How D&D Came to Be

In the early 1970s, three guys in the Midwest invented a genuinely new kind of game. David Wesely, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were all fascinated by complicated tabletop war simulations; Wesely was the one who revolutionized game-play when he asked players in a military game to each act out the role of a single character and found himself improvising rules when the characters deviated from what he'd had in mind. Arneson picked up Wesely's "role-playing" idea and constructed a medieval fantasy setting for it. Gygax, meanwhile, invented a game called Chainmail, with rules for determining the outcomes of medieval combat by rolling dice.