D&D Basics: A Brief History of Dungeons & Dragons

D&D has been around for quite some time, and if you're a curious person like I am, you wonder how it first came to be. Dungeons and Dragons started small, like most things that get very popular, and grew exponentially thereafter. I can just imagine the PHB (Player's Handbook) springing forth from Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's skulls like Athena from Zeus's cranium. Alright, I'm exaggerating. But here's how it really happened:

Dungeons & Dragons, as popular as it is, was not the first pen and paper game of it's genre. Tabletop war games like Braunstein and Chainmail preceded Dungeons & Dragons, using miniatures to fight out wars of the players' concoction and role-playing as groups of armies and other tactical units rather than actual singular people. Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax developed Chainmail and it ended up being a giant stepping stone for what we would know today as Dungeons & Dragons. The game evolved from being a simple war game to giving a person a character to act as and an entirely new set of variables to choose from.

After Chainmail lent it's rule set as a foundation to Dungeons & Dragons, there was still a lot of work to be done. Gygax and Arneson took role-playing to a whole new level and introduced a framework for many games to come. The characters, instead of being a military unit, now played a role in a party, and could perform actions from the player's imagination with the discretion of the Dungeon Master, or the leader of the game sessions.

The original Dungeons & Dragons debuted in 1974 at GenCon, a gaming and hoppy convention held in Indianapolis, IN. There was only one thousand copies of this so it's collector's value is absolutely through the roof. The game itself wasn't anything fancy, just a few brown pamphlets in a brown box. Sounds exciting, huh? With this basic set, Gygax and Arneson published many supplementary and additional rules in Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR)'s magazine, The Dragon, which had since been renamed from The Strategic Review, presumably for the new franchise TSR was embarking on.

Dungeons & Dragons went through many changes over the years, changing out rules for better ones, adding more adventure settings and even got a full revamp after Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to Dungeons & Dragons 3.0. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was really the take-off point to the series, however it was redone due to Wizards of the Coast buying out TSR in 2000 and wanting to reinvent the franchise.

Surprisingly, before Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, the game hadn't used a d20 system like it does now. Wizards of the Coast literally invented the d20 system to use with Dungeons & Dragons 3.0. It served as a game mechanic for many games afterward, but the original inspiration was Dungeons & Dragons. The d20 system helps in combat immensely, giving more accurate damage counts and opens up new possibilities of pretty much everything in regards to gameplay. 3.0 opened up a lot of new possibilities of game play and added Skills and Feats to allow further character customization.

The 3.5 Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, through currently out of print, is in my opinion the best and most played edition there is at the moment. 3.5 is essentially 3.0 with a few tweaks here and there. Wizards has also published a great deal of supplementary books containing variant rules, additional races, classes, and even full adventure settings. Even with the addition of 4th Edition, most players prefer the 3.5 system to the 4.0 system. The game has been steadily played for many years, no matter the version of the game. I believe that the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons will keep increasing as it has since the release of 3.0. I will certainly keep playing and I hope you will too! Happy adventuring!