Dungeons and Dragons - History

This episode we take a look at the game that started it all, Dungeons and Dragons.  It's been around for almost HALF A CENTURY and, throughout its rather turbulent history, it has influenced the tabletop RPG genre more than any other game.

This is part one of our D&D episode - part two will feature a round table discussion where we put on our rose tinted glasses and talk about our favourite memories of the game.

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
TWITTER: @savepodcast
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://www.buzzsprout.com/834286

HOST: Iain Wilson
VOICEOVER LADY: Keeley Wilson
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast, Dungeons and Dragons.

SPEAKER_02: 0:24

Hello and welcome to Roll to Save, the show that takes a long, nostalgic look at RPGs from the past and assesses the impact they had at the time and what their legacy is today. I'm your host, Ian. Today we're going to be looking at the game that started it all, Dungeons& Dragons. D&D is in its fifth edition and is arguably more popular than it's ever been before. But what has its journey been like over, say it, almost half a century of 12 years? History History Mention the name Geneva to most people and they'll probably think you're talking about the second largest city in Switzerland. Mention Lake Geneva and they will assume the city as a lake, which it does, it's one of the largest in Europe. However, if you inform them that you're talking about Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, most of them will look blankly at you. Which isn't surprising really. Lake Geneva is a small midwestern town of less than 8,000 people and it's around 50 miles away from the larger and better known city of Milwaukee. It does have a lake, although it's considerably smaller than its European relative. Although it is popular with tourists from Illinois, it remains largely unknown to the population at large. Unless that is, you're an old school role player. You see, Lake Geneva can be argued as being the spiritual home of role playing games because it was there in 1972 that Dave Arneson, a war gamer from Minneapolis ran a game set in a fantasy world of his own creation for a fellow wargamer, a Lake Geneva resident named Gary Gygax. The game took place in a setting that Arneson called Blackmoor, and it was run using rules Dave developed from the wargame Chainmail, a system that Gygax himself had worked on along with Jeff Perrin. Ostensibly created to simulate battles between medieval armies, Gygax had written a fantasy supplement for it that provided he had rules for monsters, magic items and spells with which wizards could zap their opponents with. However, the thing that really blew Gygax away by the game that Arneson ran for him was the scale. Rather than focusing on a pitched battle between two sides, Arneson had conceived a game where each player took on the role of a single character and together they formed a party to explore a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure. The whole experience lit Gygax's mind on fire and before long, he had started work on his own setting, Greyhawk, and had asked Arneson for a copy of his rules. Together they collaborated on what eventually became Dungeons& Dragons. Gygax felt that the game would be a hit, so he and Arneson went to Gidon Games, the publisher of Chainmail, and asked them to support the venture. In a day and age where the sales of D&D are astronomical, recently Hasbro posted figures suggesting that sales of Dungeons& Dragons had propped up their other products that were performing poorly. It will probably come as a surprise, then, that a new game in hand, Gygax found it difficult to find a publisher for his baby. Giton Games considered themselves too small for such an undertaking, and Avalon Hill, at the time the world's biggest publisher of wargames, turned it down, unable to understand what this new mutation of wargaming was all about. Gygax was still passionate about publishing the game and proposed setting up their own company to do so, but Arneson felt that he would be unable to commit to such a venture. Undaunted, Gygax and business partner Don Kaye founded Tactical Studies Rules, that's right, TSR, in 1973. The urgent need to publish on Gygax's part was more than simple enthusiasm for a new fad. He knew that other groups were out there who had similar games, and if they went first to market, might miss this opportunity. It was because of this that they accepted an offer of funding from Brian Bloom in exchange for a one-third share in the company. It was therefore possible, in 1974, to release the first commercial version of D&D. It was an instant success. The first 1,000 copies sold out in less than a year and sales simply shot into the stratosphere after that. Sadly, Kay died of a heart attack in 1975 and, after much wrangling over Kay's share of the business, Bloom and his father ended up owning the majority, leaving Gygax as a minority shareholder in the company. Dave Arneson made a reappearance in 1976, hired as director of research, but he left shortly afterwards, citing the fact that he and Gygax still had creative differences over how D&D was being developed. 1977 saw the release of what became known as the Holmes Basic Set, a version of D&D geared towards newer players that got its name from the fact that it was edited by American writer J. Eric Holmes. This set was built on both the original D&D set released in 1974 as well as the Greyhawk setting and was designed to gently introduce new players into the hobby, making the assumption that they might not come from a wargaming background. It came as either a rulebook or in a box which contained the book and some supplemental materials such as maps, monster lists, treasure charts and dice. Later printings replaced these materials with modules, TSR's term for adventure supplements including classics such as The Keep on the Borderlands. The original conception was that players of the basic rules would end up graduating to a new product that was being developed by TSR called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. However, the basic set was a runaway success and by 1978 it had seen four printings. In 1981 a decision was made not to have players from the basic set be absorbed by AD&D but instead to allow BASIC to be developed as its own product line. In line with Holmes's original vision, BASIC continued with its lighter, more personal tone, while AD&D became increasingly more rules heavy. However, a new set was developed, the Expert Set, that allowed players from the third level to move upwards to play characters of levels four to 14. 1983 saw the publication of what, for a lot of UK gamers anyway, was their first brush with D&D, the Red Box Basic Edition. Featuring an iconic cover image by Larry Elmore of a fighter locked in a life-or-death struggle with a dragon, this edition was revised by Frank Mentzer and now included a 64-page player's manual, a 48-page Dungeon Master's rulebook, and six dice that had to be coloured in with a crane? This probably seems ludicrous to younger players, but it was actually a standard practice for games at the time. I remember first edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle having something similar. The Mensa edition also went beyond expert rules, introducing companion rules for characters level 15 to 25, master rules for levels 26 to 36, and immortal rules for playing gods, where levels really didn't mean anything anymore. In an interesting change from the previous edition, the Mensa edition now included in place of a module, a solo adventure to teach players the rules and an introductory scenario for a dungeon master to run. While not much in the way of rules had changed from previous editions, the presentation of the Mensa editions were a step beyond what had been released before, and the decision to have the game act as a tutorial to ease new players into the hobby is still seen and felt today in video games that frequently use their first few levels to introduce players to the basic concepts and rules of the game. All of this has its roots in basic D&D. In parallel to the development of the basic editions, in 1977 Gygax threw himself into the development of advanced Dungeons and Dragons. This saw the rules broken up across three books, into the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual, a format that is still in use to this day. AD&D also included many more options around character, including additional classes and a lot more rules. Seriously, lots of rules. It also saw the development of some of the most, well, I'm not sure loved is a word, maybe remembered, adventures for the game. Supplements like Tomb of Horrors, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Isle of the Ape were all released in this period of creative frenzy. The result? By 1980, D&D sales had reached a staggering heights of over$8 million. However, AD&D also also brought with it its own share of controversy. In 1977, TSR claimed that AD&D was different enough of a product that Dave Anderson wouldn't be entitled to any royalties from it. This resulted in a lengthy legal battle which ended with TSR and Anderson settling out of court with an agreement that Anderson would be credited as co-creator of all D&D products and that he would receive a 2.5% royalty on them. Lucky Dave. If TSR thought a lawsuit was bad, that was just a calm before the storm. The storm itself began in 1979 when a Michigan State University student James Egbert allegedly disappeared while playing a live-action version of D&D. This wasn't true. He reappeared several weeks later. Egbert's disappearance and his tragic suicide in later years was an unfortunate result of stress and clinical depression, but had nothing to do with D&D. This furore represented the first shots to be fired in a wider torrent of negative mainstream media attention for Dungeons& Dragons. In 1981, a book was published called Mazes and Monsters, which was a thinly veiled account of the Egbert story, as reported by the press. This was followed in 1982 by a made-for-TV movie starring none other than the young Tom Hanks, based on the novel. The plot was nonsense, but it cemented an idea in the minds of certain people who were largely ignorant of the hobby of role-playing, which was role-playing can cause players to break down and lose touch with reality. And when that happens, bad things will occur. In 1982, a Virginian woman named Patricia Pooling founded an advocacy group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or, to use its none-too-subtle acronym, BAD. Pooling had been a long-time anti-occult campaigner, but she founded BAD in response to her son Irving's suicide. Irving Pooling had been an active role player. His mother attributed his tragic death to a D&D curse put on his character shortly before he took his own life. She fired lawsuits against her son's school and TSR as a result, both of which were dismissed by the judge. After this, her campaigning with BAD went into high gear as she started airing her views that D&D encouraged, amongst other things, devil worship and suicide. Flawed as these opinions were, she managed to get quite a substantial amount of press coverage from a media that had grown fat and stole such as the Egbert case and Mazes and Monsters. Gagax ended up appearing on a 60-minute special to defend the game, a show that included interviews with Patricia Pulling and other parents that claimed their offspring had been motivated to commit various unhealthy acts as a result of playing D&D. In 1988, a wealthy American businessman by the name of Leith von Stein and his wife Bonnie were attacked in their home in North Carolina. Tragically, Leith died from his injuries, but Bonnie survived and was able to summon the police. It eventually came to life that von Stein's stepson, Chris, had coerced two of his friends, James Upchurch and Neil Henderson, into committing the crime in return for a promised share of the inheritance money he would receive after his stepfather's death. It was a horrendous tragedy, motivated by pure greed, but two books written on the subject, Cruel Doubt and Blood Games, both heavily emphasised the perpetrators in interest in Dungeons and Dragons, as if that was what drove them to commit such a horrendous crime. Despite this storm of controversy, D&D continued to flourish, with sales almost doubling to around$16 million. However, all wasn't well at TSR. In 1981, Kevin Bloom, Brian's brother, had purchased their father's shares, and as a result, the Bloom brothers ended up having the controlling interest in the company. The end result was that Gygax and the Blooms found themselves increasingly at odds over management of the company. This, coupled with Gygax's turbulent personal life, which led to an acrimonious divorce in 1983, saw TSR split into two divisions, TSR Inc. and TSR Entertainment Inc., the latter of which Gygax was made president of. This saw him flying to Hollywood to negotiate, amongst other things, a D&D cartoon and the production of a D&D movie, whilst the Blooms oversaw the hobby aspect of the business. It was in 1984, whilst tying down some details of the D&D movie, that Gygax received word that the Blooms were looking to sell TSR for$6 million. Shooting Black to Lake Geneva, he found that although TSR were doing very well on paper, they were grossing over$30 million, the expenses incurred by the business were absolutely staggering, which saw them teetering to rewards and solvency. He convinced the board to fire Kevin Bloom as company president and, to prevent the board from selling the company out from underneath him, he exercised a stock option that gave him just over 50% control. Appointing himself president and CEO, he set to work tasking TSR with the production of new material that he hoped would turn around the slump. He even called upon Dave Anderson again, asking him to produce a series of Blackburn modules for Those are the ones with the DA prefix. While he was busy producing new content, he hired a company manager, Lorraine Williams, on the basis of her management expertise. Gag actually knew of Lorraine through her brother, who he had met in Hollywood whilst working on the D&D film. Originally, he had asked her to invest, but when she declined, he offered her a job, knowing that she had the skills and chops to deal with the TSR creditors and get the wheels of commerce turning again. unbeknownst to Gygax. When he removed Kevin Bloom from his position, Brian Bloom triggered his long-standing stock option. Both brothers, realising they had no future at TSR, took the opportunity to dump their stock on a new investor. That investor's name? Lorraine Williams. Despite having created the products that may have saved the company, Gary now learned that Lorraine was the majority stakeholder and she quickly replaced him as CEO. In addition, she felt that his creative direction was not necessarily in the best interests of the company and ordered that his projects be shelved. Gygax attempted to have the stock transfer declared illegal in courts but he lost. So it was in 1986 that Gary Gygax resigned all positions in TSR and left the company he had founded. 1989 saw the publication of AD&D second edition, a move that was seen by some as a way of cutting Gygax off from the royalties of previous editions of the game. This saw the standard three-book format, but instead of a monster manual, there was a monstrous compendium that was a loose-leaf binder. This idea didn't do well, and it was replaced by a monstrous manual in 1993 in the traditional hardback book format. Conscious of the controversies of the early 1980s, the writers of Second Ed deliberately removed all references to demons, devils and the like. The sexually suggestive artwork was toned down, and the option to play evil things, such as assassins, were removed. Probably one of the things that second edition was most fondly remembered for was the modules that focused on genres other than the traditional, Tolkienesque, European medieval fantasy setting. Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Al-Kadim were all developed in this era and classics such as Ravenloft were further enhanced. However, all was not rosy for TSR. In a series of increasingly unwise business ventures, including a collectible dice game, CD-ROM accessories and games with video tapes, led to the company once again nearing financial collapse. As a solution, they entered into an extremely sketchy deal with their distributor and printer, which ultimately led to their distributor returning boatloads of product and their printer refusing to print anything new for them. TSR, it seemed, was not long for this planet. The company that created the role-playing hobby was facing oblivion just over 20 years after its Well, remember that scene in the film adaption of The Two Towers when Gandalf says Look to my coming in the first light of the fifth day, at dawn look to the east. Well, on the metaphorical fifth day, any TSR employee happening to be looking to the east would indeed have seen a wizard riding to the rescue, but rather than bringing a hold of cavalry with him, this wizard brought financial salvation. Wizards of the Coast, the gaming company that produced the hit game Magic the Gathering, rode into town in 1997 and purchased the half-bankrupt husk that was TSR. Three years later, they released third edition D&D, making the move to end the split between basic and advanced Dungeons& Dragons. They also introduced something called the D20 system, with the intent on making a core system that could be used for various different genres and settings. More options were given to customise characters, and a lot of work was done to make the rules more streamlined and easier to play. A 3.5 edition was released in 2003. This included a boatload of minor rules changes, but was otherwise the same game. Fourth Edition was released in 2008, and almost immediately prompted an angry backlash from players who'd become financially invested in the third edition. 4th edition was a major revision to the game's systems, and many who played it have commented that it felt more like a tactical miniatures game than an RPG. The use of a battle grid and, you know, miniatures helped reinforce this image. Although the core rules are relatively simple to learn, one of the biggest complaints from players other than why did you kill third dead is that combat ended up taking substantially longer in this edition compared to the others. In 2012, Wizards announced the development of a project called D&D Next and invited players to take part in the playtesting which would take approximately two years. The end result was D&D 5th edition that was released in 2014. Unlike the war game Light that 4th edition was, this edition goes back to the roots of the 1st and 2nd editions and draws from that well. And unlike the complicated mess that some other editions became, 5th Ed is refreshing for its simplicity. There's the option for a lot of other rules like tactical combat and multi-classing, but they're not essential to play, or even part of the main body of rules. Curiously, When 5th Ed was released, it wasn't been released into a market where the previous version of D&D was the number one RPG at the time. Instead, upon 5th Ed's release it was Pathfinder, the game created in response to the fans who were unhappy with D&D 4th Ed and the premature death of 3rd edition that was currently sitting at the top of the heap. To help generate interest in the new edition, Wizards released the basic rules as a free PDF in July 2014, roughly a month before they brought out the It is this edition and the elegant simplicity of its rules that has probably led to the massive resurgence in D&D popularity. Wizards estimate at the moment that around 40 million people worldwide play the game. Think about that for a moment. 40 million. To put that into perspective, that's equal to the total population of 23 of the USA's states. Numerous celebrities like Vin Diesel, Drew Barrymore, Dwayne Johnston, Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper have all come out as D&D players, and the game has been featured repeatedly in the mainstream media, most notably on Netflix's Stranger Things, which even led to a Stranger Things edition of the Redbox basic set being released. Today, D&D is played at meet-up events, in pubs and restaurants. That's a far cry from the days in which players were considered nerds who lived in basements. Consider the satanic panic of the 1980s. Now consider the fact that some therapists use D&D in their treatment and research has proven that playing D&D improves mathematical comprehension and conflict management in children. Oh, and that whole business about D&D being linked to suicide? Yeah, research has proved no link between D&D and suicide. Dungeons and Dragons has also become much more inclusive in its recent addition. No longer is every character a white western male European. Gone is the sexist artwork portraying female warriors in chainmail bikinis or the you can help those princesses that were just there to be rescued from marauding orcs like another piece of treasure. And guess what? Over 40% of D&D players are now women. When I used to play back in the day, we had one girl in our group and we were considered odd. D&D is also now broadcast online. Last year, over 400 million hours of D&D content was streamed online. That's an insane amount of time devoted to allowing players to watch other players play D&D. The popularity of shows like Critical Role and Girl's Guts Glory show that there's actually a living to be made playing Dungeons and Dragons. These days it's even possible to hire a dungeon master to run your games for you although I strongly urge you to be very careful on what you click on after googling dungeon masters for hire. You make it more than you bargain for. It's insane when you think about it. What used to be the nerd hobby that people get bullied for is now a multi-million dollar industry, is played by millions of people, is broadcast world Thank goodness that's done. And that was Dungeons and Dragons and Brief History. We hope you enjoyed it. Tune in to the next part of this episode to hear us wittering on about our memories of the game. We're a podcast about old school roleplaying games and if you enjoyed this episode, please get in touch with us on Twitter at savepodcast or email us at role.to.save.pod at gmail.com You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Roll2Save. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to leave us a review on your podcast directory of choice. We really appreciate them and it helps with visibility. Thanks again for listening.