Clyde] Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.

01:23:27,742 [David Wesely] And then, and then I said, “It’s that 12-sided Der Wihajster they showed me in, in, in geometry class,” right? Yeah. The one with the cool-looking pentagonal faces on it, uh, the, uh, uh, the what’s a, what’s a oochie, whatever it was. So I run back, and I find a catalog, scient- uh, from Edmund Scientific Company in Chicago. They sell stuff for schools.

01:23:51,582 [Clyde] Okay.

01:23:52,742 [David Wesely] And I looked through it, and sure enough, there is five, set of five geometric solids, they say. And I say, “That’s how I can get one of those things.” But you gotta buy five, all five of them, and they’re six bucks a set, and gasoline in those days is, is 20 cents a gallon.

01:24:10,422 [Clyde] Right.

01:24:11,242 [David Wesely] So I’m, in effect, by modern standards, I’m buying, you know, a 60 to $100 set of, of six dice-

01:24:18,482 [Clyde] Dice

01:24:18,492 [David Wesely] … five dice to get the one [laughs] I want.

01:24:20,342 [Clyde] Right.

01:24:22,122 [David Wesely] Well, it was okay. I popped my six bucks to get the, get the one set, and I took it over and I said, “Guys, look at this. I got a 12-sided teetotum we can use now, and tab- table J or whatever it is that uses it in the rules, I can use that now.” And they go, “What are the rest of those?” I said, “Well, they’re, they’re, they’re the polyhedra.” And then, you know, there’s a little piece of paper says this one’s an icosahedron, and that’s a, you know.

01:24:46,122 [David Wesely] So, [clears throat] and people start rolling them across the table and going like, “This is way cool. Look at this four-sided one. Boy, that’s really strange,” right?

01:24:52,442 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:24:53,562 [David Wesely] So people would play around with them idly while I was using the, the D12,

01:24:58,702 [David Wesely] and I was also using the D10 because it hit me pretty quick. Well, that’s even, that’s a cool number, too, right? You can generate numbers from one to 10, and you could roll it three times to generate a three-digit-

01:25:08,522 [Clyde] Right

01:25:08,762 [David Wesely] … decimal probability, and it’s easy to compute things and come up with 34% success rate or a 39% success rate. And you roll it twice, there’s 30 and there’s seven. Not too low, right? Or whatever.

01:25:21,691 [Clyde] Right.

01:25:21,722 [David Wesely] A little bit more time, one of the guys in the group had a real job, and he’s making good money, so he could pop six bucks a whack. So he bought seven more sets and brought them. And then we took the D20s, ‘cause there are no D10s in the set, of course. They’re D20s.

01:25:35,542 [Clyde] Right.

01:25:36,542 [David Wesely] And you, um, they’re all pre-inked.

01:25:40,282 [David Wesely] That’s the way they came, right? All, all numbers are ink. So you proceeded to, to, like, white out-The leading digits, so now it’s leaving the number from one through 20, they’re numbered one through nine- One through 20 … and then one, and then one through, one through nine, and then zero, and then one through nine and zero again. And you now have two, a double 10-sided dice. Right. And if you ink them in red and white and blue, you can roll them, and there’s an obvious sequence you read them in, which a lot of the guys in the game could never remember. Red, white, and blue? Yeah. Yeah. I was really astonished to find that people couldn’t keep it straight in their heads- Right … that you read them in the order red, white, blue.

01:26:21,410 [David Wesely] Gosh. Anyhow, [laughs] so but you can generate three-digit numbers with one cast of the dice, and isn’t this cool, right? So we’re using it for that.

01:26:30,270 [David Wesely] And, um, then I go off to the Army,

01:26:35,610 [David Wesely] and I come back, and they’re playing Dungeons & Dragons. Well, the predecessor of Dungeons & Dragons, Blackmoor. Blackmoor. And, um, they are using all these wacky-shaped dice in, that are laying around that are excess from the sets I was really into, or they, I really found useful.

01:26:52,450 [David Wesely] And, um,

01:26:54,750 [David Wesely] when they’re, they migrate on at the beginnings of Dungeons & Dragons, and they’re talking about they’re gonna do this game. They’re gonna actually go commercial with this thing, right? And I said, “Well, don’t use the polyhedron dice. I mean, a guy’s gonna spend 10 bucks to get your game, and he’s gonna have to go out and buy, spend another six bucks to buy the wacky dice.” Right. It, it’s never gonna work that way,

01:27:16,910 [David Wesely] right? Well, of course, they didn’t listen to me, and as a result, the game was a disaster. Yeah. [laughs] Um, but so all this is happening, right? And I’ve, I’ve come up with this thing, and at the time I thought, “Hey, the ancient Greeks invented it,” right? They, they came up with these shapes, and obviously Totten must have been using one of them in his games, and everybody uses a six already. Right. So what’s that? You know, I’m not running out and putting in a copyright for that ‘cause everybody already knows it, right?

01:27:42,470 [David Wesely] Years go by,

01:27:44,710 [David Wesely] and I began to find out that, well, no, it’s not all that screamingly obvious.

01:27:49,690 [David Wesely] The idea of using them for dice instead of just being mathematical abstractions, the Greeks weren’t throwing them to play games with. Right. And then in about 1992 or somewhere in there, I came across a reproduction of a real English game published in 1828, and it has a 12-sided teetotum in it,

01:28:12,890 [David Wesely] and it isn’t a D12.

01:28:17,630 [David Wesely] Um, you know what a dreidel is?

01:28:21,310 [David Wesely] Um, the, the play toy for Jewish kids. Right. It’s a little four-sided top. Okay. Okay. You can get numbers one through three, one, two, three, or four, or maybe it’s aleph, bet, gimmel, something, whatever. You know, whatever. You, you spin it, and you get one of four things, right? Right. Okay. Now, make it with 12 faces around the outside.

01:28:42,990 [David Wesely] Okay. And you have a 12-sided teetotum. And you can- And then you spin it. Yeah, you spin it on its points- Points to the room … and it flops over, and one side is up. Okay. That’s the number you’ve spun, right? Gotcha. So I’ve got this really nice little, um, imitation. Would, would have probably been ivory in the original expensive game in 1828, or maybe it was carved bone, but something, right? And I’m sure it’s made out of plastic in mine. But it’s a really nice-looking little thing, right? And I paid, like, 100 bucks the other day to get the darn reproduction game just to get that. It’s a 12-sided teetotum. Mm-hmm. I finally have one, right? Um, but that was… So that’s the point I suddenly realized, “Well, dummy, then Totten didn’t know about it,

01:29:26,950 [David Wesely] and the Greeks didn’t know about it, and all the people you figured got the idea before you did, didn’t.”

01:29:34,590 [David Wesely] So now the question is, so who did? Well, I have seen a book that says that the Japanese were using two 20-sided dice numbered from one, from zero to nine twice- Mm-hmm … in three different colors to generate three-digit probability numbers. Right. But I’ve seen that book, and it’s copyrighted, like, in 1977.

01:29:58,070 [David Wesely] I’ve never been able to find an earlier edition of the book that goes back to before I started doing this to see whether they learned it by reading Dungeons & Dragons [laughs] or not. Gotcha. Um, somebody in 1965, right when I was doing this, applied for a patent on using them as dice. Okay. And his patent photographs, you can find these on the internet, patent photograph shows the same set of five dice that I was using.

01:30:23,990 [David Wesely] Mm-hmm. I don’t know, uh, well, the guy’s name. Never met him. Can’t believe that he just, Dungeons & Dragons has not been published yet, right? Can’t believe that he got the idea from me. So somebody else was out there inventing this- Right … quote, “bit” margin.

01:30:38,929 [David Wesely] [coughs] So

01:30:42,170 [David Wesely] I would say that I was one of the inventors of it [laughs] ‘cause other people were coming up at the same time, the same way that, um, we all remember Edison invented the light bulb, but he really didn’t. Right. Right? There were al- also other people. There were, there were people bef- when he was a small child who were making light bulbs. It’s just that their light bulbs didn’t last very long, didn’t cast a very bright light. Yeah. He just made one that was commercial, commercially successful, as opposed to all the other guys who had

01:31:07,330 [David Wesely] ineffective ones. Right. So, you know, I came up with the idea, and I can, and, and, the, the, the, and from my introducing it in our group, it spread into Dungeons & Dragons, and into virtually everybody who’s doing it got it by that pathway. But that doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t also do it without me.

01:31:27,030 [David Wesely] And the same thing can be said about the role-playing games. I keep saying role-playing games. Even internally, I keep saying to myself, and I hate that term, but we’re stuck with it. It’s the one we’ve all adapted. It’s- Yeah. Um, because there was a, uh, [clears throat] Michael J. Korns came up with a set of World War II

[Note: Michael F. Korns, author of “Modern War in Miniature”]

01:31:49,210 [David Wesely] single-figure combat rules called Modern War Miniatures.Which tried to come up with all the statistical data on all the World War II weapons.

01:31:58,270 [Clyde] Okay.

01:31:58,340 [David Wesely] And he has a section at the back of the book

01:32:01,930 [David Wesely] where beyond just tables and tables and tables of armor penetration and rates of fire and everything,

01:32:08,110 [David Wesely] he has a little section at the back that describes playing the game, and he has a referee, and he has individual players. And the referee says, “Okay, what are you gonna do now?” And the player says, “I’m gonna run across the street towards the open doorway.” And the referee says, “Okay, you’re halfway across the street and you hear a machine gun firing. What do you do?” “I keep running faster,” right? “Okay, ah, too bad, you got hit. You’re down. You’re laying in the street in front of the door. What are you gonna do now?” “I’m gonna try to crawl in the door.” [laughs] “I hit you again. Ah, you’re dead.” You know?

01:32:41,830 [Clyde] [laughs]

01:32:42,710 [David Wesely] Now, what’s he doing? Well, it sure sounds kind of like a referee-

01:32:46,610 [Clyde] Yeah

01:32:46,830 [David Wesely] … role-playing kind of game, right, the way that he’s talking about running it, referee and player.

01:32:52,370 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:32:52,650 [David Wesely] Sorry, probably really came as a bit thud there.

01:32:54,930 [Clyde] No, it’ll be okay.

01:32:56,410 [David Wesely] Um, and so obviously Korns was creating something, and I never met him, and he never met me, and it’s all, all doing this in parallel with my doing Braunstein games-

01:33:07,020 [Clyde] Mm-hmm

01:33:07,020 [David Wesely] … at the same timeframe. So I’m having ideas and he’s having ideas, each one of which are

01:33:14,790 [David Wesely] early kind of role-playing games. Now,

01:33:18,910 [David Wesely] and refereed aspect of it is pretty important.

01:33:20,560 [Clyde] His was about two years later though, right?

01:33:23,110 [David Wesely] What?

01:33:23,730 [Clyde] His was about two years later than that.

01:33:24,890 [David Wesely] His appears to have come out, I don’t believe there’s any way on Earth that he heard anything about the people up in Minneapolis that set off on our games right.

01:33:30,040 [Clyde] No, no, that’s not what I’m saying, but, but-

01:33:31,830 [David Wesely] Yeah, his came out about two years after the first thing that I did, but close enough.

01:33:37,070 [Clyde] ‘Cause you weren’t publishing.

01:33:38,350 [David Wesely] I wasn’t publishing.

01:33:39,170 [Clyde] So-

01:33:39,810 [David Wesely] And so I th- I think it’s highly unlikely that he met some guy who had been up on vacation and played in one of our games in the Twin Cities or something like that, right?

01:33:47,650 [Clyde] Well enough for him to get it all figured out, right.

01:33:50,190 [David Wesely] I think he just evolved the concept on his own, and, um, and it’s cool that he did. And he did not go on in the games business at all either. So it’s as though,

01:34:02,030 [David Wesely] as though you went back and you found out that somebody had, uh, built a perfectly good flying airplane in 1895, but he was really interested in being a, being a ship captain. He never bothered to do anything with it, [laughs] you know?

01:34:13,770 [Clyde] That happens, that happens a lot with people and that thing, so it doesn’t-

01:34:16,970 [David Wesely] Yeah, there’s, well, there’s a lot of, I mean, there, there was a lot of, of, a lot of, um, uh,

01:34:23,010 [David Wesely] nationalistic argument in the early 20th century about whether indeed the Wright brothers had invented the airplane for the same kind of reasons. I mean, okay, they built an airplane that flew 120 feet. Um, there were other people who could claim, “Well, darn, I had an airplane that did that good about the same time.” And it really goes back to George Cayley, who did all this theoretical research on how to get lift out of wings and things.

01:34:45,450 [Clyde] Mm-hmm.

01:34:45,860 [David Wesely] And he built an airplane that never flew, but his, his descendants in the 20th century rebuilt the airplane according to his plans, and by putting in a modern engine with vastly better horsepower to weight ratio, they got it to fly, uh, claiming therefore that he probably did get his to fly when nobody was looking, uh, right?

01:35:02,340 [Clyde] Right.

01:35:02,350 [David Wesely] And where do you go for that, right? But, um,

01:35:05,610 [David Wesely] but there was Santos-Dumont, who was building flying craft of various kinds at the same time too. What really clinched it was in 1909, six years after the famous first flight in North Carolina, there was an international airplane show in Paris,

01:35:21,010 [David Wesely] and all the European inventors who were making things that would barely get off the ground were gonna all show up there and show them off to each other. And the Wright brothers from America came over, and they uncrated their current version of the Wright Flyer, and they set it up, and they took off, and they went out, they flew over the city back and forth, making big circles in the sky, and kept flying and flying and flying. And everybody else on the ground is going, “I haven’t been able to figure out how to make turns with mine yet.” [laughs] And by that point it was, “Well, I don’t care if we did ours four years, but it’s obviously the only one that works.”

01:35:55,250 [Clyde] Right.

01:35:55,670 [David Wesely] Right. So,

01:35:58,390 [David Wesely] uh, y- you know, all of us, there’s parallel inventors, all the people who invented automobiles, and all the complications Henry Ford went through on lawsuits,

01:36:06,510 [David Wesely] and the people who invented submarines, and there’s all these ideas that people get and they work on, and sometimes centuries go by, right, and the idea is brought back, and it, it works better the next time around for different reasons. So no, as there’s, there are things that are invented de

01:36:24,350 [David Wesely] novo, nobody had anything like it beforehand, but an awful lot of things are a case of you finally got it to work right.

01:36:30,490 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:36:30,770 [David Wesely] So, um,

01:36:34,030 [David Wesely] there’s another parallel I like to make too come to think of it. [laughs] Who invented the telegraph?

01:36:39,490 [Clyde] Right.

01:36:41,310 [David Wesely] Most people think it’s, it’s Samuel B. Morse who invented the telegraph.

01:36:45,340 [Clyde] Yeah.

01:36:45,350 [David Wesely] He didn’t actually. The telegraph was invented by Professor Henry,

01:36:50,710 [David Wesely] who made the magnetic telegraph, and he proceeded to demonstrate that you can send signals with it up to a distance of at least a mile by wrapping a mile of wire around and around and around the, the laboratory he was in, and showing you could close the switch here, and you make the signals come off over here, and at a long length of wire, which would still work, right?

01:37:09,750 [Clyde] Right.

01:37:10,290 [David Wesely] So he did all this stuff. He showed you could send signals. He did all these things, and he did it as a, a exercise ‘cause he was a physics professor.

01:37:18,050 [David Wesely] And that was fine, and he went back to working on other stuff.

01:37:22,010 [David Wesely] A few years later, Morse comes along, and he starts the American Telegraph Company. So he’s gonna, he’s gonna revolutionize communications by having telegraph stations that will send messages faster than you can send them by waving flags or-

01:37:36,150 [Clyde] Right

01:37:36,370 [David Wesely] … night and day and all this, right?

01:37:38,850 [David Wesely] And he gets going on it. People say, “Didn’t, uh, but, uh, do you know who invented it?” “Well, I invented this all on my own. I, I had this incredible idea while I was on a transatlantic ocean voyage, and I came ashore, and I said, ‘I’ve gotta build this thing.’” “Oh, gee, it sure looks a lot like what Professor Henry’s done.” “I’ve never heard of that Henry guy. Not me. No sir.” Right? All right.His company is at death’s door. He’s got a big problem. They have all these insulated wires they’re burying in the ground that carry the signals out,

01:38:07,310 [David Wesely] and the insulation isn’t up to it, and it can’t keep the thing working for, for more than a few days at a time.

01:38:13,510 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] Right.

01:38:13,970 [David Wesely] It’s costing a fortune to put it in. Finally, he goes to Professor Henry, and he says, “Okay, we’ve got a problem I can’t fix. They say that you did yours over a distance of a mile, and it worked okay. How did you do it?”

01:38:27,970 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] [laughs]

01:38:29,320 [David Wesely] And Henry says, “Well,

01:38:31,990 [David Wesely] I didn’t bury the wires in the ground. I hung them between poles on glass insulators.”

01:38:37,310 [David Wesely] Oh.

01:38:38,910 [David Wesely] [laughs] You know, all the money I’m gonna save just putting up poles. Holy mackerel, what an idea, right? And Morse says, “All right, you got me.

01:38:49,990 [David Wesely] I’m gonna have to cut you in on it then. What do you want?”

01:38:53,530 [David Wesely] And Henry says, “I don’t want anything.

01:38:59,010 [David Wesely] I’m a scientist. They pay me to be a scientist.

01:39:02,350 [David Wesely] When I develop things, they’ve already paid me for it, and they’re free for everybody.”

01:39:09,090 [David Wesely] And Morse is just flabbergasted that this schmuck won’t take– doesn’t wanna hold him up for any money, so he goes off and says he invented the telegraph, and that’s that. [laughs] And, um,

01:39:21,790 [David Wesely] so here I am. I gave my gift to the world, right? This is it. Never mind. I don’t get no credit or I don’t get any money for it. There you go. Um, so but that was the, uh, that was the thing with the dice. So you got any other questions for me?

01:39:33,910 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] I think, actually, I think that’s where I would like to leave it.

01:39:40,070 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] [upbeat music] You were listening to Theory from a Closet. This show is copy left via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which means you can bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate, but you’ve gotta keep it free

01:39:59,570 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] so that others can use your stuff, and you gotta give me credit for what’s mine.

01:40:08,990 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] And that’s really it. You shouldn’t be listening anymore.

01:40:13,270 [Clyde L. Rhoer, III] [upbeat music]

---

Originally published on Substack on May 21, 2026.