Dungeons and Dragons: The First Roleplaying Game
1974 · game
In January 1974 a small company in Wisconsin published a set of three booklets in a cardboard box. A thousand copies had been assembled by hand, some of them at a kitchen table, and they sold out within a year. Dungeons and Dragons was written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and grew out of the hobby of playing battles with model soldiers, with one crucial change. Instead of commanding an army, each player controlled a single person, and one player described the world and decided what happened.
That change created something new. Characters kept their possessions and experience from one session to the next, so a game became a continuing story rather than a contest with a winner. The rules introduced ideas that are now everywhere in games, character classes, levels, points that measure how much damage a body can take, and dice of several shapes to settle uncertain outcomes.
The game had a strange decade in the 1980s, when it became the subject of a public scare in the United States that connected it to occultism, which is now studied mainly as an example of how moral panics work. It survived, changed hands and editions, and has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.
Almost every computer role playing game descends from it, and so do large parts of the design of video games generally, including the vocabulary. In the last decade the tabletop game itself has grown again, helped by people watching others play it online, and it is now used deliberately in schools and in therapeutic settings because of what it requires, which is a group of people sitting together, taking turns and imagining the same room.