In past posts, we've described the emergence of Chainmail, Blackmoor, and OD&D thanks to the labours of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Today we'll look at the 1977 release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the game that took D&D to the next level. So how did AD&D come to be?
Gary did not sit still: thanks to the success of OD&D, he now had the funds and staff to take the next step in the development of the system. It took him three years - that's how long it was since the first "wooden box" of D&D was released. John Holmes (who, in addition to his passion for literature, was a medical doctor and assistant professor of neurology at the University of Southern California Medical School) is as active in the development as he was in the development of the core rules, being mostly responsible for the literary content of the game. It was he who suggested the name Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, as the rules became more expansive, complex, and the world deep and enquiries.
It is with AD&D that the classic "trio" of edition books appears: the wizard book, the player book, and the monster book. From that point on, the expansion of the system comes through adventure books that open up new zones, new monsters, new rules, and so on.
AD&D departed from the Chainmail tradition for the first time in the line of D&D editions, both technically (combat system) and conceptually. Class descriptions reflected the game's past experience, many abilities were explained more precisely, and successful classes published in supplements (paladin, thief, assassin, monk, druid) and journals (bard, illusionist, ranger) were added to the corbook. Races were separated from classes for the first time, and the worldview system also became two-dimensional ("ethics" and "morals"). The first edition of Advanced D&D ran smoothly until 1989 (supplements continued to be published for 12 years!), when it was replaced by the second edition, which revised many of the rules but stuck to the new paradigm of game publishing: thick, colourfully illustrated books with a mixture of fluff and crunch, and a large number of themed supplements and set-ups.
A successful product, on the wave of general interest in fantasy, was thoroughly strengthened and properly presented to the player - an excellent example of a developer who not only managed to throw out a successful dice, but also worked properly with DLC without changing the main vector. In this we, in our project, try to orientate ourselves on the example of TSR.