The Game Behind Dungeons & Dragons

No single game has been as synonymous with the idea of tabletop gaming as Dungeons & Dragons. Since its 1974 debut, D&D has been inspiring gamers, writers and fans of all ages through a system that encourages problem solving and cooperation as much as it does combat.

The earliest predecessor to D&D came in the form of a ruleset created for medieval-themed wargames, originally written by Jeff Perren. Perren worked alongside Gary Gygax, a fellow wargamer, to expand the rules and together they published them as Chainmail in 1971. Chainmail itself would later be expanded upon by Dave Arneson in order to help resolve combat in other game experiments. Arneson and Gygax, who had previously worked together on Don’t Give Up the Ship! (a 1972 set of rules for Napoleonic naval wargames), eventually went to work together on what would become Dungeons & Dragons.

The high fantasy theming of D&D took a lot of inspiration from popular fantasy novels of the time; the original Dungeon Masters Guide listed immediate influences as the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Fletcher Pratt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others. The Lord of the Rings also had an impact on the game’s world, with “Halfling” having been changed from “Hobbit” (among other name changes) in order to avoid a copyright lawsuit.

The original D&D set was published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in 1974, and contained three booklets – Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and Underworld & Wilderness Adventures – as well as a handful of reference sheets and charts. These books shipped in a woodgrain-colored cardboard box, which was limited to just 1,000 copies, and the boxes themselves were assembled by hand. Within the first year, the entire run sold out, and TSR went back to print on another run of 1,000 in ’75, which too sold out quickly, in less than six months. A third printing of 2,000 was made and also sold out. In 1976, TSR published a fourth run of the game, running 5,000 copies, in a white box that would be used for all future printings of the game.

Being an initial release, the original launch of D&D contained a lot of the basic elements that would later be expanded upon in further additions, such as races (humans, elves, halflings), character classes (fighters, clerics, and so on), monsters, armor, treasure and magic, as well as rules for how to travel throughout the lands and towns. However, the books largely assumed that the people playing the game had previous experience with wargaming, particularly with ChainmailD&D rules rely on Chainmail rules for both movement and combat.