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and Dragons began in 1974 with the first printing of a thousand copies authored by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game owes its popularity not only to its innovation, but the fact that it debuted at the GenCon gaming convention. GenCon hosted Chainmail previous to Dungeons and Dragons. Chainmail was not a RPG in the same sense as D&D, but was actually a miniatures warfare game authored by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. What happened as Dungeons and Dragons evolved is where the controversy took place with some religious groups.

In 1977, TSR began publishing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which was jam-packed with mythological gods, devils and demons and rules for playing evil characters. Although it is common knowledge that the evil characters represented in the game were fictional and did not represent evil in reality, many began to give the game the same regard as the wigi board. Although evil characters could be created and simulated in the first release of Dungeons and Dragons, there was not as much detail as there was in this new edition called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. So, religious groups and gamers came into emotional conflict.

To the gamer there was a need for real villains, both to emulate in the game for fun and to defeat in an adventure. Without evil in the plot what's a courageous knight or good elf to do? With evil characters and mythological beings in the plot others who did not agree with the game became estranged and defensive. My grandfather, a chaplain when he was alive, talked me into throwing my D&D game books in the trash twice when I was a kid, once when I was ten and later when I was twelve. Today I have all the same books I did then, though they are not the ones I got for Christmas or my birthday, but they are books that once belonged to someone else. I also have the new editions of the game bought straight off the shelf.

I think it is important to note that with the controversy Wizards of the Coast has made every effort to accommodate the broadest audience. One of the big differences in the second edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was there was not much emphasis on devils and demons other than very basic monsters like imps and satyrs. The second edition also brought with it a companion game world called the Forgotten Realms, which used pantheons that were not based on real world history. It seemed that the controversy was no longer as eminent as it once was during this time, but the inevitable happened...the third edition

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