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:This article is about the role-playing game. See also the movie Dungeons & Dragons and the cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons, both of which were based on this game.
Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy role-playing game (RPG) published by Gary Gygax and David Arneson in January 1974. It was first published by Gygax's company, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) and subsequently spawned the RPG industry. D&D is by far the most well-known and best selling RPG game, with an estimated 20 million players and over $1 billion in book and equipment sales as of 2004.
The rights to D&D were sold to Wizards of the Coast in 1997, a company later bought by Hasbro. Owing partially to heavy marketing, products branded Dungeons & Dragons made up over fifty percent of the RPG products sold in 2002.
1 Overview and history
Dungeons & Dragons evolved in the early 1970s from the Chainmail system of wargamingWargaming is either A hobby in which one or more players simulate battles or entire wars, or The model or computer simulation of possible scenarios in military planning, also called warfare simulation. See also defense contractors, or The full-scale rehea rules by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren; Gygax and Arneson designed D&D to take place in a fantasy setting based upon popular fiction and mythology. It was influenced by The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings is an epic fantasy story by J. Tolkien, a sequel to his earlier work, The Hobbit''. For more information on the fictional universe the story takes place in, including lists of characters and locations, see Middle-earth. The story's n, popular Greek and Norse mythologyThis article is about a system of myths. For the 1942 book Mythology see its author Edith Hamilton. A mythology is a relatively cohesive set of myths: stories that comprise a certain religion or belief system. What is mythology? Myths are generally storie, the pulp fictionPulp magazines often called simply "pulps", were inexpensive text fiction magazines widely published in the 1930s 1950s. The first "pulp" is considered to be Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy of 1894. Most of the few pulps still thriving today are science fi stories of Robert E. HowardRobert Ervin Howard ( January 22, 1906 June 11, 1936) was a writer of fantasy and historical adventure pulp stories, published primarily in Weird Tales magazine in the 1930s. He was born in Peaster, Texas, the son of Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester J, Edgar Rice BurroughsEdgar Rice Burroughs ( September 1, 1875 March 19, 1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan, although he produced works in many genres. Biography Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois, the, and many of the more contemporary fantasy authors of the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around and 1970s, such as Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. The game developed the RPG concept of a referee (the Dungeon Master) who creates the fictional setting of the game, plays antagonists and supporting characters, and moderates the action of the adventures.
The game evolved from wargames with soldiers, in which onlookers were given characters to play during the battle. Gygax and Arneson were playing an Arthurian Knights version when someone decided they wanted to play Merlin. Later, they decided to hide in a cave and they decided that if Merlin existed, then a monster might be in the cave.
The original D&D game allowed players to play characters in three classes: fighters, magic-users ( wizards), and clerics (priests). Players could choose to have their characters be Hobbits, Dwarves, or Elves; later versions termed these three " races" as "demi-humans". The players would embark upon imaginary adventures, where they would battle many kinds of fictional monsters from goblins to dragons to ten foot gelatinous cubes, while gathering treasure and experience points as the game progressed. These character classes, monsters, and fantasy world settings were greatly expanded and improved with further editions of the game.
D&D took the world of wargaming by storm, creating its own niche and giving birth to a multitude of role-playing games, based on every genre imaginable. Science fiction, horror, superheroes, cartoons, westerns, spies and espionage, and many other fictional settings were adapted to role-playing games, with several of these games also being published by TSR. However, "fantasy role-playing" loosely based on the world of D&D, continues to dominate the field of role-playing games as of 2004.
