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.

 

[Older Beholder]

Like it or not - and, inexplicably, some don't - D&D is a game, and as such it by definition has win conditions and loss conditions; even if those win-loss conditions aren't always as black-and-white as in hockey or Monopoly or M:tG. And people don't generally play any game with the specific intention of losing.

The definition of a game: an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun.

 

[Lanefan]

It can be, depending on how you go about it. It also depends on what you mean by "get away with something", which often to me is the players cleverly planning in a way the GM didn't expect. To me, the idea of "getting away with something" is very much a viewpoint of adversarial GMs who feel like their players are trying to do something unfair or trying to neutralize the GM. But I think that comes from looking at things as "us versus them": you say "getting away with" when referring to an opposing team cheating, not in a collaborative game. So I don't really let my players "get away" with things because I work to make sure they are including me in plans rather than trying to get around me.

There's a difference between in-character planning (and as DM I don't at all mind being surprised by their plans, in part becuase in-character as their foes I've no idea what their plans are) and looking for broken spell combo's and - as seen in that other big recent thread - trying to exploit the rule of cool to get away with something that would otherwise be against the rules and-or in-fiction impossible.

I'm also not talking about outright cheating here such as reading the module, funky dice manipulation, etc.; that's a different thing and much easier to deal with.

Exploit in what way? Again, this is a wargaming viewpoint, one I'm familiar with because I wargame all the time. His players were looking for exploits because they were looking to win against the GM, just as Gary was looking to thwart them. If you want to play like that, it's fine: it's a style and a choice, just not for everyone. And I'm not here saying you're trying to make everyone play like that, either. But I think Gary definitely pushed that idea and that's why we have so many people viewing the GM role as an adversarial role, often to the detriment of players who don't like playing that way.

The DM is, at the table, something of an authority figure when in the role of referee; and some people (to a certain point, I'm one such) innately view any authority figure in any role as being an adversary.

I think there's a difference between clever planning and cheating. And I have known cheaters in my life, but I don't really see that as needing an adversarial GM style to deal with. Again, I don't think "challenge" equates with "adversarial". My players certainly look for advantages, but they include me and consult me so that they understand the rules of the universe better rather than trying to make stuff up outside of my sight and then blindside me with it. They don't need to tell me all their plans, but I tell them if it's based on an indirect rules interpretation, run it by me so I can give you a fair idea of what the result should be.

And that's more than fair; and I agree there's a difference between clever planning (good) and cheating (bad). What there also is, however, is a gap between those two things in which falls the sort of exploiting I refer to above.

And that's great, but that's not how I view adversarial GMing. To me, adversarial GMing is like wargaming, playing unfair and using power when you can: you always coup de grace, always fight to the death, etc.

That's one where I think the DM can quite fairly take cues from the players and, in effect, give back what she gets. If the in-character players don't coup-de-grace their foes then I won't necessarily c-d-g the PCs, and so forth.

It also depends on who or what they're fighting: smart foes will do things differently than dumb foes who will do things differently again than mindless foes.

And that's not always what Gary says (again, the wargaming backbone in the rules is how we get ideas like morale, which is something I use all the time, even if it's largely me deciding it rather than rolling), but I don't think that "adversarial" is just "giving the enemies a fair shake" as much as "be as ridiculous as possible to thwart the players".

"Be as ridiculous as possible to thwart the players" is 99% of the time just plain bad DMing, with the other 1% reflecting occasional and avoidable situations where the players really have run themselves in way over their heads.

Adversarial DMing is, to me, playing the foes true to themselves (and the adventure true to itself) without regard for whether that means a PC or even whole party lives or dies; because in that moment you are in fact the PCs' adversary and IMO do the whole thing a disservice if, in order to protect or presever the PCs, you take your foot off the gas. And let's face it, we've all done this at some point or other in our DMing careers. I know I have, and afterwards realized that by doing so I kinda cheapened the whole experience even if the players never knew I'd done it (and from the player side, it's often more obvious than the DM thinks it is).

I dunno, I don't see me at cross-purposes with players when they are trying to solve things. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher and I create things I intend to help people solve all the time, but I don't think it's wrong of me to assist or want the players to overcome challenges. That doesn't mean I straight up give them answers, but I create challenges so that they can be overcome, not for the purposes of frustrating my players.

I create challenges as challenges; and though I might want those challenges to be overcome I don't assume they always will be. I also see now-and-then player-side frustration as a natural outcome of being unable to overcome some challenge or other, and thus I don't sweat it much if at all.

Thanks, by the way, for the thoughtful post I'm quoting here.

 

[Lanefan]

Except that we aren't discussing whether or not Player's fight monster or if they are baking a cake.

The premise Lanefan starts with (And has been consistent with for years) is that players must take every single route possible to push their effectiveness at every turn to the highest possible capabilities, with no considerations beyond winning. To the extent of seeing if they can break the game entirely by being "technically correct. And therefore, in response to that DMs must constantly reign in their players, force them to be weaker, hit them where they are vulnerable, and never give an inch.

No-o-o-t quite.

The players must (or at the very least should) advocate for their characters. Sometimes this advocacy can mean trying to push against the rules and-or the DM; and when they do, the DM should push back. Also, IMO the long-term playability of the campaign is usually considerably more the DM's concern than the players', meaning the DM has to keep that in mind.

The primary player-side consideration is winning - or at least not losing - and why's that? Because doing so means you can continue to play that character in that setting in the manner you want to play it. Lose by dying? Can'y play that character. Lose by getting captured? Can't play that character, at least for a while. Lose by losing all your magic gear? Can't play that character the way you want to . Etc.

DMs shouldn't "constantly ... hit them where they are vulnerable" at all. That's no more fair than constantly avoiding their vulnerabilities.

Which immediately falls apart the moment you consider homebrewing a powerful magic item that ISN'T a monkey's paw designed to ruin the character. Or the moment a player says "you know, using my invisible familiar as a portable hole/Bag of Holding bomber to win every fight is kind of boring... I'm going to stop doing that.

Yes, players want to overcome challenges. Yes, the DM crafts challenges. But the DM crafts the challenge for the player to WIN. Because (especially in earlier and deadlier DnD) the moment the group fails to overcome a challenge and dies... the game is over.

Only if nobody in the group is willing to book it out of there when things really start going sideways.

I craft challenges for players to encounter, in full knowledge that those challenges might just as easily be missed or bypassed. The difficulty of said challenges ranges from trivial to deadly and there's usually some in-fiction clues as to which might be which. But I don't specifically craft those challenges for the players to "WIN", if for no other reason then from the players' side winning all the time gets boring.

And it is very possible that everyone is in agreement in practice of where to be, but the problem is that our words convey different meanings, and some people take you at what you say, not what you mean. I remember a friend who went to a con game with me, run by another friend of mine. That guy loved being an "evil GM" and often would brag about being an adversarial DM. The new friend was deeply offended, because he pointed out that if they were fighting the DM, it was impossible to win, because the DM has infinite resources and can just decide to win. And it threw the other guy for a loop for a minute, because the idea of the DM winning made no sense to him. But, if you are adversarial and fighthing the players.. then you are talking in terms of the you winning or the players winning.

Thing is, when the players lose it doesn't mean I-as-DM win; just like a (non-corrupt!) hockey referee doesn't win regardless of which team in fact does.

Which is why many people have stopped using that framing and that concept, because the DM doesn't win if the player's fail to defeat the boss, or fail to solve the puzzle. The DM wins when the players win and have a great time. And for some players, that includes DRAMA!! and putting their character through a lot of suffering, either in combat or in the story.

The bolded are not tied together, though I suspect some think they are. Players can have a great time while their characters are losing left right and centre - seen this many a time, I have.

 

[Maxperson]

Born in 1908, Novalyne Price was the girlfriend of Robert E. Howard. Born on a farm in Brownwood Texas she became a school teacher in the hopes of becoming a writer and to pay her way through Daniel Baker College. She met Howard in 1933 and looked to him for writing advice. And though she tried to get him into a more committed relationship than friendship and casual dating it never worked.

Robert E. Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster Texas. So it's really safe to say they were contemporaries, right?

She called out Robert E. Howard for being a racist. And his response was to browbeat and berate her for having no idea how actually evil and awful black people "Really" are.

Being born in a specific time period, or living through specific events, definitely shapes who you become. Makes some attitudes more likely. But there are always going to be people who deviate from the norm.

Someone who willingly identifies themself as a bigot and doubles down on their bigotry is someone who deviates from the norm. They're not a "Product of their Time". They're an outright bigot.

Considering Women's Lib had reached national levels several years earlier and was growing ever more popular before it's end in the 80s where it would be supplanted by other feminist movements that took prominence...

I'd say it was probably an "Edgy" joke to make in 1975. Probably on par with people ranting about wokeness.

Agreed for the most part. To quote Brennan Lee Mulligan who was paraphrasing his teacher:

Personality predates ideology. Before you were a fascist you were a bully and an -

Well. I'll cut him off there to avoid the naughty language filter.

The point is that some people ARE mean and cruel and ugly and will latch onto what it's "Okay" to be mean and cruel and ugly about in a given time period.

If Gygax was born in 2001 as a Gen Z kid he'd still be a bigot because he'd still have the need to place himself above others. He probably wouldn't be the sexist that he was, though, because that fell out of favor. He'd probably be a transphobe and homophobe latching on to Joanne Koanne Roanne's grievances while lauding Harry Potter as fantastic writing.

Or, let's be honest, some combination of various bigotries and grievances.


Tiamat was Nammu.

Nammu was the first of the Sumerian Gods. Queen of Primordial Waters, as in the waters of life that allow anything to live, it is she who birthed Ki (Earth) and An (Sky). She was the mother of all things. Her religion was deeply important as a foundational religion for, well, y'know. Everything. And like most goddesses she primarily had priestesses because we find that was pretty traditional when we look at Inanna and her religious following.

How do we know that? Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, priestess of Inanna, and her massive poem/hymn to Inanna which tells us tons about her religion which we can cross-reference with other materials at the time. We also see Nammu's religion fading from prominence with the Akkadian rulership as An, Enki, and Enlil become far more prominent. Particularly Enlil in Nippur which is his hometown. Nippur being considered a must-have for the rulers of the region and even though Uruk is the big city you can't -really- be the King of Kings without Nippur on your trophy wall.

(Though it should be noted that prior to the time of Akkad Inanna was a minor cult deity thrown up into incredible prominence by Enheduanna and Sargon who conflated her with and eventually syncretized her to Ishtar)

Then you get the Gutis, briefly, before the Sumerian Dynasty return when Ur-Nammu, a ruler who is literally named after the goddess of primordial waters in the Sumerian culture, builds Ur 3.

Then come the Ammorites for 300 years before you get to the Babylonians. Specifically the Paleo-Babylonians who conquer it. And with it they bring the story of Marduk and Tiamat. But who is Marduk?

Marduk is a Storm God. Like Enlil. Enlil is the Sumerian god of storms and for the -longest- time he was an incredibly important and central figure in their religious beliefs as well. In fact his Temple in Nippur was seen as the "Rope" holding the heavens and the primordial waters apart so that mortals could live on Earth. The two were seen as so similar and taking the same place that Marduk took all of Enlil's titles and was referred to, by the Babylonians, as "The Enlil of the Gods"

(Sort of like how Ra was the Horus of the Eastern horizon and Horus of the Western horizon and eventually basically ate up the god Horus's whole mythology to syncretize into a single entity, Ra. Or as he was briefly known as Re-Horakhty)

But. Nippur fell out of favor and with it, so did Enlil. His worship was largely supplanted by Inanna (Thanks, Enheduanna!) Enki, and other gods. So when the Babylonians conquered in the name of their god, who they considered the god of heaven the earth and the underworld (Bel Matati) they had to end the slander against Storm Gods. How'd they do it?

They took the name of Enlil off the walls. In Nippur Imgur-Enlil and Nimit-Enlil had been on the walls for a long time. But they were changed to Imgur-Marduk and Nimit-Marduk while Imbur-Enlil and Nimit-Enlil were instead moved to Babylon.

Because they were practically the same character. The ancient mesopotamian beliefs that developed into national gods were still largely shared. They just tended to go "My god's better than your god" and fight wars over it.

But where does that put Tiamat and Nammu? Tiamat was the primordial goddess of the sea who mated with Absu (Groundwater) to birth the gods of the Babylonian pantheon. Nammu, no longer the creator of the world since they had Absu as the god of primordial water, is relegated to the role of one of nine deities who helped to create mankind.

But within the culture of Sumer during the conquest, Nammu was a powerful goddess of water, not the sea. Her temples are strong in the minds of the people. So how do you deal with that? Simple. Tiamat took her place in the story of creation, so kill Tiamat and syncretize Tiamat of Babylon with Nammu of Sumer to break the faith and rebuild it to suit your needs.

Just like you did with Marduk and Enlil when you transferred the names of Enlil to Babylon and Marduk to Nippur.

And then you have Marduk marry Inanna/Ishtar and keep her as his "Queen of Heaven" to put her in a subservient position to him since -her- priesthood was too powerful to easily unseat. Still manages to reduce the relative power of women in society, though, which is largely the point, while spreading word of Marduk's prominence into every temple of Inanna/Ishtar.

Fascinatingly, in the background of all of this happening, you've got Inanna becoming Ishtar becoming Asherah. Same character across different stories and religions, but always the same associations and history. Even into Rome. Asherah had cults in Rome until at least 500CE, making hers the longest continuing religion of the region since it started in Sumer and just kept going. Mostly because she was the -hottest- of all the gods and everyone wanted their chief deity to marry her. Also their kings.

That's not a joke. There was a "Sacred Marriage" ceremony where the high priestess of Inanna/Ishtar would "Marry" the new king of (insert current empire name here) who would act as Dumuzid the shepherd and husband of Inanna. Meanwhile she was considered "Queen of Heaven" 'cause in various myths she's the wife of Marduk of the Babylonians, El of the Canaanites (and previously the Akkadians before they swapped over to Enlil and conquered Sumer), and eventually Adonai of the Israelites.

Anyway. It's kinda beside the point.

The point being that Gygax didn't -have- to use the name Tiamat and didn't -have- to make her the mother of all evil dragons and chaos and stuff, it just fit his sexist presumptions and gave him a 'Fancy Historical Name' to use. Gygax was always going to make an evil dragon queen and a good dragon king and the names didn't matter.

Otherwise he wouldn't have picked the name of a Fish to be the name of his Dragon God. He'd have chosen one of the MANY NAMES of Dragons or Monsters of the Babylonian mythology. Bahamut and Tiamat just sounded cool.

I mean, the name Tiamat is from the Akkadian word for the sea and was a Babylonian goddess who created an army of monsters to kill the other gods and was sometimes portrayed as a dragon. Did Gygax have to pick her and use the name? No, but during that time period there really wasn't a better choice for the evil queen of dragons that I know of.

 

[Lanefan]

The definition of a game: an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun.

That's the definition of a hobby.

A game is something you play that generally has a definable outcome where either one player (or team) wins and the others lose or the end-state result is even and thus nobody wins or loses (a tie).

D&D is confused twice here: once because it's both a hobby and a game, and twice because it has no overall end-point where the win-loss-tie condition can be assessed and instead the wins and losses are scattered throughout play at unpredictable intervals.

 

[Justice and Rule]

There's a difference between in-character planning (and as DM I don't at all mind being surprised by their plans, in part becuase in-character as their foes I've no idea what their plans are) and looking for broken spell combo's and - as seen in that other big recent thread - trying to exploit the rule of cool to get away with something that would otherwise be against the rules and-or in-fiction impossible.

I'm also not talking about outright cheating here such as reading the module, funky dice manipulation, etc.; that's a different thing and much easier to deal with.

Yeah, but that stuff isn't stopped by an adversarial GM, it's encouraged: when you are fighting against someone who has power over the story, you look for anything you can get. When you get away from people feeling like they need to scrap every advantage for every thing because the GM is going to put them in the worst circumstances possible, that is less of a problem.

The DM is, at the table, something of an authority figure when in the role of referee; and some people (to a certain point, I'm one such) innately view any authority figure in any role as being an adversary.

Eh, even then that doesn't equate to adversarial. That has a very specific meaning in this case, one where the GM is trying to win or to beat the players. Giving them adversity (a challenge) is not the same as being adversarial (trying to "win").

And that's more than fair; and I agree there's a difference between clever planning (good) and cheating (bad). What there also is, however, is a gap between those two things in which falls the sort of exploiting I refer to above.

I just don't have that problem as much, I suppose. Part of that is not being adversarial and allowing people to feel comfortable to bring you into their planning, which allows you to both encourage good ideas and nip bad ideas quickly. Like, I just don't see broken combo stuff at my tables as much in any game I play.

That's one where I think the DM can quite fairly take cues from the players and, in effect, give back what she gets. If the in-character players don't coup-de-grace their foes then I won't necessarily c-d-g the PCs, and so forth.

It also depends on who or what they're fighting: smart foes will do things differently than dumb foes who will do things differently again than mindless foes.

Sure, but to me adversarial GMs don't have that off button: that's what they do. And that's also why you get paranoid players, and why I basically announce my GM style up front.

"Be as ridiculous as possible to thwart the players" is 99% of the time just plain bad DMing, with the other 1% reflecting occasional and avoidable situations where the players really have run themselves in way over their heads.

Adversarial DMing is, to me, playing the foes true to themselves (and the adventure true to itself) without regard for whether that means a PC or even whole party lives or dies; because in that moment you are in fact the PCs' adversary and IMO do the whole thing a disservice if, in order to protect or presever the PCs, you take your foot off the gas. And let's face it, we've all done this at some point or other in our DMing careers. I know I have, and afterwards realized that by doing so I kinda cheapened the whole experience even if the players never knew I'd done it (and from the player side, it's often more obvious than the DM thinks it is).

I mean, I see some ridiculousness in the early modules, but again I think that's the sort of "I am the GM and I am the enemy." We're talking about guys who were getting their jollies playing stuff like WRG 4th-5th Edition Ancients, where you're going to have guys getting into very long arguments about every little rule and possible advantage they can get, typically after an enemy has committed to an action (because if you asked to confirm what you thought the situation was, your enemy would hear it and simply not fall into the trap).

And I don't necessarily believe in protecting the PCs, but again I also don't see "If he dies, he dies" as necessarily "adversarial": Again, when I think of adversarial I think a GM who is fighting against the players. To me, that's specific. Challenging them, even TPKing them is not necessarily that (though the latter certainly happens more often in it).

I create challenges as challenges; and though I might want those challenges to be overcome I don't assume they always will be. I also see now-and-then player-side frustration as a natural outcome of being unable to overcome some challenge or other, and thus I don't sweat it much if at all.

Thanks, by the way, for the thoughtful post I'm quoting here.

Nah, it's okay. I get what you are saying, I just don't think it's necessarily "adversarial". I think if the GM isn't playing with the primary objective of beating the players and using the advantages of being a GM to do that, it's missing out on what a truly adversarial GM is. Again, if you're hiding your plans from the GM because they'll change their plans, that's adversarial.

 

[Older Beholder]

That's the definition of a hobby.

A game is something you play that generally has a definable outcome where either one player (or team) wins and the others lose or the end-state result is even and thus nobody wins or loses (a tie).

D&D is confused twice here: once because it's both a hobby and a game, and twice because it has no overall end-point where the win-loss-tie condition can be assessed and instead the wins and losses are scattered throughout play at unpredictable intervals.

Nope, it was the first definition I got when I looked up the word 'game'
You use the word 'generally' meaning often but not always, which is true, games will often have competitive elements, but they are not required to be a game.

There are plenty of video games that doesn't really have a win/lose state...
A couple of examples off the top of my head are: Mountain and Neko Atsume

 

[Steampunkette]

I mean, the name Tiamat is from the Akkadian word for the sea and was a Babylonian goddess who created an army of monsters to kill the other gods and was sometimes portrayed as a dragon. Did Gygax have to pick her and use the name? No, but during that time period there really wasn't a better choice for the evil queen of dragons that I know of.

Tiamat was the name of a goddess of the Sea. Separate from Nammu, the goddess of lifegiving groundwaters. However, the Babylonians transposed Nammu and Tiamat's roles in the creation myth because their religious tradition placed Apsu, a masculine deity, in the position of god of lifegiving groundwaters while Nammu was a separate minor goddess relegated to creating Humanity with the help of 8 other deities.

As the Babylonians did with Enlil and their primary god Marduk, they syncretized Tiamat, who gave birth to various gods after mating with Apsu, with Nammu, who gave birth to those same gods after mating with Anu, god of Sky.

And then Marduk killed Tiamat, who was syncretized to Nammu, as a way to position their religious ideology over that of the Akkadians and the Sumerians and generally all the Mesopotamians who came before and existed around the Babylonian Empire. Since they were mostly working off the same overarching "Core Pantheon" across different cultures.

But yeah. Anyway. It's not relevant to Gygax's choice of making her a 5 headed dragon of Chaos.

Otherwise the "Platinum Dragon", Bahamut, would be a Carp with an Ox on it's back, an Angel on the Ox's back, and the world on the Angel's shoulders.

Dude found a couple of cool names for characters he wanted to create. Made the characters he wanted to create. And then slapped the names on them. The D&D deity Tiamat has nothing more in common with the Mesopotamian Sea Goddess than a name. Everything else is us trying to create a connection or syncretize them.

 

[Parmandur]

 

[Maxperson]

Tiamat was the name of a goddess of the Sea. Separate from Nammu, the goddess of lifegiving groundwaters. However, the Babylonians transposed Nammu and Tiamat's roles in the creation myth because their religious tradition placed Apsu, a masculine deity, in the position of god of lifegiving groundwaters while Nammu was a separate minor goddess relegated to creating Humanity with the help of 8 other deities.

As the Babylonians did with Enlil and their primary god Marduk, they syncretized Tiamat, who gave birth to various gods after mating with Apsu, with Nammu, who gave birth to those same gods after mating with Anu, god of Sky.

And then Marduk killed Tiamat, who was syncretized to Nammu, as a way to position their religious ideology over that of the Akkadians and the Sumerians and generally all the Mesopotamians who came before and existed around the Babylonian Empire. Since they were mostly working off the same overarching "Core Pantheon" across different cultures.

But yeah. Anyway. It's not relevant to Gygax's choice of making her a 5 headed dragon of Chaos.

Otherwise the "Platinum Dragon", Bahamut, would be a Carp with an Ox on it's back, an Angel on the Ox's back, and the world on the Angel's shoulders.

Dude found a couple of cool names for characters he wanted to create. Made the characters he wanted to create. And then slapped the names on them. The D&D deity Tiamat has nothing more in common with the Mesopotamian Sea Goddess than a name. Everything else is us trying to create a connection or syncretize them.

Gygax is very, very well known for reaching into mythology to come up with things.

I can very easily see a scenario where he's like, "I need to make rulers for the good and evil dragons." Then he proceeds to scour mythology books and talk to mythology professors until he finds Tiamat(female) who is sometimes depicted as a dragon(perfect!) and created a lot of monsters(she will also be the mother of those she rules) to kill the other gods(evil!) and since she is the mother of the chromatic dragons, she will have one head for each of them to depict it.

Now that he has the Tiamat the evil mother of dragons he needs a ruler for the good dragons. After scouring sources he finds nothing. Since good and evil are opposites, he makes her opposite. Female becomes male. CE becomes LG. He makes him platinum since it's more valuable than gold and invents a name. No bigotry there at all(not that I'm saying he wasn't a bigot).

I find that scenario far more likely and believable than him sitting down and being like, "Women evil! Men good!" Without some sort of concrete evidence that he chose the two rules out of bigotry, we can't assume that he did so. The Tiamat example is an example of people looking for something and forcing what could possibly be rooted in bigotry and declaring it to absolutely be so. You can't do that. Gygax was a bigot and that doubling down was very bad, but not everything he did with female and male is rooted in that bigotry.