a brief "history" of d&d, 1980-2000

(This post is fiction and not history.)

Dave Arneson's 1980 lawsuit goes to court, and Arneson is awarded not only great deal of back royalties but some damages as well. The legal battle and debt compound TSR's other financial problems and and the fledgeling company go bankrupt in late 1982. Moldvay's Basic Set is published late, and Cook's Expert Set never is.

Gygax and the Blumes spend 1983 unsuccessfully shopping the company around for a buyout. Arneson, as one of TSR's creditors, negotiates for Cook and his unpublished expert materials to be released to his company, Adventure Games.

When the "Dungeons and Dragons" trademark lapses in 1984, grimoire games, desperate to sell to a wider audience, republishes its Arduin material as Grimoire Dungeons and Dragons, not as "the Arduin Adventure." The game is a success and saves the company from bankruptcy.

Gygax, hired by Avalon Hill to help with their own RPG in development (what we would know as Richard Snider's Powers and Perils), tries to contest Grimoire game's use of the title, but the court determines in late 1984 that the trademark has lapsed and can be used generically by any publisher to describe a fantasy roleplaying game.

The year 1985 sees five new contenders for the label of D&D:

• Avalon Hill Dungeons & Dragons by Gygax and Snider. It continues the AD&D tradition with some significant mechanical innovations from Snider's drafts of Powers & Perils.
• Holmes & Perrin D&D (published by Chaosium). John Eric Holmes, familiar to most as the author of the 1977 "blue box" D&D Basic Set, was hired to write most of the text of a fairly conservative take on D&D74 and his own basic set using the Perrin conventions and some additional material supplied by Steve Perrin.
• Blackmoor: The Original Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Game, by Arneson and Cook. This is essentially Cook's revision and redaction together of Adventures in Fantasy with the unpublished expert d&d material.
• Jackson Dungeons and Dragons (Steve Jackson Games), is what we know as Man to Man: Fantastic Combat with GURPS.

In the wake of the collapse of TSR (and Gen Con with it), former employee Frank Mentzer helps found the RPGA to organize D&D and other RPG events. As soon as the first conventions are organized, there is immediate controversy over what should and should not be called D&D. In 1988, after a few more latecomers have added their D&Ds to the mix (Palladium D&D and Iron Crown D&D [being the second edition of Rolemaster]), the RPGA forms the D&D Interoperability Working Group with representatives from most companies actively publishing D&D materials. The goal of the group is to standardize a lexicon for writing D&D materials that can be used in a variety of rulesets.

In 1989, the first draft of the Portable Adventure Gaming Interface (PAGIX) are published. The 90s sees various d&ds partially or wholly adopt some of the specified usage. The second editions of Iron Crown, Blackmoor, Palladium and Grimoire all adopt it, though Avalon Hill and Jackson remain holdouts. By far the majority of published adventures, monsters and settings are written for PAGIX-compliant D&D. In 1991 the RPGA becomes a member of ANSI and, after several years of application, PAGIX is determined to be an American National Standard in 1993. "PAGIX-compliant" (always a mouthful) is replaced with the much more marketing-friendly "Standard D&D" designation.

In 1994, Wizards of the Coast acquired the rights to the non-PAGIX but beloved Order of Hermes D&D (known in our timeline as Ars Magica) from White Wolf and hired Jonathan Tweet to produce a Standard D&D version of that game. Monte Cook is brought on to develop Planeswalker D&D, the MtG tie-in, based on his popular work on the PAGIX Planescape setting. Order of Hermes D&D Standard Edition is a mixed success with fans of white wolf Order of Hermes, but is praised for its well-researched historical sourcebooks. The Planeswalker D&D materials, on the other hand, are extremely well received by the MtG community.

In 1997, management at Avalon Hill, concerned about the declining marketshare and prominence of their D&D, put increasing pressure on Gygax and Snider to release a new Standard D&D edition of Avalon Hill. The pair convinced management instead to bring on Skip Williams, an RPGA organizer who had run several very popular convention games using a grid-based variant of Holmes & Perrin. The three designers together created Millenium D&D, released in 2000.

Millenium D&D marketed itself as an advancement beyond "twentieth century standards" by increasing character customization, overhauling the combat system to focus on grid-based tactical movement and action economy. Although several of its complexities ruled out PAGIX-compliance, Millenium came with a detailed guide for converting Standard D&D content to Millenium. Millenium also came with its own standards for labelling third-party content as Millenium-compatible.

Millenium D&D had significantly higher production values than most other D&Ds on the market and Avalon Hill did a good job in marketing it. It was an immediate commercial success, its depth of complexity lauded by one contingent of the emerging D&D internet forums. While other D&Ds continued to be played, Millenium brought many new people into the hobby and became an increasingly important market for D&D content.