Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is widely regarded as the world’s most influential tabletop role-playing game, and it has become one of the fastest-growing hobbies of the past decade.
The game was once considered niche and even controversial, but in recent years, D&D has surged into mainstream culture through podcasts, livestreams, celebrity campaigns, and a renewed interest in collaborative games.
The publisher of D&D, Wizards of the Coast, reported in 2020 that D&D had reached its seventh consecutive year of record growth. This has been driven partly by new players during the pandemic, and also by digital platforms like Roll20 and D&D Beyond.
D&D is a collaborative role-playing game where players create their own characters and explore an imagined fantasy world guided by a storyteller called the Dungeon Master.
This Dungeons & Dragons set up features dice, a D&D Player’s Handbook, and figurines. (Credit: britannica.com)
Players choose a race for their character, like elf, human, dwarf, or halfling, and pick from 13 official classes such as Fighter, Cleric, or Wizard. They assign points to core attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) on a Character Sheet that tracks everything about the player’s character. Those stats shape how well they perform actions, most of which rely on dice rolls.
Despite its ever-growing popularity, D&D can appear incredibly complicated to outsiders. With over 80 rulebooks, elaborate character sheets, and fantasy jargon, it often appears to be a game that’s reserved for experts. But longtime players say that perception is misleading.
Ewan, a young Dungeon Master, says beginners need very little to start.
“They have to know some of the basics of the character, like what their weapons may be, what their character is, but otherwise, the Dungeon Master will generally be able to fill them in,” he says.
Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974. It was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, who combined miniature war-gaming with narrative fantasy.
The game’s early editions were directly influenced by fantasy authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Their works directly shaped the game’s worlds, classes, and monsters.
Page 12 from “The Dispatch,” a newspaper in Moline, Illinois. Published on Sun, Oct 13, 1985. (Credit: newspapers.com)
The game’s history also includes controversy. In the 1980s, D&D became a focal point of the “satanic panic,” which was a moral panic in North America that linked fantasy, counterculture, and occult themes to harmful behaviour.
Morgan Corvidae, D&D player and Dungeon Master with 14 years of experience, says that period had an unexpected effect.
“You get the satanic panic, and that’s where people were playing records backwards to hear messages from the devil, and were having moral issues with things they considered inappropriate being shown on TV … And because the satanic panic sort of dragged D&D into the spotlight of ‘This is evil,’ it showed so many more people D&D,” she says.
Today, the most common barrier for new players is not the rules, but finding a group to play with. Local game stores host weekly D&D nights, and many are designed specifically to welcome first-time players.
Organized Play programs such as D&D Adventurers League offer structured beginner-friendly sessions in public spaces. Online, communities like the subreddit r/LFG (Looking for Group) help players form or join campaigns, and virtual tabletops like Roll20 provide integrated tools for maps, dice rolling and character sheets.
What continues to define Dungeons & Dragons is the same as what defined it in 1974: a group of people sitting together and building a story. For the growing number of new players, that’s enough to take the first seat at the table.
