A Complete History of D&D in 800 Words

Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created D&D, but no company would buy it, so Gary co-founded Tactical Studies Rules or TSR to publish it. D&D proved to be a hit. Soon TSR was moving out of Gary’s basement and moving into properties in scenic downtown Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Soon, the company’s growth was hindered by the fact that existing rules for D&D were spread out over a number of different rulebooks, and the game was hard to learn. To solve the problem, D&D was split in two. Basic D&D was a stripped-down version of the game designed to bring newbs into role-playing. Advanced D&D was for existing players. It put the game’s core rules into three fascinating hardcover books. In AD&D, Gary let his garden grow wild, providing rules for everything from assassination to herbal remedies.

As more people, and younger people, got into D&D moral panickers began to link D&D with Satanism, sorcery, and suicide. Many freaked-out religious folks talked about D&D like it was an evil new religion, and while the accusations were all total flim-flam, there are two points worth making about them. First, they made D&D cool, and sales shot up as a result. Also, while D&D isn’t a religion, it does answer some of the same needs as religion, such as community, and contact with the wondrous and the numinous.

Mazes & Monsters was a Tom Hanks vehicle that fueled the fires of the Satanic Panic.

By 1983, D&D sales stalled and then began to plummet, probably because the company saturated its market. TSR also made a number of questionable business decisions, like hiring executives’ relatives, purchasing a needlepoint company, and attempting to raise a shipwreck. Seriously folks, they did.

While all this was going on, Gary Gygax was in Hollywood dating models and trying to get D&D on film or TV, a project which saw some success with the 1983 D&D cartoon. By 1985, with TSR in extreme duress, Gary returned to Lake Geneva and took control. He also brought on one Lorraine Williams to help right the ship. By the fall of that year, Williams had ousted Gary as president and CEO of TSR in a hostile takeover, exiling him from the game he created and the company he birthed.

During Williams’ tenure, TSR would vastly increase the number of D&D settings the company published, exponentially increase the production of D&D novels, and even oversee an attempt to break into the comic book market. Despite publishing some amazing products, D&D sales stagnated then dropped in 1996. The company appeared unlikely to survive this drop because of unhealthy relationships with its distributor, Random House, from whom TSR had borrowed millions of dollars, and its printer, whom they had stopped paying, and given their offices, making them also their landlords.

In the spring and summer of 1997, TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, the sale midwifed by Wizards CEO Peter Adkison.

Wizards produced a fantastic third edition of the game in 2000, and created the Open Gaming License, or OGL, which allowed other publishers to produce products for D&D. The result was a D&D boom, with dozens of publishers producing hundreds of products for the new edition of the game.

A few years later though, there was a bust. In 2003, Wizards updated the rules to a 3.5 version, which resulted in the companies publishing under the OGL taking a hit as their books were now all out of date.

In 2007, a 4th edition of D&D was announced for release the following summer. Would the OGL, which helped drive the success of 3rd edition, continue? Third-party publishers needed to know. Wizards answered with a resounding no. Rather, it would be replaced with a more restrictive Game System License or GSL, which motivated 3rd party publishers to abandon D&D and go their own way, most famously with Paizo Publishing creating the Pathfinder RPG, an extension of the 3.5 ruleset. Fourth edition itself was a radical departure, making huge changes to the D&D’s cosmology and rules. The reception by fans was at best mixed. Many said it just didn’t feel like D&D. Pathfinder began outselling the world’s oldest RPG.

Wizards saw these problems, and in 2014 responded with a 5th edition of the game. Likely the most successful version ever, it is both a return to roots and simplification of the rules, pleasing many old players and making it easier for new players to enter. Two years later, the company released an OGL for 5th edition. Since then, the game has grown exponentially, with streamers, actual plays, and even TikTok helping to spread the game. In spring 2021, Wizards claimed that over 50 million people have played D&D over the game’s lifetime.