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.

 

[payn]

I find it incredibly depressing to think that fans of D&D are such people, that when we acknowledge the sexism in early D&D and by its creator, we should somehow expect them to "trample" the messenger in a fury. Especially with how blatantly obvious Gygax's sexism is.

I hold all fandoms to a higher standard than that. A fan means you enjoy the work, not that you cannot bear the thought of the work's creator being criticized for their actions.

Culture overshadows everything.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I actually don't feel that "the cultural context was different in the 1970s" is an obvious statement to everyone. I think "these statements are sexist" is the obvious statement, personally, and I am confused at how adding context comes across to you as excusing. I accept that you read it that way, but I don't understand why you can't separate the two things.


I read that and understood it. I snipped it because moral judgment, setting examples, etc., were completely beside the point from my point of view.


But I never said we couldn't judge someone for being sexist. When people took that from my mentioning the historical context, I even explicitly said that wasn't what I meant. I am frustrated that you continue to accuse me of saying this.


You don't need context in order to make a moral judgment. I thought that went without saying. But there are other angles to examine the subject from, apart from moral judgment.


I am frustrated that you keep reading "you can't judge" or "we MUST give grace" into a simple statement that times have changed. As I said above, I think the change in reception is interesting and worth noting in its own right, as a completely separate topic from the moral judgment.


I don't get why you think that simply noting changes in outlook between different time periods must always be accompanied by a moral evaluation/judgment/lesson or that the absence of one is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Your point of view, as you keep insisting is that times change, and that because they change that provides context that Gygax's writings would have been received differently.

My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable.

You agree, they are completely unacceptable.... but we must understand that times change and there are other angles to consider his writing from

My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable.

You agree, they are completely unacceptable... but you just think it is a very interesting thing to note that times change and that things that are unacceptable now weren't always unacceptable.

My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable.

You absolutely agree... but there are just simply changes in the outlook between time periods and we really should be aware that these things were not always considered to be unacceptable.

My position doesn't need the "but". I don't need to consider the fact that people in times before today held different views on sexism. I am PAINFULLY aware of that fact. I am PAINFULLY aware of the fact that people hold some of those same views today. There are people right now, who I am related to by blood, who truly do not believe in equal rights for women. They believe that it is their right to own women, in at least some sense. You don't need to tell me that some "good ol boys" from middle America might have been just laughing it up as they mocked Women's Lib for getting upset with them. You don't need to explain that fifty years ago, "locker room" talk was far more acceptable in public than it is now. You don't need to keep trying to just give context to the behavior. The current fight being fought right now is plenty for me to know those things.

My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable. I don't care what other people thought 50 years ago about his remarks, I don't care what people in other countries thought about his remarks. I don't don't care what people today think about his remarks. My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable.

 

[mamba]

I'm feeling frustrated again because I have been consistent throughout this thread in saying there was no one single "average joe" opinion in the 1970s.

you made him part of the mainstream opinion. Average Joe means that, not that there are no outliers, only that he was not one.

Plenty of people saw things differently from the way Gygax did at the time, and some of them challenged his statements.

not relevant to this

Plenty of others agreed with him and, beyond having some arguments with the first group, didn't especially suffer for it.

yep, hence the average Joe comment… how does that make what he said any better?

 

[jayoungr]

Your point of view, as you keep insisting is that times change, and that because they change that provides context that Gygax's writings would have been received differently.

My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable.

The two are not mutually exclusive!

My position doesn't need the "but".

I don't see it as "but." I see it as "and."

My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable. I don't care what other people thought 50 years ago about his remarks, I don't care what people in other countries thought about his remarks. I don't don't care what people today think about his remarks. My position is that Gygax's sexist remarks are unacceptable.

If that is the ONLY thing that you want to talk about, then fine.

 

[Zardnaar]

Guys new epic level monster just dropped. Bar'ri Goldeater, Ancient Red Dragon, come to burn down your villages. His surprising weakness? Daisies.

Autocorrect dammit.

 

[jayoungr]

you made him part of the mainstream opinion.

One thread of mainstream opinion that was in opposition to others.

Average Joe means that, not that there are no outliers, only that he was not one.

Do you think he was an outlier for the 1970s?

not relevant to this

How is it irrelevant to the point that there were multiple viewpoints in dialogue throughout the 1970s?

yep, hence the average Joe comment… how does that make what he said any better?

It doesn't. What do you need me to say in order for you to believe that me thinking about how things were different in the 1970s is not me defending the statements?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Thanks Chaosmancer!

But someone on this site came up with something rather creative regarding the origin of Tiamat whereby she didn't start off inherently evil. I remember there were more colours but only those 5 chromatic remained after some catastrophe.
I only read it once, and my memory is rubbish, but I did bookmark/favourite it and now it seems it is lost in the ether of my bad admin.

The only reason I brought it up was because of that business with Gygax/Tiamat and @Krachek's post. I'll probably find it one day, once this thread has blown over.

Oooh, that does sound interesting. I recently saw something about her having five heads as a connection to singing the world into existence, and being her own choir, which I thought was a fantastic idea to swipe.

 

[mamba]

I don't even know how to respond to this. To me, your restatement is coming really out of left field.

didn’t you say he only made them this ‘carelessly’ because he knew there would not be / did not expect much pushback

At most, I'm saying that the lack of social consequences meant that he took less care in phrasing his thoughts

and probably some other cases

And again, he did take care in his phrasing, he just did not bother hiding his misogyny. So you are in fact saying he would have hidden it better

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Witholding your fellow human the most basic of consideration and decency never is ok and never was; not now, not in the 70's not in 4000 b.c.

That it was accepted by the leading caste, well hidden at the bar or behind fake smiles, that is was begrudgingly accepted or proudly claimed in an old magazine is not only no excuse, it is irrelevant.

 

[Krachek]

I wouldn't even give Gygax -that- ground of imagining he might have considered Tiamat being the evil dragon queen of chaos meant "Girl Power" or "Women can be Strong"

Based on -everything else- it was just "Look! Women are evil! Men are good! FITE ME!"

Indeed Gygax wasn’t thinking in term of girl’s power.
So he tricks himself giving to Women one of his most famous and iconic monster!