# Vincent Baker - Maker: Game designer - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/vincent-baker/ > The indie designer and Forge theorist behind Dogs in the Vineyard and, with Meguey Baker, Apocalypse World, whose 'moves' became Powered by the Apocalypse, the most imitated RPG engine of the 21st century. **Why it matters:** Baker's designs turned years of indie-RPG theory into games anyone could run. Apocalypse World's openly hackable engine produced Dungeon World, Monsterhearts and hundreds of other games, and fed into the Forged in the Dark system behind Blades in the Dark. ## Quick answers **Who is Vincent Baker?** The indie designer and Forge theorist behind Dogs in the Vineyard and, with Meguey Baker, Apocalypse World, whose 'moves' became Powered by the Apocalypse, the most imitated RPG engine of the 21st century. **What is Vincent Baker known for?** Vincent Baker is best known for Apocalypse World. **Why does Vincent Baker matter to fantasy and games?** Baker's designs turned years of indie-RPG theory into games anyone could run. Apocalypse World's openly hackable engine produced Dungeon World, Monsterhearts and hundreds of other games, and fed into the Forged in the Dark system behind Blades in the Dark. ## Life David Vincent Baker, who publishes as Vincent Baker, is an American designer and theorist of tabletop roleplaying games. Little about his early life is on the public record, and no reliable source gives his birth date or birthplace. He is married to the designer Meguey Baker, his frequent collaborator, and he runs Lumpley Games, the small press that publishes his work and hosts the archives of the Forge. That forum was where American independent RPG design organized itself in the 2000s. ## Work Baker came out of the Forge, the website founded by Ron Edwards where designers argued about what roleplaying actually is and self-published games to test their answers. His early titles were small and provocative: *kill puppies for satan* (2001), *The Cheap and Cheesy Fantasy Game* (2001), *cockroach souffle* (2002). His most important contribution to the theory was the Lumpley Principle, developed with Emily Care Boss, which defines "system" not as the written rules but as "the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play." The idea was that rules matter because they decide who has the authority to say what happens. *Dogs in the Vineyard* (2004) put that idea to work. The players are young God's Watchdogs riding circuit through faith communities in a version of the nineteenth-century American frontier inspired by early Mormon settlements, judging sin and deciding how far they will go to root it out. Conflicts escalate from talking to fists to guns, and every escalation has a cost the player chooses to pay. The game master was told to "say yes or roll the dice": either let the players have what they want, or make it a real conflict. *Dogs* won the 2004 Indie RPG Game of the Year and Innovation awards and was shortlisted for the Diana Jones Award, and it was one of the first indie RPGs to succeed both commercially and in changing how people played. It was followed by *Poison'd* (2007), about pirates, and *In a Wicked Age* (2007), a sword-and-sorcery story game using oracle tables. Then came [Apocalypse World](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/apocalypse-world/) (2010), a lethal, profane game of survival and relationships after the end of the world, created with Meguey Baker, who was credited as co-designer of its 2016 second edition. It became the foundation of a new school of [narrative design](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/narrative-rpg/). Each character is a playbook, a single sheet such as the Hardholder, the Gunlugger or the Hocus, and every significant action is a "move" that triggers when the fiction calls for it. Players roll two six-sided dice plus a stat: 10 or more succeeds, 7–9 succeeds with a cost or a hard choice, and 6 or less hands the MC a move. The MC follows written principles instead of a prepared plot and is told to "play to find out what happens." The world has only an implied setting, filled in by players as they create characters and their tangled histories. The game won the 2010 Indie RPG Awards for Game of the Year, Best Support and Most Innovative Game, and in 2011 it won RPG of the Year at both the Golden Geek Awards and Lucca Comics & Games. The Bakers then did something unusual: they invited anyone who had made a game inspired by Apocalypse World to publish it. The resulting family of games, "Powered by the Apocalypse," includes Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel's [Dungeon World](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dungeon-world/) (2012), which adapted the moves to fantasy dungeon crawling; Avery Alder's teen-monster game *Monsterhearts*; and many more. [John Harper](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/john-harper/)'s [Blades in the Dark](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/blades-in-the-dark/) (2017) adapted the approach into its own "Forged in the Dark" system. Baker's later work with Meguey Baker includes *Firebrands* (2017), a science-fiction romance game about mobile-frame pilots, and *Under Hollow Hills* (2021), a game of fairy tales and a traveling circus. ## Legacy Baker's influence is visible across contemporary tabletop design. Apocalypse World's move structure, its "fiction first" principle that rules trigger from what happens in the story, and its three-tier outcomes, success, partial success and failure, are now part of the ordinary vocabulary of tabletop design. By 2020 critics were observing that PbtA games were everywhere. In 2025 the American Library Association's Games & Gaming Round Table honored Apocalypse World as a "Platinum Play Classic." Baker's larger achievement was to show that game theory, developed in forum debates, could produce games simple enough to teach in minutes and rich enough to sustain long campaigns. The indie RPG scene that followed, from itch.io zines to crowdfunded hardcovers, grew in large part from his invitation to hack the game. ## Facts - His full name is David Vincent Baker; he publishes as Lumpley Games, which also hosts the archives of the Forge forums. - With Emily Care Boss he formulated the Lumpley Principle: system is 'the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play.' - Dogs in the Vineyard (2004) made 'say yes or roll the dice' a famous rule of thumb for game masters. - In Apocalypse World the game master is called the MC and is told not to plan the plot before the first session. - Apocalypse World rolls just two six-sided dice: 10+ is a success, 7–9 a success with a cost or hard choice, 6 or less lets the MC make a move. - The Bakers explicitly invited others to publish games inspired by Apocalypse World, which created the Powered by the Apocalypse movement. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Baker) - [Wikipedia: Apocalypse World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_World) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.