When Dungeons & Dragons Turns 40

Many sources, including Playing at the World, assign to Dungeons & Dragons an initial release in January 1974. Our best evidence comes from contemporary notices like the one above, a letter written by Gary Gygax late in 1973 that foretells the imminent release of the game. Now, with the fortieth anniversary nearly upon us, a burning question arises: when exactly should we celebrate? While there is no shortage of anecdotal accounts describing when, and to whom, the first copy of the game was sold, there is little concrete evidence to indicate any particular birthday. This author, however, will be lifting a die to toast the anniversary on Sunday, January 26th, 2014, on the basis of the following chronology surrounding the release of Dungeons & Dragons.

[Update: do see the more detailed D&D development timeline here.]

The Earliest Dungeons & Dragons Advertisements

In 1974, Tactical Studies Rules had a very limited advertising budget to promote their new game Dungeons & Dragons. Their first advertisements therefore appeared in fanzines, sometimes places that required no payment for running a promotional notice. That was the case with TSR's first advertisement, which Gary Gygax sent to the Great Plains Gameplayers Newsletter in February 1974, surely only weeks after Dungeons & Dragons was released. In it, we see the prototype for the advertisements that would follow in the first year of the game's life.

The First Critical Hits

Nothing is more satisfying than rolling the dice and seeing not only that you hit, but that you hit exceptionally well. The adrenaline rush of critical hits proved so compelling that there is scarcely a game today, be it on a tabletop or a computer, where hits can be scored in which they don't have a chance to be critical hits, dealing additional damage. But the time-honored tradition of getting double damage on a natural 20 did not ship with the earliest version of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, D&D spent decades resisting this idea of critical hits. Even without TSR's endorsement, critical hits still became a part of gaming everywhere, largely due to the impetus of fans like Gary Switzer, who sent the critical hit rules above to APA-L in May 1975.

The Origins of Dice Notation

As a previous post here covered, Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to make practical use of all five Platonic solids as dice. The first printing of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) did not, however, employ the classic abbreviations of dice notation: d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20. Instead, we see constructions like, "From 2-16 snakes can be conjured (roll two eight-sided dice)." Initially, TSR had no need for dice notation, instead favoring number ranges which assumed players could infer the dice needed: this was the convention through the Holmes Basic Set (1977), which is full of systems of the form, "Damage: 3-24 points." These same conventions prescribe dice throws in the contemporary Monster Manual. 

The Players Handbook (1978), however, suddenly makes liberal use of dice notation, without any preamble, as if players were expected to recognize a "d20," and more significantly, qualifiers like "5d20." This strongly hints that dice notation had been in use long before TSR embraced it, and we can in fact trace its origins to the very dawn of D&D fandom: as we see above in Alarums & Excursions #1, in an article by Ted Johnstone on "Dice as Random Number Generators."

Character Sheets in 1975

The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons did not ship with any sort of character sheet. The Men & Magic booklet did provide "a sample record of a character" (pg.10) which comprised only the example character's name ("Xylarthen"), his class, his six abilities, and his gold and experience totals: it omits even fundamentals like level and hit points. Nowhere in the original game did there appear a pre-printed, fill-in-the-blank form for recording the vital statistics of characters. The fan community immediately grasped the usefulness of keeping one such form per character, especially in a campaign with many players. It is therefore not surprising that the first fanzine dedicated to a Dungeons & Dragons campaign included just such a character sheet: the one we see above, from the Haven Herald #1 of Stephen Tihor's Endore campaign in New York, dated May 3, 1975.

Arsouf (1969) by Gary Gygax

Years before the publication of Dungeons & Dragons or even Chainmail, the wargaming fan community knew well of Gary Gygax's aspiration to design games. The image above shows the back of a copy of the April 1968 issue of Panzerfaust, an important early wargaming fanzine, which is hand-addressed to Gygax by the editor, Donald Greenwood. Of special note is the sentence Greenwood has jotted in the upper left-hand corner: "Am interested in printing your games." Around a year later, Panzerfaust would serialize Gygax's Arsouf (sometimes called Crusader), a medieval board wargame that represents Gygax's first foray into designs for that crucial setting.

Tactical Studies Hobbies, an Oddity in Letterhead

In mid-1975, the partnership of Tactical Studies Rules underwent a transformation into TSR Hobbies, Inc. A number of factors motivated this transition, including the need to reorganize following the death of Don Kaye, as well as the company's increasing ambitions in the mail-order and retail hobby sales business (the first steps towards the Dungeon Hobby Shop). The newly-constituted TSR Hobbies, Inc. acquired the assets of Tactical Studies Rules, and work on game development proceeded under the TSR Hobbies, Inc. umbrella. If, however, you received mail from TSR at just the right time in 1975, you might have found the oddity shown here: the transitional name "Tactical Studies Hobbies." To explore the territory around this curious company-that-never-was, let's take a tour of TSR's early letterheads.