An Interview with Bob Meyer - Part 1 of 3

From 8 December 2025

[RH] This is Rod Hampton.
[BM] Yeah. Rod’s the way you prefer to be called, right?
[RH] Correct. Yes. And you prefer Bob?
[BM] Yeah. I... I normally go by Bob.
[RH]Fantastic. Just to give you some background on me, I started really taking a deep dive into the early history of war gaming and especially the early history of D&D back in around 2022, and I wrote a retro clone based on the Beyond This Point Be Dragons draft set of rules that came out of the Twin Cities. I’ve also tried to look at what Strategos could be done man-to-man because I bought into a line of baloney that people fed me and I think that’s non-productive, and I‘d like to talk to a few people that were there at the beginning and get more at the truth of what actually the play style was.
[BM] Well, why is it that you think it’s baloney?
[RH] Strategos uses a bunch of ratios in the Advance Game, and Strategos N, which I’ve happened to have a look at now, and Valley Forge, also by Dave Wesley. All of those have a very complex system for morale, tracking morale, for calculating ratios, whether you can accomplish things on the battlefield or not, and I’ve never — in any of the many podcasts or interviews with the early bunch of people — heard them talk about, you know, we multiplied ratios and then we did dice roll-offs like in Don’t Give Up the Ship.
[BM] Okay, well, then a brief history on Strategos. Uh, you do know that what happened is that Wesley stumbled upon a book by an American army officer named Totten.
[RH] Yep.
[BM] And do you know the history of Totten?
[RH] I do. I’ve actually played the Basic Game out of Strategos RAW (rules as written) on the table and I’ve read the Advance Game and been with it for a bit now.
[BM] So I do not know what Totten wrote originally, so I can’t be sure about that. But all I’ve been told is Wesley adopted or adapted the Totten rules, because Totten wrote for a period later than the Napoleonics. And what the guys were interested in was Napoleonics. I guess they already had lots of these figures because they were available, and Civil War figures, I guess, were not as available. And so I do not know what came from Totten and what came from Wesley’s imagination. I do know that there was a problem when they first started playing Napoleonics, because they used Napoleonic tactics and the same thing happened for them that happened in the Civil War. Their troops were all being mowed down until someone realized that — you know — these rules need to be adapted a little more because we’re playing Napoleonics with muskets, not Civil War with rifled muskets that used those special bullets.

So [for] everything that we talk about really, the one thing that I will emphasize is that everything evolved. I do not know where the idea of morale came from, if that was in Totten originally or not. For that matter also, Wesley read some books, and one of the books that he read was from this guy in England, and I forget his name now. It’s a very important book because it talks about role playing and morale and things like that.
[RH] I know he read The Compleat Strategyst, and there was another book too on industry and negotiations inside a plant between unions and management.

<Interjection: the second book to which I was referring is listed in the wikipedia article as Kenneth E. Boulding, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory, Harper & Brothers, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1962 available at https://archive.org/details/conflictdefense00boul/page/n5/mode/2up. I was referring to Chapter 11: Industrial Conflict p. 208. The Compleat Strategyst was also published in the United States so I am not sure of the title of the book from England to which Bob is referring here. David Wesely describes these books in another interview that I transcribed to substack.>

[BM] Well, which is the one that Wesley mentions all the time, which kind of puzzles me, because he claims that he basically came up with the idea for [Braunstein] because of that book out of England and from Totten’s Rules. And, you know, I’m saying this secondhand, you know, because I was not there for any of it. I was not even there for the original Strategos games. This is just my impression on it, but Strategos itself was adapted from rules and ideas that already existed. And actually Strategos-N is extremely important in the formation of Blackmoor . . . . From Strategos-N and our Napoleonic campaign we had an awful lot of role-playing in that . . . the guys really got into it. Now, Strategos was not the only campaign we were playing. We played a lot of campaigns. Of course, we played a lot of just regular war games and also board games because that was what was available. We also played miniatures. We were really big on Fletcher Pratt, especially. Which is one reason why we liked the fact that a lot of us were university students, because that gave us access to these really large rooms, because when you play Fletcher Pratt in 1:1200 [scale], you need a lot of floor. But that’s getting off the point.
The main thing is that in Strategos, the guys really got into this idea of royal families. Now, we were a very large wargaming group and we weren’t the only wargaming group in the Twin Cities. You know, a lot of guys belonged to more than one group, and sometimes the groups kind of melded together and became a larger group. The largest group that came out of the Twin Cities was Midwest Military Simulations Association. Would you be interested in a brief history of that?
[RH] I think I would like to fast-forward a little bit.
[BM] Okay.
[RH] I’m mostly interested in the ‘71 to ‘72 timeframe, and let me just, let me just back the truck up a little bit. So, I know Arneson was corresponding with Gygax, and that Gygax and Carr were helping work on Don’t Give Up the Ship.
[BM] Mm-hmm.
[RH] Around the same time, I know there was a Napoleonic campaign going on, and there was actually a call for - right around Arneson’s time when he went overseas to England - there was a call for some work on maybe the Dutch part of that campaign.
[RH] I’m curious about that, that trip to England that Arneson took. It’s my understanding that Richard Snider and Arneson talked about the Midgard stuff that Arneson encountered over there, and maybe some of that made its way into what’s called the “Richard Snider Variant.” Do you know, do you know anything about that piece of it?
[BM] None of it.
[RH] None of it?
[BM] I know nothing about David’s trip or who he talked to or what came out of that. All I know is what was happening in the Twin Cities.
[RH] Got it.
[BM] Because out of Napoleonics where you had the role-playing with the generals and the colonels and the royal family, um, from that, and there was a very important game that was played. I do not know what the date is on that game. It was one that Wesley ran, which was a recreation of the Battle of Bladensburg. And in that, he pulled the same thing on us that he did with Braunstein, and that is, as each of us showed up, he told us, “We’re running a battle. You’re going to be in it, and you are going to be a particular person who will have these troops, or not as the case may be.” And so I ended up being an historical figure who was a ship or a naval captain who commanded a detachment of Marines, and someone else was the Secretary of War and everything. And then [Wesely] ]positioned us on the map, and we were not allowed to talk to each other unless we were actually close to each other on the map. And I don’t know if this was part of the formation of role- playing or if this is after it already started.

<Interjection: Dave Wesely talks about the Battle of Bladensburg in the interview that I have transcribed to substack. From minutes 37 - 40 he seems to imply that Bladensburg was run more than once and that it preceded his famous Franco-Prussian Braunstein game.>

[BM] But something else that people miss is that there’s another game after Braunstein, and I’m sure you know the history of Braunstein. Do you know the history of Brownstone?
[RH] So, I know Duane Jenkins ran it. I know Arneson participated in that as El Poncho. As a matter of fact, I was trying to run a little Boot Hill Braunstein with family and friends a couple of months ago, and we gave it up just because we couldn’t get enough participation. But the short answer is, I made El Poncho the villain. So yeah, I know a little bit about that.
[BM] Okay. Well, the important thing about Brownstone is that Braunstein was always one off. That is, one Braunstein did not affect the next one. Brownstone was different. We each had a character, and for the first time, we continued the character. I tried, but I was not interested in role-playing to begin with. I’ve never played [Wesely’s] Braunstein. I enjoyed the Bladensburg Battle. I tried Brownstone, again was not interested, and when Arneson came up with Blackmoor, I was not interested then to begin with either. But the important thing about Brownstone is that everyone kept their character, and what happened in one game affected what happened in the next one.
[RH] Do you recall how many sessions Brownstone went on for?
[BM] No. Like I said, I tried it maybe once or twice and dropped out. There were so many people, it didn’t really matter because there was always enough people that there were plenty of people who would be interested in any one particular campaign. So I’m sure he had probably at least half a dozen, if not a dozen people that played in it. And as to what happened to it, I don’t know. As I said, I dropped out.
[RH] How did they resolve combat in that, Bob? I mean, was it just 2D6 or 1D6? Do you recall any details on conflict and how it was resolved?
[BM] No. No, I’m sorry, I don’t. Probably D6, because it predated Blackmoor, and Blackmoor we started with D6. You know in the first Braunstein [they got] to use D6, even though Wesley had not planned it. Of course, [laughs] when you get wargamers together, the unexpected always happens, and two guys decided they wanted to fight a duel. So, Wesley dug up [a] D6 because everyone had D6. That was in all the games that we had back then. That’s almost certainly what they did in Brownstone also. And as to what the rules were that Jenkins used, I don’t know if he made up his own or if he used an existing game or what. He probably made up his own. I don’t think any of the other games existed before then, like Boot Hill or any of those.
[RH] Right. It was all wild, wild West for Jenkins for Brownstone, right?
[BM] Yeah. The setting was Columbus, New Mexico because that’s where Pancho Villa invaded and so it offered itself as a very rich, shall we say, target environment.
[RH] [laughs] Right.
[BM] You know, the people that created these games and campaigns were always trying to come up with something to keep people interested, because something that I’ve always said — and all of us have always said — is that we were just a bunch of kids having fun. Well, you know, people become bored with the same old things, so they kept adding new and more things into it. You know, everything evolved not just from one campaign to the next, but within each campaign. And, lots of ideas that were in one campaign would be recycled into the next campaign because they worked. And the only real difference was the setting, or adding more ideas, more rules, whatever was needed. So, as far as the ‘70, ‘71, that’s just about the time when I first joined the group myself.
[RH] I’ve heard the troll under the bridge was your first encounter in Blackmoor and that’s April1971, if the timelines I’ve seen are correct.
[BM] Which they would know better than I would. I’ve forgotten all of that. I do know that there was a game May [X] of ‘71, and I always assumed that that was the troll game, but since then, from what people are saying, I think it was the April [game], which would make a lot more sense because May [X] is my birthday, and I could not see myself playing a game on that particular day. I was back home. As a matter of fact, I saw a picture of myself and John Snider was in it at my parent’s house. So it was probably the April game, and it would also make more sense because David [Arneson] was using that game to try out a set of rules to see if they would work. You know, both Greg Svenson and I have maintained for a long time that the first Blackmoor games were actually in 1970, or the first Blackmoor, in some way, was in 1970. This might be when David was trying out different ideas. So April ‘71 would be about right. I believe the rules he was trying out were adapted from Chainmail, but I could easily be wrong. I don’t know. All I know is that he was interested in combat. He wanted to adapt combat rules and we tried it and it went...well, it went badly for me. But, more importantly, David looked at that [encounter] and decided that, “No, that doesn’t work.” And, of course I told him it doesn’t work because it didn’t for me, but he agreed with me. He said, “No, these aren’t...[right]”

Because the big thing about it is it was all or nothing. Which, he [Dave Arneson] did not care for that.

You know, going back to the Strategos, when you have a unit like a regiment, it doesn’t all disappear at one time. It’s traded away in combat and he [Dave Arneson] preferred that idea. There was another game that we were playing at the time [too]. You know, most games, you kind of trade away [combat power] like Risk or any of those games from back then. So he said, “Yeah, this isn’t working,” and he came up with his own rules. And my contention — because it seemed very much like a game, a naval game that David and I were playing at the time — was that he basically adapted rules from this Civil War naval game. And part of the reason I say that (and I could be wrong about this) but he adapted one particular rule from the naval game, and that is for Armor Class. And people have always asked, “Why is it that the best armor class is zero? And as you go up in numbers, you go worse in armor?” And the reason for that would be because in the Civil War, the very best ships you had were ships that were built from ground up as armor clads. And then the next best would be ships which were wooden ships, which had armor added onto it, and then you had ships with cotton bales or ships with very thick wood, all the way down to rowboats that have no protection. And those went up from zero to whatever number because you could have just anything available for a ship. And so it worked out the same in Blackmoor, because when it came down to it, he was not using the number for the Armor Class for the actual combat because the combat tables were just set up in such a way that you figured it out. You know, he reversed the numbers then that were used in the combat tables. And none of this was apparent to any of us that started out playing the game because, as I put it, David did not burden us with rules.
[RH] [laughs] Right.
[BM] We always used to say, “Well, there were no rules.” Well, that’s kind of a misnomer, because there were no rules as far as the players knew.
[RH] No player-facing rules.
[BM] Yeah. David knew the rules. He had them. We were all experienced gamers who have played many games and campaigns before then, so he knew we would have no problem at all in adapting to this, especially since we’d already been through Strategos and some of the other battles like Bladensburg and Brownstone. So, you know, we didn’t see the combat tables so it didn’t really matter how he did it because he was the one who then used it, and it wasn’t until D&D came out that we actually knew the rules. We kinda knew ‘em, yes, because we were operating with them, but we finally had them, like the tables and everything, black and white in these booklets. We could look it all up ourselves and, of course, study it ourselves, which was ridiculous, because we already knew what we were doing, and it didn’t matter, you know?
[RH] Right.
[BM] You knew that if there was one orc in front of you, you could take it, unless it was a really good orc. And if there were a hundred orcs in front of you, then you might have to consider that, “Well, this is a good time to depart, time to leave,” which is something that people don’t realize. The original games, and for a long time, and still for all of us who survived, in the game, the most important survival strategy was running away.

[RH] Right. Uh, yeah. [laughs]
[BM] We did that a lot because we needed to, you know, even when there was a group of us, three or four or half a dozen. Well, when the game first started, it was not unusual for our characters to die. And we didn’t care for that, because we understood the concept of levels, that as we survived and did more things, then we became better, and we wanted that. You know, being experienced wargamers, we wanted any advantage we could get. So that’s what we did. We survived. We ran away, and then we took what we could. You know, this sounds really bad. You know, it was not woke back then.
[RH] Right
[BM] I guess you could say, in that, yeah, we just killed ‘em because that’s what heroes do with creatures like orcs. We just killed and we plundered, because we were looking for treasure of any kind. And when David introduced magic items into it — because we already had magic. We had Peter Gaylord was the original wizard and so on.
[RH] Oh, I wanted to ask you about two things before we continue. So let’s circle back to the Civil War game. I’ve, I’ve heard three different versions of the name of that game that Arneson was playing. One is Ironclads. Another is Damn the Torpedoes, and another is, Iron Ships and Wooden Men [a humorous play on the name of an existing naval game]. That’s what Jeff [Berry] told me yesterday or the day before when I spoke with him. Do you recall if Arneson had a working title for those Civil War rules?
[BM] As a matter of fact, I don’t know. Did Jeff tell you about Frank?
[RH] No, he did not.
[BM] Okay. When we played this game... Now, this game is extremely complicated. Now, this is something that I really like and David liked also. Now, the main thing though is that David and I are... (well, are as in David was)...naval enthusiasts. I mean, if I did not have [PHYSICAL ISSUE], I would have joined the Navy. And David and I both were Naval experts. We weren’t the only ones in the group, but I know that David and I were. We just loved everything about Navies. I mean, I bought Jane’s Fighting Ships books. And I looked them up. I, I read them just like a person would read a regular book. And David, I think, had them also. And so we were real big on these Naval games. And, uh, there was a gentleman, I think he’s still alive, in the Twin Cities who had an Atari computer (I believe was the computer). These rules were so complicated. The main complication was, of course, combat. It is in any of these games. What he did was he entered all of the stats for the combat rules into this computer . . . . The thing about the Civil War that you probably know is that there’s so many different types of cannons.
[RH] Yep.

[BM] And at this time, they were just shifting from like 30-pounder cannons to 64-pounder cannons, to rifled, to, like, nine-inch guns. And again, this thing with the Armor Class, there’s all different types of armor that these ships have, and this game, to be really realistic, added in not just distance but parabolas on it. So that way then the further away you are, the more likely the shell is to come in from above.

[RH] Hah. Nice. Yeah!
[BM] Basically, you had diagrams of the ships and you had the distance and where it comes in. So you looked at where it hit and what the particular armor was at that point. And so what the penetration is, what damage it would do is according to what was there. So that’s all I know. I don’t remember the name of the game, but I know that Frank had that in his computer. So if that helps any.
[RH] It does. What was Frank’s last name?
[BM] I don’t remember it. Jeff probably will remember that. I do not remember myself.
[RH] Okay.