Dungeons & Dragons Trivia
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224 free Dungeons & Dragons trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
68 free Dungeons & Dragons trivia questions with answers. Roll for initiative. This DnD trivia quiz spans fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons: the Chainmail rules and Blackmoor campaign that spawned it, the 1974 white box, the split into Basic and Advanced, TSR's rise and fall, and the editions that followed all the way to the 2024 revision. Expect monsters (beholders, mind flayers, the plastic-toy origins of the owlbear), settings from Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms to Ravenloft and Planescape, characters like Drizzt, Mordenkainen and Strahd, and the wider culture: the 1980s Satanic panic, the Saturday-morning cartoon, both films, Critical Role, Stranger Things and Baldur's Gate 3. Easy questions suit newer players; the expert tier is for people who remember THAC0. Every answer is checked against a reference page and the exact source sentence appears under each question, so table disputes can be settled without pausing the game.
30 of 224 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which wargame publisher turned down D&D before Gygax published it himself in 1974?
Avalon Hill
Avalon Hill, then the biggest name in wargaming, could not make sense of a role-playing game and passed, so Gygax co-founded TSR and assembled the first print run by hand.
Q 02Which two designers are credited with creating Dungeons & Dragons?
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are the credited co-creators. The pair later fell out; Arneson sued TSR over royalties in 1979, settling in 1981.
Q 03Which 1971 miniature wargame supplied the original combat rules for D&D?
Chainmail
Chainmail ended with a short fantasy supplement of wizards, heroes and dragons; Dave Arneson took those rules and ran a dungeon-exploring game with them, the prototype of D&D.
Q 04What do D&D players roll at the start of a fight to decide the order of turns?
Initiative
Initiative is a Dexterity check, so nimble characters tend to act before slower ones; the DM makes a single roll for a whole group of identical monsters, so they all act together.
Q 05Which die decides whether an attack hits in D&D combat?
Twenty-sided
Twenty-sided dice settle every attack: a natural 20 always hits and a natural 1 always misses, whatever the modifiers or the target's armour.
Q 06Which of these is one of D&D's six ability scores?
Charisma
Charisma sits beside Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence and Wisdom; in Gygax's first games, players rolled three six-sided dice to generate each score.
Q 07In which year did Wizards of the Coast buy the near-bankrupt TSR and take over D&D?
1997
Wizards of the Coast bought the debt-laden TSR in 1997, flush with card-game profits; Hasbro then bought Wizards itself in 1999.
Q 08For roughly how much did Hasbro buy Wizards of the Coast in September 1999?
$325 million
The company had been founded by Peter Adkison in 1990 and named after a guild of wizards in his own D&D campaign.
Q 09Where is Wizards of the Coast headquartered?
Renton, Washington
Wizards of the Coast is based in Renton, Washington, a Seattle suburb; its parent since 1999, Hasbro, is headquartered in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Q 10Which of these was one of the three character classes in the original 1974 D&D?
Cleric
Cleric joined fighting-man and magic-user because Dave Arneson's players needed a vampire hunter: one player's vampire character, Sir Fang, had grown too strong for anyone to touch.
Q 11What is the D&D term for a roll made to resist a spell, trap or poison?
A saving throw
A saving throw is a last-chance roll to shrug off danger; a hero at 0 hit points makes death saving throws each turn, stabilising on the third success and dying on the third failure.
Q 12Which AD&D hardcover reached shops in 1977, a year before the Player's Handbook?
Monster Manual
Monster Manual was the first hardcover D&D book, so the monsters arrived before the rules for playing them: the Dungeon Masters Guide did not follow until 1979.
Q 13The 1983 D&D Basic Set, with Larry Elmore's dragon-fighting cover, is known to fans as which colour box?
Red
Q 21The vorpal sword, which lops off heads on a lucky roll, takes its name from which poem?
Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky is where Lewis Carroll coined 'vorpal'; he admitted he could not explain the word, which left D&D free to decide that it meant a blade sharp enough to take a head clean off.
Q 22Which famous D&D monster did Gary Gygax model on a cheap plastic toy made in Hong Kong?
Owlbear
Owlbear began as an odd plastic figure, sold in bags of so-called prehistoric animals, that Gygax pressed into service as a miniature; the rust monster and the bulette came from the same toys.
Q 23Which low-level D&D spell fires glowing darts of force that strike their targets with no attack roll?
Magic Missile
Red was the 1983 box; Frank Mentzer rebuilt its rulebooks as a step-by-step tutorial with a solo adventure, so that younger newcomers could learn the game more easily.
Q 14AD&D 2nd Edition in 1989 dropped which two words from its monster books to calm the era's moral panic?
Devil and demon
Devil and demon vanished from the 1989 rulebooks after years of claims that the game promoted Satanism; the monsters themselves stayed in, under invented names.
Q 15Which class, casting spells through inborn talent rather than study, debuted with D&D's 3rd edition in 2000?
Sorcerer
Sorcerer power has a price: with no spellbook to copy new magic into, a sorcerer learns only a handful of spells, though each can be cast on the spot with no preparation.
Q 16What working name did Wizards of the Coast use for D&D 5th edition during its 2012 playtest?
D&D Next
D&D Next was built in the open: Wizards handed out its draft rules for a public playtest and reworked them on players' feedback before the finished game shipped as 5th edition.
Q 17On what date was the 5th edition Player's Handbook released?
August 19, 2014
The 5th edition Player's Handbook arrived on August 19, 2014, followed by the Monster Manual that September and the Dungeon Master's Guide in December 2014.
Q 18In 5th edition, which label marks beasts that act on instinct, not moral choice?
Unaligned
Unaligned arrived with 4th edition's trimmed-down alignment list; 5th edition restored the old grid but kept the word, so a shark can be a savage predator without being evil.
Q 19Gygax credited the law-versus-chaos alignment idea to which two fantasy authors?
Moorcock and Poul Anderson
Gygax credited law versus chaos to Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which also gave the game its regenerating troll and paladin.
Q 20D&D's 'memorize a spell, cast it, forget it' magic came from which fantasy author's stories?
Jack Vance
Jack Vance's Dying Earth wizards cram a few spells into memory and lose each as it is cast; players call the rule Vancian magic, and later editions' at-will powers moved casters away from it.
Magic Missile creates three darts that simply hit whatever the caster can see, so neither heavy armour nor quick feet is any defence against it.
Q 24Which pale, silver-haired elf among Baldur's Gate 3's companions is secretly a vampire spawn?
Astarion
Astarion spent two centuries enslaved to the vampire lord Cazador Szarr; the parasite planted in his head lets him walk in sunlight again, so he is in no hurry to be cured.
Q 25Which D&D monster is also known as an illithid?
Mind flayer
Mind flayers, or illithids, breed by slipping a tadpole into a victim's skull, where it devours the brain and turns the host into a new mind flayer, the fate hanging over the heroes of Baldur's Gate 3.
Q 26Which six-legged, tentacled D&D predator was borrowed from the alien coeurl of a 1939 A. E. van Vogt story?
Displacer beast
Displacer beast copies van Vogt's cat-like coeurl; he later built the tale into a novel so close to the plot of the film Alien that he sued and settled out of court for $50,000.
Q 27Which colossal D&D monster is named after a beast of French legend?
Tarrasque
Tarrasque borrows its name from the Tarasque, a dragon of Provençal legend said to have lurked in the Rhône near Tarascon, sinking boats, until Saint Martha tamed it.
Q 28Which five-headed dragon goddess rules the evil chromatic dragons of D&D?
Tiamat
Tiamat has one head for each chromatic colour, each with that dragon's powers; the name is borrowed from a Mesopotamian goddess whom the game's version barely resembles.
Q 29In Baldur's Gate 3 and D&D lore, which lich-queen rules the githyanki?
Vlaakith
Vlaakith keeps her undying throne by feeding on her own people: githyanki who grow powerful are summoned to her palace to 'ascend', and she consumes their souls.
Q 30Which demilich lurks at the heart of Gygax's notoriously deadly module Tomb of Horrors?
Acererak
Acererak, the demilich, waits at the heart of Tomb of Horrors; Gygax wrote it for tournament play at the 1975 Origins convention, to test players who boasted that their characters could beat any challenge.