Origin of Dungeons and Dragons RPG

Series Summary

Role playing games are a type of game where the participants assume roles of characters to create a story. One of the most widely known role playing games is Dungeons and Dragons. Developed in 1974, the game is still widely distributed today. Role playing games begin with an assumption of a character who are to embark upon imaginary adventures in which they interact with various other players. Battles occur with fictional monsters, and there are chances to gather treasure and earn points which build power as the game progresses.

In this series of videos, you can get a detailed history of role playing games and fantasy games. Our expert demonstrates role playing game styles that can give you an advantage in fantasy game playing. Our expert acts as a guide to role playing game genres to help you decide which game and which role is best suited for you. Learn more about character attributes and character classes in Dungeons and Dragons. Get tips for basic game play and ideas for role playing equipment in this series of instructional videos.

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Barry Osser from North Coast Role Playing in Eureka, California and I’m here today to talk to you about the history of role playing. Role playing games, the game portion of it, not the part that’s used in psychology began in 1974 when 2 gentlemen Dave Arnesen and Gary Gygax got together and had been playing a miniatures game and wanted to have more for the miniatures than they were doing, they wanted to make certain that they were having the most fun they could. So they took a set of miniature rules a game called Chain Mail and converted it over so that these characters had a 3-dimensional life, not just a 3-dimensional attribute sitting on the table. So in 1974 our first box set of Dungeons and Dragons came out and from then it’s been crazy. There have been over a thousand different games produced in many different genres; the major changes have mostly come with the changes and the advent of each of the additions of Dungeons and Dragons. The first addition what they call the basic addition in 1974 was a little collection of 3 brown books they were produced in a box and sold to you with dice and papers for character sheets and stuff. The next step was to produce the advanced Dungeons and Dragons, this was a set of books that they produced in 1979 that gave you more of the basic information that you needed and some more advanced information so you were not required to produce everything, they actually mostly had it set so that you were going in dungeons, that’s a hole in the ground, but theoretically a collection of creatures or beast that walked down into and started living in and your job was to go in there and kill everyone and take all their money, which doesn’t sound as nice in today’s kinder, gentler world, but in 1974 it was actually a lot of fun. So in 1979 they started these advanced books and at that point Dave Arnesen had much less involvement with the company which was TSR, but Gary Gygax had pretty much taken it over and made it into the company that it was going to become at its height. And they produced a collection of these 3 books, now these books came out and gave you everything you needed to build a character, build the world, lay out everything and pretty much was written for you instead of the guess work. In the time between ’74 and ’79 a collection of other games came out TSR produced a western game, TSR produced a couple of different science fiction games and a couple other companies came out that use to be board games or miniature game companies, GDW, Games Workshop and a few others were around at that time. The big one at that point was still TSR and Dungeons and Dragons. "