Brief History of Dungeons And Dragons

Roleplaying games have been around, in at least some form, for a few hundred years. While most of the early games were more like parlor games, where each player assumed a loosely defined role, such as a profession or character in an extemporaneous story game; there were a few adult games along the “let’s pretend” ideology. Parallel to those games were the tabletop strategic battle games, wargames, which were very popular in 20th century (and still enjoyed today). In strategic wargaming, one reenacts a famous, or fictitious, battle on a table-sized map or terrain and they move figures around the topography with each figure representing a platoon, troop, or other group of soldiers. The popular board game, Risk, is a simplified version of strategic wargaming.
In the late 1960’s Jeff Perrin adapted the standard wargaming rules, which were mainly Colonial and Napoleonic era, into Medieval combat. Gary Gygax expanded upon Perrin’s original ideas and included a fantasy supplement, which was published under the name Chanmail fantasy miniature war gaming. In 1970, a young Dave Arneson, while in the Army, met Dave Wesley, who was also an avid wargamer. Dave Wesley had already created a single-soldier variation of strategic wargaming centered on a fictional German village called Braunstein. Arneson expanded Wesley’s ideas, using Chainmail rules to resolve combats and later added such things as character classes, character advancement, and the story-telling ideas from parlor roleplaying style games. This became the first ever quasi-D&D gaming campaign, known as Blackmoor. Having worked with Gygax on a naval battle strategic game called Don’t give Up the Ship, Arneson and Gygax soon collaborated on finalizing and detailing the Blackmoor game into what became dungeons and Dragons in 1974.
Since then, D&D has gone through many iterations and no less than 8 versions (D&D, AD&D, 2nd Edition, 3.0, 3.5, 4th, Next, and 5th edition). It has also been owned by 3 different companies. Styles of play and particular foci vary from group to group and edition to edition, but the core essence of playing the role and assuming a make-believe persona remain constant. D&D allows the players to assume the role of, or act as if they were, a fictional main character in a story that they [the players] form through their decisions. Each player runs a character that is defined by a character class. A Class is an archetype from literature and mythology, such as a wizard, a holy warrior priest, a warrior, or others. The character class helps to define the skills, talents, and abilities of the character, as well as their particular areas of expertise.
Unlike traditional games, that have the sole goal of winning, roleplaying games entertain the players by allowing them to challenge their imagination, overcome fictional obstacles, and to explore their collective imaginations, with the rules as a backdrop to provide an agreed upon method as to how things work or work out. Consider D&D to be an impromptu play in which you are one of the main characters, or a collective story that you all make up on the spot.