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Dungeons & Dragons

An elaborate D&D game in progress. Among the gaming aids here are dice, a variety of miniatures, and a dungeon diorama.

Dungeons & Dragons (commonly abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR). It has been published by Wizards of the Coast, later a subsidiary of Hasbro, since 1997. The game was derived from miniature wargames, with a variation of the 1971 game Chainmail serving as the initial rule system. D&D's publication is commonly recognized as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry, and also deeply influenced video games, especially the role-playing video game genre.

In 2004, D&D remained the best-known, and best-selling, role-playing game in the US, with an estimated 20 million people having played the game and more than US$1 billion in book and equipment sales worldwide. The year 2017 had "the most number of players in its history—12 million to 15 million in North America alone". D&D 5th edition sales "were up 41 percent in 2017 from the year before, and soared another 52 percent in 2018, the game's biggest sales year yet". The game has been supplemented by many premade adventures, as well as commercial campaign settings suitable for use by regular gaming groups. D&D is known beyond the game itself for other D&D-branded products, references in popular culture, and some of the controversies that have surrounded it, particularly a moral panic in the 1980s, which attempted to associate it with Satanism and suicide. The game has won multiple awards and has been translated into many languages. (Full article...)

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David Lance Arneson (/ˈɑːrnɪsən/; October 1, 1947 – April 7, 2009) was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game (RPG), Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax, in the early 1970s. Arneson's early work was fundamental to the role-playing game (RPG) genre, pioneering devices now considered to be archetypical, such as cooperative play to develop a storyline instead of individual competitive play to "win" and adventuring in dungeon, town, and wilderness settings as presented by a neutral judge who doubles as the voice and consciousness of all characters aside from the player characters.

Arneson discovered wargaming as a teenager in the 1960s, and he began combining these games with the concept of role-playing. He was a University of Minnesota student when he met Gygax at the Gen Con gaming convention in the late 1960s. In 1971, Arneson created the game and fictional world that became Blackmoor, writing his own rules and basing the setting on medieval fantasy elements. Arneson took the game to Gygax as the representative for game publisher Guidon Games, and the pair co-developed a set of rules that became Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Gygax subsequently founded TSR, Inc. to publish the game in 1974. (Full article...)

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WikiProjects

The Dungeons & Dragon WikiProject collaborates on improving all D&D-related articles on Wikipedia. WikiProject Role-Playing Games, its parent project, has a larger scope and covers all role-playing games. The Video games project also has a task force dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons-related video games.

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The following are images from various Dungeons & Dragons-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1TSR, Inc. logo (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 2A Dungeon Master's notebook with a custom design adventure (from Dungeons & Dragons)
Image 3Waupun State Prison in 1895 (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 4The ' World Axis' model of the planes, as described in the 4th edition Manual of the Planes. (from Plane (Dungeons & Dragons))
Image 5Orcs were popularized by fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien and are found in many fantasy games. (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)
Image 6D&D uses polyhedral dice to resolve in-game events. These are abbreviated by a 'd' followed by the number of sides. Shown from left to right are a d20, d12, d%, d10, d8, d6, and a d4. A d% and d10 can be rolled together to produce a number between 1 and 100. (from Dungeons & Dragons)
Image 7The 'Great Wheel' model of the planes, as described in the 5th edition Player's Handbook (from Plane (Dungeons & Dragons))
Image 8Fan art depicting a hobbit (from Dungeons & Dragons controversies)