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Because early editions of Dungeons & Dragons emphasized that game masters should create their own worlds and even modify their own rules, the game was constantly being improved upon by hobbyists. This frequent experimentation created a level of cross-pollination that influenced all forms of gaming since.

After the second edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released, it became less of an influence on CRPGs. The balance flipped in later editions, with many of the refinements introduced on MUDs and CRPGs influencing third and fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons. We will touch on these refinements in later chapters.

Throughout this chapter I reference Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the creators of Dungeons & Dragons. This is not to imply that they are the final authorities on fantasy gaming. Their perspectives changed over time, and both creators disapproved of some of the improvements to the game. While Gygax and Arneson are by no means the final word on game development, their contributions are an important part of gaming history.

History

In 1967 a 40-millimeter medieval wargame using miniatures titled The Siege of Bodenburg was published in Strategy & Tactics magazine. Jeff Perren developed his own rules and shared them with Gary Gygax.

In 1969, Dave Wesley moderated a wargame session at the University of Minnesota in which players represented individual characters in a Napoleonic scenario centered on a town named Braunstein. At this time, the notion of having a game master who invented the scenario for the battle of the evening was actually inspired by Strategos: The American Game of War. It was a training manual for U.S. army wargames by Lieutenant Charles Adiel Lewis Totten, published by Doubleday in 1880. Wesley had found a copy in the University of Minnesota library and attempted to adapt it prior to the Braunstein game. Wesley had read about the notion of “n-player” strategy games after reading Kenneth Swezy’s The Compleat Strategist.

Wesley’s group normally consisted of eight people, two of whom played while the other six watched. In an attempt to be more inclusive, he developed roles for the other players beyond the usual wargaming army commander. Wesley invented a mayor, banker, university chancellor and more, each role with its own objectives and goals. When nearly twenty people showed up, Wesley made up roles for them too.

It was telling that the players received their orders in a separate room, where Wesley briefed them, and were not allowed to share the information with each other. What was supposed to be an orderly set of instructions fell apart when two of the players, one an officer in the Prussian army and the other a pro–French radical student, told Wesley they had challenged each other to a duel. Wesley was once again forced to improvise; he rolled some dice and declared that one had shot the other, with the winner imprisoned. The game continued well into the night, at which point Wesley realized that the players had taken over the game—his carefully crafted rules that would ultimately help determine who won no longer applied. To Wesley, the game was a failure.

Later, Wesley ran a second version of the game, placing the players in the role of leaders in a fictional banana republic. Dave Arneson was a participant in both games. Dave Arneson continued to run versions of Braunstein and started inventing new scenarios. Eventually, he expanded them to include ideas from The Lord of the Rings and Dark Shadows, which were popular at the time. This eventually led to the creation of Blackmoor (Wesley 2006).

Wesley also lays claim to using polyhedral dice, which up to that point had been used as teaching tools for math professors. The four-, eight-, twelve-, and twenty-sided dice are used in tabletop role-playing games to this day.

Meanwhile, Gary Gygax founded the Castle & Crusade Society as a special interest group for the International Federation of Wargaming. In 1968, he and Jeff Perren published Chainmail, a medieval wargame (Mona 2007:25). In the core rules of