Category:Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a role-playing game (RPG) invented by TSR Inc. and now owned by Wizards of the Coast. The game consists of two main parts:

• Game mechanics (which have changed and evolved over multiple editions of the game), and;
• Campaign settings (of which more and more have been published, as time has gone on).

Dungeons & Dragons is a group activity and the gaming group will generally be playing with a specific D&D edition and a specific campaign setting (although play without use of a setting is also possible). Many of D&D's campaign settings are now out of print, and are supported by one or more fan community, rather than by Wizards of the Coast. It is these fan communities that are most likely to create D&D-related wiki sites. Most campaign settings are fictional game worlds, but D&D has also created a few campaign settings that are not based on a planet. These settings are sometimes referred to as 'worlds' despite the fact that they are not worlds. This is probably to fit in with existing categorisation of earlier game worlds, rather than a genuine misunderstanding of the campaign settings.

Common goals of D&D fan communities include:

• Collection of information about a campaign setting (often called 'canon');
• Expansion of canon via fan-created additions to the gameworld (sometimes called 'fanon'), and;
• Replacement of official rules with a GM's personal rules (often called 'house rules').

The goals of collecting canon and adding fanon are in opposition to each other and it may not be possible for a D&D-related wiki to do both things without the fanon-information 'polluting' the canon.