D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism

The recent book The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 talks about the early years of D&D. In the book, authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro talk about the way the game, and its writers, approached certain issues. Not surprisingly, this revelation received aggressive "pushback" on social media because, well, that sort of thing does--in fact, one designer who worked with Gygax at the time labelled it "slanderous".

D&D historian Ben Riggs--author of Slaying the Dragon--delved into the facts. Note that the below was posted on Twitter, in that format, not as an article.

D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.

The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.

Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit points. They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which states:"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and early D&D?

Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character class. It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)

​

It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for another example.)

Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.

(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)

Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading politics into D&D. Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.

The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.”

​

The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.

Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any other interpretation.

The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.

Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:“I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."

"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room."

"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”

So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.

The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases...

Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy....it is also directly harming the legacies of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.

How? Let me show you.The D&D player base is getting more diverse in every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis men of middle European descent...

...the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human vegetable garden ...

find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization forward, even if only by a few feet.

So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game we love? We could pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no **** and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is naughty word on your sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.

I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know **** when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so great after all…

We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past, it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own mistakes from them?

Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. Or maybe when someone tells you there is **** on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it off, and move on.

We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024. Something like...

“Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others. So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.”

Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those old PDFs on DriveThruRPG. And when we see something bigoted in old D&D, we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the entire human family into the hobby.To do anything less is to damn D&D to darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are kinda ****** up. So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators.

Appendix 1: Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D.

But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book 1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading, along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.

Ben Riggs​

Look, folks, we know how a conversation like this goes on the internet. Because, internet. Read the rules you agreed to before replying. The banhammer will be used on those who don't do what they agreed to.

 

[Steampunkette]

A lot of those quotes are horrible, but can we also take a moment to underscore that Gygax thought Vampire: The Masquerade was a gothic romance game?

I like to imagine that the only times he ever interacted with V:tM was when someone was doing a flashback scene to establish their connection with their sire or another player at the table in an overly dramatic Gothic Romance sequence of torrid affairs and blood-drinking as sex allegories ala Anne Rice set entirely in Germany/Hungary between 300 and 800CE...

And then as soon as Gygax walked out of the room it was back to some rando Brujah punching a vending machine for stealing his dollar.

 

[Zardnaar]

I get that your situation was particularly awful. And that you experienced particularly awful stuff in your friend group. To the point that what little you've seen coming out of Gygax makes him saintly compared to the complete trash fires that raised you in painful and awful ways.

But. Your experiences are not universal. And you having a really rough time of it doesn't mean that was the average experience people had growing up.

I wasn't born in the 1940s. But my parents were. And they told me the best and the worst stories about their parents and growing up in the 40s and 50s. And where my father's parents were strict to the point of being outright abusive, and my mother's father was a philandering jerk who named my mother after his mistress before he abandoned his family to booze and fornicate 'til he died a death that was to be expected, they had it a lot better than what you describe.

And so did I come the 80s.

I'm sure Gary Gygax looked over at people like your family and thought of himself as superior to them, at least. And by your words he was right.

But that doesn't mean Gary Gygax was a good person, or a saint, or better than average, or even average. It just means your bar is so low that the arch of my parent's feet would be high enough to clear it it without them feeling the bar when they stepped on it.

Average requires it to be popular enough for 50% of the population to think it's normal. For it to be unremarkable, people would've had to not remark on it. People remarked on it. He doubled down after it was remarked on.

Gary Gygax lived in WISCONSIN. Not Arkansas. Not Alabama. Not Mississippi. Wisconsin.

My grandmother hit my mother across the face with a leather strap. Her son was killed by being hit in the head with a stone. By a PoC. It was her dad and uncle who were the trenches. Fairly dry eyed funeral in 2002.

I got the strap once for throwing stones. Apart from that just drunken verbal trades. Sister moved out aged 17.

I dodged the worst of it. Think our entire group was from broken homes. One would come stay with mum for the weekend post divorce and go home six weeks later. He also fudged his dice rolls.

One guy I knew party 1997. Blind drunk rage he smashed out the windows. My female best friend nadeher little sister but in me and sat beside me. She was maybe 15. We weren't allowed to go to his place as children.

2014 he became a guest of her majesty. He repeated what his dad did. Still there afaik. Never really had a chance. There was around 6 of them my year these are just the ones I knew off.

Schoolers bad as well. Ministry if education intervened early 2000s fired the entire board. 4 suicides 1992-6 town of 12000. Another obe resulted in that intervention.

That's where I'm coming from. What the law says and what happens on the ground are to different things. You're kinda experiencing that now I suppose in the USA.

 

[Zardnaar]

and I am struggling to see how it can be seen as anything but excusing it…

If it is not meant as an excuse, why bring it up at all

Not really an excuse an explanation.

 

[Clint_L]

For quite a while, I have taken a slightly different approach on this. To wit:

You cannot expect a person to be better than their time, in general. We can celebrate the ones who are. But, to be significantly better than average is, by definition, a rare trait. If it isn't, then the average moves, and you have a new average that most people won't be better than.

So, if we are to consider it a sin to fail to be better than their times, then... pretty much everyone is a sinner.

And it is unclear to me what the value is in that exercise. If you want to be able to sweep 90% of humanity into a box labelled "Complete Trash", this does the job. You can dust your hands off and know you work is complete, I guess.




As above - on average, humanity will only ever be as good as its time, by definition. Which is why I question how valuable it is to quibble over it.

The real question, to my mind, is this:

We have this information about a man. He was who he was. So, what are you going to do about it? What value for the future can be gained from it?

I see little evidence that slapping his memory about with the Trout of Righteousness is going to make the future better. We have learned that, broadly speaking, punishment for a transgression doesn't generally act as a deterrent, or stop others from transgressing. Castigating Gygax for his sexism isn't going to make future people less sexist.

Exactly this. D&D has some serious sexism in its DNA. Like a whole lot of other culture does. Not to mention racism, homophobia. Debating why or to what degree or where the fault should accrue is useful to some degree, but the most important thing is what we choose to do about it today.

Culture and morality are ever evolving. That is an obvious fact of human history. You can get on board with it, or you can fight it, convinced that the values of your particular youth are the Truth. That your generation and culture, of all human generations and cultures, was the only one that cracked the Code. You can go to your grave grumping about kids these days, or you can ask the one question that makes us essentially human, “gee, maybe I was wrong?” and keep trying to do better.

That doesn’t mean it’s shameful to have been wrong. Being wrong and learning from it is the human superpower. The one thing that age has made clear to me is that I know a lot less than I thought I did when I was 20. Gygax was not a monster. He was a human being. Somewhat more sexist than the American male average of his time, a low bar, and that caused hurt to people because of the way his genius co-creation spread its ideas through our culture. Just as we acknowledge and celebrate the genius, we acknowledge and try to fix the hurt. And that’s how we flawed humans try to make things better, bit by bit.

 

[lynnfredricks]

Which is why I also addressed your other qualifier. "Unremarkable".

And Wisconsin may not have been San Francisco or New York but it ratified the Equal Rights Amendment on March 26th, 1972.

New York ratified it May 18th, 1972. California ratified it November 13th, 1972.

Funny that the two examples you picked as more progressive than Wisconsin were the 16th and 22nd to ratify it while Wisconsin was the 15th.

If only you'd gone for Texas or Tennessee ... both of which ratified it earlier. 8th and 9th, respectively. The three I picked never ratified it.

When (or if) a state ratified ERA doesn't necessarily speak to the norms of the population of the state.

New York and San Francisco were where the action was happening, and you had more businesses taking the goals of ERA seriously.

 

[Steampunkette]

Not really an excuse an explanation.

Explanations become excuses when they deflect responsibility.

"Gary Gygax was a sexist." Using evidence you express the problem and the person responsible.
"He was a product of his time." Using a generalization to remove responsibility from the person.

I get that you're trying to explain that sexism was common at the time. But there's never been a time when sexism was uncommon. Even now. That doesn't excuse Gygax's sexism or the fact that he was a sexist.

It doesn't "Explain it Away". It doesn't even really provide context. It only serves to deflect responsibility for his sexism onto society, even though that society called out his sexism at the time.

When (or if) a state ratified ERA doesn't necessarily speak to the norms of the population of the state.

New York and San Francisco were where the action was happening, and you had more businesses taking the goals of ERA seriously.

It kind of does, though, doesn't it?

If a state ratified the amendment that means the people in power, who were put there by the populace, agreed with the ERA enough to ratify it. If they didn't, then they didn't agree with the ERA enough to ratify it. And by the commutative function, neither did enough of their populace.

Otherwise people who -did- support it would've been in political power.

As far as California being much more progressive than Wisconsin in the 1970s... No. No it really wasn't. Don't get me wrong, San Fran and NYC were wild in the 60s and 70s for the LGBTQ+ community... but the state itself? Check out the Governor from 67 to 75. Check out their electoral college votes prior to 1992.

California became a liberal stronghold in the 90s. It wasn't before that point. Most of the time it had a fairly split government.

 

[Zardnaar]

Explanations become excuses when they deflect responsibility.

"Gary Gygax was a sexist." Using evidence you express the problem and the person responsible.
"He was a product of his time." Using a generalization to remove responsibility from the person.

I get that you're trying to explain that sexism was common at the time. But there's never been a time when sexism was uncommon. Even now. That doesn't excuse Gygax's sexism or the fact that he was a sexist.

It doesn't "Explain it Away". It doesn't even really provide context. It only serves to deflect responsibility for his sexism onto society, even though that society called out his sexism at the time.

It kind of does, though, doesn't it?

If a state ratified the amendment that means the people in power, who were put there by the populace, agreed with the ERA enough to ratify it. If they didn't, then they didn't agree with the ERA enough to ratify it. And by the commutative function, neither did enough of their populace.

Otherwise people who -did- support it would've been in political power.

As far as California being much more progressive than Wisconsin in the 1970s... No. No it really wasn't. Don't get me wrong, San Fran and NYC were wild in the 60s and 70s for the LGBTQ+ community... but the state itself? Check out the Governor from 67 to 75. Check out their electoral college votes prior to 1992.

California became a liberal stronghold in the 90s. It wasn't before that point. Most of the time it had a fairly split government.

Look at electoral naps 68-88 and check the popular vote.

Something happened between Goldeater and the 70s. Personally I blame Vietnam.

I'm more cynical and big picture stuff. If you don't fix those big ticket items forst you don't create an environment where the smaller things fall into place.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Sexisms always existed ultimately it's a self correcting problem.

It's been 50,000 years. How much longer are women expected to wait for that self-correction?

 

[Zardnaar]

It's been 50,000 years. How much longer are women expected to wait for that self-correction?

I'll fix that typo. Meant to be a clever point about chudism but it's probably to logans run/dystopian/ straying to far.

 

[Hussar]

Here's a thought. It's late and I've not fully vetted it but -

What if for some the notion of Gygax being a product of his time isn't to excuse his sexism, but rather to excuse D&D for being made by a sexist?

Why do we need to “excuse” any of it?

I mean seriously. What is the purpose of excusing any of it? It happened. We all know it happened. We try to do better now.

The only reason I can see to excuse anything is to make it acceptable in some way.