Dungeons & Dragons

This game grew out of the wargaming table. Instead of moving armies, you move a single character who grows through levels and experience points. That shape became the common parent of Rogue, Wizardry, and Ultima, and crossed the ocean to become the grandfather of Dragon Quest. You can trace where the vocabulary came from, too. "Hero" and "superhero" come from the unit types in Gary Gygax's Chainmail (1971). Experience points and levels come from the system Dave Arneson built into his own Blackmoor campaign, where earning gold or defeating an enemy scored points that promoted a character toward hero status. Hit points were invented specifically to handle individual combat, since a wargame's ruler — built for one player moving two hundred pieces — could not track individual wounds. And I should note this isn't a tidy story. When the advanced edition (AD&D) came out, Gygax argued it was a different work from the original D&D and refused to pay Arneson royalties. It went to court in 1979, and after two years of dispute, they settled by 1981 — Arneson received a 2.5 percent royalty on the cover price of the AD&D core rulebooks. The rights weren't unified until 1997, when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. A joint invention rarely stays joint.