From three plain booklets in a wooden white box to a streaming, virtual-tabletop, multimedia juggernaut, D&D has redefined itself roughly every decade. The 1970s brought wargame-derived mechanics and the first three booklets. The 1980s split the line in two (classic D&D vs. Advanced D&D) and turned campaign settings into the main product. The 1990s opened the door to story-first play across nine different worlds. The 2000s rebuilt everything around the d20 and the Open Game License, an unprecedented opening that defined the next twenty years of third-party publishing. The 2010s reconciled accessibility with the old-school spirit. The 2020s now balance corporate stewardship, OGL controversies and a thriving indie scene.
Original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D)
The very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) and came out in 1974 as three booklets (Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, Underworld & Wilderness Adventures), written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Three alignments (lawful, neutral, chaotic), three classes (fighter, magic-user, cleric) and three races (dwarf, elf, halfling), but the game asked you to choose a class or a race (the races behaved more like classes here). In 1976 the booklets were re-released in the famous white box.
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (Holmes)
In 1977, TSR released a new version of Dungeons & Dragons, written by J. Eric Holmes. The Basic Set compiled the three original booklets, plus a supplement on Greyhawk that had appeared in the meantime, into a single blue volume. This edition aimed to be more accessible than the first one and allowed play from level 1 to level 3. It also expanded the alignment system from three to five, and was the first box to include polyhedral dice.
1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
In 1978, Gary Gygax (without Dave Arneson) launched, still at TSR, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Monster Manual (350 monsters) appeared in December 1977; the Player's Handbook followed in June 1978 and the Dungeon Master's Guide in August 1979. D&D now split into two branches: classic D&D out of the Basic Set, and Advanced D&D. Alignments expanded to nine; assassin, druid, monk, paladin and thief became standard.
Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert Sets (Moldvay, B/X)
In 1981, the Basic Set was rewritten by Tom Moldvay, and a follow-up arrived as well, the Expert Set, by David Cook, which extended play from level 4 to level 14. Although the box was red, Moldvay's Basic Set is still known as B/X thanks to its Expert companion. Race and class are finally cleanly separated, opening up many more combinations. For many players the mix of retro feel and accessibility in B/X defines the golden age of the classic D&D line.
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and friends (Mentzer, BECMI)
Starting in 1983, Frank Mentzer reworked the Basic Set and the Expert Set. Mentzer then regularly added new supplements to this branch of D&D: the Companion Set (levels 15-25, 1984), the Master Set (levels 26-36, 1985) and the Immortal Set (playing gods, 1986). Today the line is called BECMI.
1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: revised expansion
Late in the 1e lifecycle, Gygax bolted three big supplements onto the line: Unearthed Arcana (1985, new races, classes, weapon specialisation), Dungeoneer's Survival Guide (1986, dungeoneering subsystems and the proto-skills system) and Monster Manual II (1983, more bestiary). Some call this informally "AD&D 1.5".
2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
In 1989 the second edition of AD&D appeared, eleven years after the first. Primarily written by David Cook, TSR tried to broaden the game's audience and removed some classes (assassin, half-orc) seen as too dark for younger readers; demons and devils were renamed tanar'ri and baatezu. It was the golden age of campaign settings: Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape, Birthright, Spelljammer, Mystara.
Rules Cyclopedia
In 1991 TSR compiled the BECMI Basic / Expert / Companion / Master sequence into the Rules Cyclopedia, a single hardcover volume, still considered the definitive version of classic D&D.
2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Black Box revision
In 1995 a revised printing arrived, the Black Box, with cleaner layout, updated art and a new Monstrous Manual hardcover replacing the loose-leaf Monstrous Compendium binders.
3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons
In June 1997, TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast, already a hit publisher of Magic: The Gathering, itself acquired by Hasbro in 1999. At Gen Con 1999, Wizards announced the third edition, which shipped in 2000. The system was rebuilt around the d20 (the d20 System) and published under the Open Game License (OGL), opening the floodgates to a deluge of d20-compatible products from third-party publishers. That openness would prove decisive for the OSR movement below.
3.5 Edition Dungeons & Dragons
In July 2003, Wizards of the Coast released the 3.5 revision of D&D, only three years after the third edition. Many players took the paid upgrade of the three core books badly, but 3.5 became the commercial high-water mark of Wizards' classic line and left a lasting mark on the designers of later editions.
Old School Renaissance
The Open Game License gave birth to an informal movement: the Old School Renaissance (OSR). Independent designers used the d20 SRD to clone the rules of earlier editions and publish new adventures in the original style. OSRIC (2006) reproduces AD&D 1st edition as a single all-in-one volume; V2.x (2013) is the revised printing of that single volume.
4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
In June 2008, eight years after D&D 3 (but only five years after 3.5), came the fourth edition. The 4th tried to bring the MMO experience to the table: at-will / encounter / daily powers, grid-based tactical combat, and class roles. The break from 3.5 was so sharp that a sizeable chunk of the community stayed loyal to earlier versions, further fuelling the OSR, and Paizo seized the opening to release Pathfinder in 2009 as the unofficial D&D 3.75.
5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
"Our mission is to ensure that D&D enters its next 40 years as a vibrant, growing, and exciting game." That was the sentence Wizards used in 2012 to announce a fifth edition. After a long public-playtest phase known as D&D Next, 5e shipped in 2014 and consolidated the lessons of every edition that came before, including the spirit of the OSR: simple rules, plenty of room for the DM, and a return to fiction.
Old-School Essentials
Necrotic Gnome's Old-School Essentials is the modern flagship B/X clone, a meticulously edited, layout-perfect restatement of Moldvay/Cook 1981. The Classic Fantasy line ships the rules across Basic Rules (combined player + referee), a Treasures volume and a Monsters volume.
OSRIC 3.0: the split rewrite
The 2023+ rewrite of OSRIC finally splits the rules along the AD&D 1e PHB/DMG/MM lines: separate Player Guide, Gamemaster Guide, and a bestiary supplement (Monsters of Myth).
Dungeons & Dragons 2024 refresh
Ten years on, the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 release, informally the 5.5, keeps the 5e foundation while revising the three core books and the design assumptions around classes, species and DM-facing tools.
Two-and-a-half generations of players have grown up on very different "D&Ds": wargame, story engine, MMO companion, narrative sandbox. Yet a single throughline holds: the table, the dice, the shared imagination.
The Old School Renaissance mattered far more than its niche size suggests. It proved the original assumptions still work, kept the rules-light tradition alive while WotC chased tactical complexity, and seeded an entire generation of indie designers (Necrotic Gnome, Goodman Games, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, The Arnesonian Game Library) who now release more titles per year than TSR ever did. The OSR also kept the lights on for editions WotC officially abandoned, and it gave 5e its philosophical anchor: enough rules to teach the game, few enough to let the table breathe.
What comes next is less a matter of "edition number" and more about how the corporate stewards, the indie publishers and the virtual-tabletop platforms split the work. The post-OGL licensing landscape (WotC's 5.1 SRD under Creative Commons, Paizo's ORC license, dozens of system-specific reference documents) means no single publisher controls the rules anymore. AI-assisted prep tools, hexcrawl generators and live-VTT integrations are likely to take over the production-value layer, while the table itself keeps doing what it has done for fifty years: people sitting together, rolling dice, asking "what do you do?".