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.

 

[TiQuinn]

Actually, it seemed to be supposition based on actual direct quotes leading up to when he died. We obviously don't know what he would have thought about 4e or 5e. But since it seems pretty clear he was consistent in his views throughout his life, up until his death (and he was active here right until the end) I really don't see that was an unfair extrapolation.

About what, though?

About women in the hobby? I mean, 40% of the gamer base now according to WotC is women. D&D took off in sales in a way that Gygax never would've dreamed possible in the years after he died. How would he have reacted to those two facts?

Would he have been a jerk about it? Very possible, but I don't know that.

Would it have changed his views? Look, one of the things that I truly believe, and I think it's a point that is absolutely missed by the "product of his time" argument - people CAN and do change. Viewpoints soften and harden over time. No one is monolith, and I reject the idea that someone is going to just be a sexist their entire life because that's the environment they grew up in.

So, no, I don't think it's fair or worthwhile to guess what Gygax would've said. We'd just be projecting our own feelings at this point onto someone else. I hold Gygax accountable for things he said in the time he was alive, not the things we "think" he "might" have said after he died.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The 1970s were progressive, feminist, and visionary. Remember, the 70s also gave us Apocalypse Now. The Godfather. A Doll's House. The Stepford Wives. Wonder Woman. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Rocky. Enter the Dragon. Patton....

I am not weighing in on the present debate about 1970s culture as a whole (I was born in the mid-70s and have a sense of what it was like from things people told me, what I have read and watched, but I haven't done a gallup poll or anything and don't have a particularly strong emotional investment in the issue). But when it comes to movies, while I agree there was a lot of progressive thought in the air (you mention Rosemary's Baby and that is pretty much a feminist movie), some of these other entries feel a little more gray to me (they are still great movies, I just don't think they are necessarily super progressive). Also this was also the decade that gave us Dirty Harry and Death Wish. Rocky is a great movie, but Stallone is notoriously conservative, and the script was inspired by the Chuck Wepner fight with Muhammad Ali. There is a certain amount of great white hope to it. Enter the Dragon has women sex slaves (it too is an incredible movie and ahead of its time in many ways but it is ultimately a macho film). The Godfather is as patriarchal as it gets. Talia Shiver is a battered wife in that film, and Sonny's attempt to intervene in that are what lead to his death (and in Rocky she is also in an abusive situation with her alcoholic brother, and while it doesn't flinch from his behavior, he is also otherwise presented as a kind of likable but deeply flawed character). In part II Michael slaps his wife in the face for having an abortion. Obviously these films have nuance and are often character studies or people living in a morally gray world, but I think it is a little simplistic to file some of these as being firmly progressive films. I think something 70s films often did that a lot of folks in this thread might have a hard time with is they often follow very morally questionable characters without passing judgement on them

 

[Umbran]

Call it the "Trout of Righteousness", I just see it as knowing who someone was.

You don't know who someone was by listing out all the ways they screwed up.

When the approach becomes more about how horrible the person was, instead of how to make the future better, then it is more about being righteous than about making the world a better place. Because, in the end, exactly how sexist Gary was really isn't the important bit. How we work the sexism out of our games is.

I find it important to know these things when discussing what came before it because, given how often people appeal to the tradition and talk about how it was like things, it's good to know where it comes from.

There is a limit to how much good comes from castigating a dead man for his wickedness. Once you'd documented some clear instances, the point is made. Further listing of sins may technically be accurate, but it engages the very fannish emotional reaction you say you don't want.

No, I completely disagree with this. You can be a fan and still think critically, and indeed plenty of people in this thread are doing so right now:

And in this you miss the point.

You yourself said that we need to go beyond fannish thinking - the implication there that we haven't yet done so. Ergo, you should expect fannish thinking, to start with.

Yes, some folks will be able to immediately and without any help jump to where you want them to be - but your approach should not assume that behavior - because your thesis is that we don't currently exhibit it! If you do assume that jump, that's on you, not on the folks who don't jump at your command.

 

[Steampunkette]

About what, though?

About women in the hobby? I mean, 40% of the gamer base now according to WotC is women. D&D took off in sales in a way that Gygax never would've dreamed possible in the years after he died. How would he have reacted to those two facts?

Would he have been a jerk about it? Very possible, but I don't know that.

Would it have changed his views? Look, one of the things that I truly believe, and I think it's a point that is absolutely missed by the "product of his time" argument - people CAN and do change. Viewpoints soften and harden over time. No one is monolith, and I reject the idea that someone is going to just be a sexist their entire life because that's the environment they grew up in.

So, no, I don't think it's fair or worthwhile to guess what Gygax would've said. We'd just be projecting our own feelings at this point onto someone else. I hold Gygax accountable for things he said in the time he was alive, not the things we "think" he "might" have said after he died.

Have you read the things he said?

He died in 2008. In 2005 he said he was a "Biological Determinist" and that women -couldn't- get the same joy from TTRPGs that men could. He used pseudo-science to back up his bigotry 3 years before the end, and it was a clear continuing arc from his first recorded statements 'til the end of his life.

He said that stuff on -THIS- forum.

Women who played at his table describe being "Begrudgingly Tolerated". It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand the guy was not a fan of women.

So me being a woman is already putting me in the "Begrudgingly Tolerated" category. The fact that the number was at 40% wouldn't have had any effect on that because he "Knew Better" than anyone else. He said as much in a forum post I presented, earlier.

He's also said, repeatedly, snide comments about Women's Liberation and Political Correctness. So it's fair to say he'd dislike playing with a feminist or someone he'd consider "Too PC".

He's also made it clear he prefers "Kill 'em, loot 'em, find more stuff" and doesn't enjoy Roleplaying. So he wouldn't want to play with me since I do a lot of Roleplaying.

This is not difficult to extract from his REPEATED STATEMENTS that were clearly firmly held from at least the age of 36 to the end of his life.

And since the hobby is, according to a lot of people, "Going Woke", which is everything here he didn't like... well. I dunno. Maybe you're a rocket surgeon and it comes as easily as breathing.

 

[Umbran]

I mean, I feel like the moderation of this site goes against the expectation you are giving, since if people were to give the same sort of reactive backlash I would expect you'd be handing out thread bans for it.

Mod Note:
Commenting on moderation directly to my face is a really great way to get yourself one of those threadbans.

Your smiles and winks don't make it okay. Do not do this again.

 

[mamba]

So 3e was too combat centric for Gary, but he told a player there would be no role playing.

that is not mutually exclusive, I guess he wants more puzzles / riddles, more traps, and generally more poking around with a 10 foot pole

 

[TiQuinn]

Have you read the things he said?

Have you noticed that I went back and reposted a number of those things he said?

He died in 2008. In 2005 he said he was a "Biological Determinist" and that women -couldn't- get the same joy from TTRPGs that men could. He used pseudo-science to back up his bigotry 3 years before the end, and it was a clear continuing arc from his first recorded statements 'til the end of his life.

I'm aware. I've talked about that at length.

So me being a woman is already putting me in the "Begrudgingly Tolerated" category. The fact that the number was at 40% wouldn't have had any effect on that because he "Knew Better" than anyone else. He said as much in a forum post I presented, earlier.

And here's where we disagree. You do not know this. You surmise this would have been his response. Everything that has been discussed about Gygax up til this point was fact. This is not.

And since the hobby is, according to a lot of people, "Going Woke", which is everything here he didn't like... well. I dunno. Maybe you're a rocket surgeon and it comes as easily as breathing.

I don't know what that last part is supposed to mean.

 

[Justice and Rule]

You don't know who someone was by listing out all the ways they screwed up.

When the approach becomes more about how horrible the person was, instead of how to make the future better, then it is more about being righteous than about making the world a better place. Because, in the end, exactly how sexist Gary was really isn't the important bit. How we work the sexism out of our games is.

This is true in the broader sense, but I think when a bunch of people are going around online defending Gary's honor over a disclaimer, then this sort of response is warranted. I don't think we always need to bring this up with everything and certainly not at random, as I've said in other posts. But in this case, with so many people trying to downplay it, it's necessary. There's a time and a place, and to me this is one of those times.

There is a limit to how much good comes from castigating a dead man for his wickedness. Once you'd documented some clear instances, the point is made. Further listing of sins may technically be accurate, but it engages the very fannish emotional reaction you say you don't want.

Sure, but that's not what sparked this: a historical take on the history of D&D with a disclaimer sparked this. This didn't start out as someone castigating Gary's views, but rather started with people saying "Look, some of these people have views that aren't great" and then the backlash around people denying it. The fannish reaction is to something incredibly minor and pedestrian, and Riggs' response to show Gary's shortcomings are directly in response to the denials by those people.

If no one said anything about the disclaimer, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It was the backlash and denials that precipitated people coming out to set the record straight.

And in this you miss the point.

You yourself said that we need to go beyond fannish thinking - the implication there that we haven't yet done so. Ergo, you should expect fannish thinking, to start with.

I mean, I can expect people to fail to live up to my expectations, but that shouldn't change my expectations. Even if people don't always act like adults doesn't mean I shouldn't have a natural expectation of it.

Yes, some folks will be able to immediately and without any help jump to where you want them to be - but your approach should not assume that behavior - because your thesis is that we don't currently exhibit it! If you do assume that jump, that's on you, not on the folks who don't jump at your command.

With this situation, I'm not assuming behavior because the behavior happened before I got here: this is not a situation where I'm the initiator, I'm the reactor. I'm really observing behavior and commenting that we shouldn't cater to this sort of thing. I'm not asking people to jump on my command, I'm saying that the current outrage is not how people should act.

At a certain point, the people who are outraged at the disclaimer are responsible for their actions. For me, I think we should say that this is an inappropriate and disproportional response to what they are responding to. I don't think that's particularly controversial. I'm not sure what else I can do beyond attempt to correct things, and I definitely don't see people being fans as an excuse for indulging in the bad behaviors we see online that sparked Ben Riggs to make this thread.

 

[mamba]

And here's where we disagree. You do not know this. You surmise this would have been his response.

no one knows this, but it seems a reasonable conclusion. It is certainly better supported by what we do know than expecting him to change

Everything that has been discussed about Gygax up til this point was fact. This is not.

no one said it was fact, it obviously cannot be

 

[TiQuinn]

no one knows this, but it seems a reasonable conclusion. It is certainly better supported by what we do know than expecting him to change


no one said it was fact, it obviously cannot be

Knock yourselves out then, but I feel that it gets closer to just having a hate-on for Gygax when you're surmising what he would've said than focusing on what he did say in the time he was alive.