Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game, commonly considered the first of its kind, in which a group of players create and develop characters whose skills and abilities are determined by rolling dice.⁵⁴ It was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and first published in 1974.⁵⁹ Developed out of war gaming using table-top miniatures, its paperback rule books were an instant commercial success and spawned an industry that influenced a generation of film-makers, writers, and videogame developers.⁵ An estimated 20 million people had played the game by 2004, with more than $1 billion spent on game equipment and books.⁵

In play there is no board or counters, only pen, paper, and an active imagination.⁴ One participant, the Dungeon Master, plots and narrates the adventure and controls the world and its non-player characters, while the other players each embody a single character — a fighter, a thief, a magic user, or perhaps a bard, druid, or cleric.⁴¹⁶ The core loop is simple: the Dungeon Master describes a scenario, the players decide what their characters do, and dice are rolled to determine the outcome.¹⁷ Characters are built by selecting a species such as human, elf, dwarf, or halfling and a class such as cleric, fighter, rogue, or wizard, then assigning numerical ability scores recorded on a character sheet.¹³¹⁶ Brad King, author of Dungeons and Dreamers, contrasts it with board games, which have an objective or goal: “D&D is the opposite. It’s about sitting down and telling stories with your friends”.⁴

Origins

The game grew directly out of the hobbyist wargaming culture of the American Midwest, in which players pushed miniatures around maps, measured fire with rulers, and built historically accurate terrain resembling battlegrounds such as Gettysburg or Stalingrad.⁶ Gygax, an insurance underwriter in Kriegsspiel-descended wargaming circles in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, published Chainmail, a medieval wargame with a fantasy-flavoured supplement, in 1971.⁶⁷ Dave Arneson, a University of Minnesota history major and part-time security guard in the Twin Cities, adopted Chainmail’s ruleset for a fantasy wargame called Blackmoor, and the two then collaborated to make Dungeons & Dragons.⁷⁶ The name was conjured by Gygax’s daughter Cindy as she and her siblings ran through the game’s earliest sessions.⁷ TSR, the company created by Gygax and Don Kaye in 1973, published the game, with an initial printing of a thousand hand-assembled copies stored at first in a colleague’s basement.⁹

The original 1974 set was mailed in a faux-wood cardboard box containing three booklets — Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.¹⁷ A 2018 statement of credits describes the game as “the original D&D game created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, with Brian Blume, Rob Kuntz, James Ward, and Don Kaye”.¹³ The conventional origin story crediting Gygax as sole father of role-playing games has been contested; Rob Kuntz, who was welcomed into Gygax’s family in October 1968 at the age of 13 and became his student and co-author, told Kotaku that the popular account is “sorely mistaken or flat-out wrong”.⁷ The 2019 documentary Secrets of Blackmoor attempts to credit Arneson’s Twin Cities gaming group, which playtested and iterated on wargaming rulesets, with a larger share of the invention of fantasy role-playing.⁷

The game drew on a wider literary inheritance: the dwarves, elves, halflings, and wizards at its core were popularised by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, themselves with older roots in European folklore.¹⁰ The first 1977 Basic Set rulebook contained references to “Hobbits”, which were changed to “Halflings” in the January 1978 second printing.¹ Gygax was an intermittently observant Jehovah’s Witness whose company nonetheless published books such as Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and Deities and Demigods, codifying beings from numerous pagan religions for use in the game.⁹

While The Lord of the Rings is inevitably linked to Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax always maintained that J. R. R. Tolkien had only a “superficial” influence on the game.²² He argued instead that it was inspired by Robert E. Howard?’s Conan stories, Fritz Leiber?’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and other authors including L. Sprague de Camp and Jack Vance.²² Gygax’s dismissals of Tolkien’s importance may have been connected to the fact that TSR was sued for misappropriating Tolkien’s work and forced to remove words such as “hobbit” and “ent” from the game’s rule books.²²

Toward the end of the 1970s, while formalising the advanced rule set, Gygax added an appendix to the Dungeon Master’s Guide? listing the books that had inspired him, writing that he had been “an avid reader of all science fiction and fantasy literature since 1950”.²¹ This list, known within the role-playing community as Appendix N, drew from a wide field of fantasy and science-fiction authors, among them Poul Anderson, R. E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber? — believed to have coined the phrase “sword and sorcery” — Michael Moorcock, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, and Tolkien.²¹ It also included Leigh Brackett, best known as a screenwriter, likely for her planetary romances set on Mars.²¹ The blogger James Maliszewski has called Appendix N the “literary DNA” of the game.²¹ Asked in 2007 whether he would change any of the selections, Gygax replied that he would not alter the list much, “other than to add a couple of novels”.²¹

The most immediate influences on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were de Camp and Pratt, Howard, Fritz Leiber?, Jack Vance, Lovecraft, and A. Merritt.²³ The fifth edition’s Player’s Handbook? carried a comparable “Appendix E: Inspirational Reading” that reprinted several of Gygax’s picks alongside more recent fantasy such as China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts.²² Its designers cited specific literary debts: lead designer Mike Mearls named Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series as a major influence, while Rodney Thompson traced the paladin and warlock classes back to Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions and The Broken Sword.²²

Editions and publishers

The game soon split into two lines: a simpler Basic line, whose Basic Set was edited successively by J. Eric Holmes (the blue box), Tom Moldvay (magenta), and Frank Mentzer (red), and the more structured and complicated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons favoured by Gygax.¹ Original D&D sets and supplements continued to be produced for three more years as “Original Collectors Editions”.¹ By the early 1980s the game generated $8 million in annual sales, rising to $30 million later in the decade, and TSR signed a distribution deal with Random House and spun off a Saturday morning cartoon on CBS.⁹

Gygax and Arneson sued one another over the development of the game in the late 1970s and 1980s; both eventually sold their royalties to publisher Wizards of the Coast in the 1990s.⁴ Wizards of the Coast, later a subsidiary of Hasbro, has published the game since the 1990s.⁴¹³ A fifth edition was released in 2014, with its core three rulebooks — the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual — followed by an Open Game License permitting third-party publishers to produce compatible content.²⁹ A 2024 Player’s Handbook both marked the game’s 50th anniversary and streamlined the fifth-edition rules for new players.¹⁴ The game is supported by a network of campaign settings, of which the Forgotten Realms is the fifth edition’s default, alongside Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron, Ravenloft, Planescape, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer.²²⁰

Cultural reception and controversy

At the height of its 1980s popularity the game became a target for cultural conservatives and was wrongly implicated in a missing persons case, a teen suicide, and a number of murders.⁴ The 1979 disappearance of college student James Dallas Egbert III was linked to the game; though he was found unharmed, the episode inspired Rona Jaffe’s novel Mazes and Monsters, adapted into a 1982 television film starring Tom Hanks.⁹⁴ Patricia Pulling, whose son had committed suicide, founded the organisation Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, and the evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick published the 1984 tract “Dark Dungeons” depicting a player seduced into witchcraft.⁹ Gygax rejected the accusations on a 60 Minutes segment as “nothing but a witch hunt”.⁹ U.S. Army intelligence, according to a biography of Gygax, sent two agents to infiltrate his Lake Geneva wargaming circle in the 1970s, suspecting the tabletop reenactments might be insurgent training, and on finding the group harmless asked to join.⁹

The game’s popularity waned in the early 1990s with the videogame boom, but it later revived; a fifth-edition resurgence after 2014 was driven in part by actual-play shows such as Critical Role and by the game’s appearance in Stranger Things.⁴¹²¹⁷ Therapists came to use the game to help troubled children talk, and children with autism to improve social skills, and a study found role players exhibiting above-average empathy.¹²

Influence on video games

D&D’s highly statistical design lent itself readily to computers, which could generate random numbers like dice and calculate hit-probability charts faster than a Dungeon Master.¹¹ Its conventions — hit points, experience points and levels, character races and classes, the acquisition of armour and weapons, and the impetus to fight progressively fiercer monsters — were adapted directly or indirectly into fantasy computer games.¹¹ Early developers who pioneered the computer role-playing game genre out of the game include Richard Garriott (Ultima, 1981), Brian Fargo (The Demon’s Forge, 1981), Daniel Lawrence (Telengard, 1982), and Jon Van Caneghem (Might & Magic, 1986).¹¹ The numerical representation of game components reached well beyond fantasy, descending into the health bars of first-person shooters such as Doom and the motives of The Sims.¹¹ Later games adopted its mechanics directly: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic uses the rules of D&D 3.5, and the 2023 release Baldur’s Gate 3 closely follows the fifth-edition rules.¹⁰¹⁴ The 2023 film Honor Among Thieves set its story in the medieval-esque world of the tabletop game.¹⁴