In 1968, a group of wargaming enthusiasts set out to develop a set of rules for simulating heroic medieval combat. The result was Chainmail, published by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. As humble as it may have seemed, this was the first step in a three-decade tradition known as the "role-playing game" that has entertained and inspired millions of people around the world.

To people familiar with card games or board games, a role-playing game or RPG might seem quite strange at first. In "Dungeons and Dragons," or D&D, neither a board, nor cards, nor even pieces or tokens are necessary, although there are games with quite elaborate maps and very detailed painted figurines.

In a role-playing game, one person acts as the "Dungeon Master" or DM. It is this person's job to tell the "story" of the game while also acting as a referee. The other players all create characters which, through a process of collaborative storytelling, have adventures in the Dungeon Master's imaginary world.

The game operates through the exchange between the players and the Dungeon Master. The DM explains the setting and the choices available to the players. The players can decide which direction to go, which items to examine, or, if they encounter a monster or enemy, whether to flee or stand their ground and fight.

If they decide to fight, the Dungeon Master uses rules with their origins in the original Chainmail design to resolve combat: which attacks hit or miss, how much damage they do, whether certain character's magic abilities are effective, and ultimately, whether the monster or the player's character survive. To resolve these conflicts, both players and the Dungeon Master make use of elaborate and unusally-shaped dice with as many as 20 sides. These dice are often symbolic of the D&D phenomenon, and have even been the subject of a Trivial Pursuit question.

Players have an amazing number of choices for their characters. They may choose to be elves or dwarves, human or even a barbaric orc. They can also decide what "class" to make their character, a choice which determines their basic set of skills. For example, if a player decides to make their character a warrior, they will have very strong combat skills with swords or axes, but few, if any, magical abilities. On the other hand, if they choose to be a magic-user, they will have a variety of very powerful spells to cast, in exchange for having limited skill with weapons.

By working together, "parties" of these characters can combine their unique abilities to defeat opponents they may otherwise be unable to battle alone. This is part of the unique appeal of Dungeons and Dragons: a game with a built-in incentive to work together as a team.

If anyone wants to learn just about everything there is to know, and then some, and then some more, about dragons, the Dungeons and Dragons books are a good place to start. Know what a green dragon breathes? Here's a hint: it isn't fire. How about a black dragon? Do you know if a silver dragon is good or evil? Do you know how many heads the Queen of Evil Dragons has, or what spells she knows how to cast, or how much damage she can do with her claws?

Dungeons and Dragons has published literally thousands of pages of exhaustively detailed information on dragons, along with snakes, spiders, oozes, insects, bugbears, will-o-the-wisps, and just about every whimsical or fantastical creature of legend and myth from the earliest literature up to high-technology. One of the great features of the game is that it gives players and dungeon masters the freedom to make up their own creatures if they so choose. Using what is known about creatures placed in the game by the publishers of the rulebooks, players and dungeon masters can fashion literally anything they can imagine for their adventures, from walking blocks of stone to ghost sharks to evil gem-encrusted boots.

Gold, gems, silver, magical swords and lost artifacts of legend: all this and more awaits those adventurers who vanquish the evil lurking in the dungeons constructed by game masters. It is treasure that drives the quest forward, and for every fanged baddie seeking to devour the hapless, there are five amazing treasures that will make the heroic adventurers that much more heroic.

The glittering objects of the dungeon party's journey are known as "loot" in most role-playing universes, and provide yet another outlet for the imaginations of both players and game masters, since they can invent literally any enchanted object, from a simple +1 mace to a planet-shaking artifact.

It is probably impossible to list all the video games, comic books, movies and books that have been directly influenced by D&D, but there is one undeniable fact. Dungeons and Dragons is uniquely responsible for a massive culture of storytelling that has brought millions of people together the world over in a celebration of the heroic and the fantastic.