Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Overview

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) is the expanded, reorganized version of D&D that Gary Gygax wrote for TSR, Inc. across three hardcover books: the Monster Manual (1977), the Players Handbook (1978) and the Dungeon Masters Guide (1979). It gathered the three booklets of Dungeons & Dragons, five supplements and years of magazine articles into a single, systematic whole — and then kept going, adding classes, races, spells, tables and rulings until it covered nearly anything a table might argue about.

For most of the 1980s, when the game was a national phenomenon, AD&D was D&D to millions of players, even as a simpler Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set line continued alongside it.

Origins

By 1977 the original game had become a patchwork. Rules were scattered across Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and The Dragon, and every group played differently. Gygax, whose company now ran tournaments at conventions, wanted an authoritative text that could settle disputes at any table in the country. At the same time John Eric Holmes was writing a beginner's version. TSR decided to publish both: a Basic game for newcomers and an "Advanced" game for everyone else.

The Monster Manual came first, in 1977, as a 108-page hardcover of more than 350 monsters with David C. Sutherland III's cover. The Players Handbook followed in June 1978 (128 pages, edited by Mike Carr, with D. A. Trampier's famous cover of adventurers prying the gem eyes from a giant demon idol). The 232-page Dungeon Masters Guide appeared in August 1979. Gygax wrote all three.

The split had a legal edge. TSR paid Dave Arneson royalties on D&D but took the position that AD&D was a different product and paid him nothing for it. Arneson filed suit in 1979; the case was settled in March 1981, with Arneson credited as co-creator and paid a 2.5% royalty on AD&D products (see The Gygax–Arneson Disputes).

How it plays

AD&D's session looks like earlier D&D — a Dungeon Master describing a world, a party of players declaring actions, dice to resolve the uncertain — but everything is more detailed. Players roll their six ability scores (the Guide offers several methods, such as rolling four dice and dropping the lowest) and choose from seven races, from dwarf and gnome to half-orc, and a roster of classes: cleric and druid; fighter, paladin and ranger; magic-user and illusionist; thief and assassin; monk; and the bard. Alignment expands to nine positions on two axes, Law–Chaos and Good–Evil.

Combat still turns on a twenty-sided die, now read against matrices that cross-index class and level with the defender's Armor Class — tables later players compressed into the shorthand THAC0. Each weapon has its own damage die and speed, magic-users memorize Vancian spells from a long list of evocatively named incantations, and the Guide supplies rules for everything from hirelings and spell research to disease, aging and weather in the wilderness. Its tables even let a referee generate a dungeon at random as the players explore.

A typical 1980s evening meant opening a published Adventure module — often one of Gygax's, like Tomb of Horrors — and sending a party of characters through it over many sessions, with the Dungeon Master consulting the Guide behind a cardboard screen.

Reception & impact

British reviewer Don Turnbull greeted the books with mounting enthusiasm in White Dwarf: the Monster Manual was "the best thing that TSR have produced so far," until the Handbook, "nothing short of a triumph," surpassed it. The Dungeon Masters Guide has been described by critics as idiosyncratic and dense; the historian Stu Horvath calls it "a masterpiece" and "an accidental portrait of the man's brain circa 1978." Its Appendix N reading list (see Appendix N) became a canon of 20th-century fantasy for later designers.

AD&D arrived as the hobby exploded. Supplements poured out — Deities & Demigods (1980), the British-sourced Fiend Folio (1981), Monster Manual II (1983), Unearthed Arcana (1985) — along with settings such as World of Greyhawk, Dragonlance and the module Ravenloft. The game's success made it a target too, during the Satanic Panic & D&D of the 1980s.

Legacy

Gygax planned a revision but lost control of TSR in late 1985 and resigned from the company in October 1986. The resulting Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition (1989), led by David "Zeb" Cook, streamlined the rules and dropped the assassin and monk. The AD&D rules also carried the game onto screens: SSI's Gold Box games beginning with Pool of Radiance (1988) and Westwood's Eye of the Beholder (1991) were licensed AD&D. After Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1997 and bought out Arneson's remaining royalty interest, the "Advanced" name was retired with third edition in 2000. The core trio of player's book, referee's book and monster book remains the backbone of D&D today.