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.

 

[Lanefan]

SOME of his advice is reasonable in that context. Other advice is just over the top and dumb. Like the advice about screwing over Thieves at every opportunity. Or assuming anyone who wants to play a monster PC is a basically a jerk power gamer and that it's basically always bad for the game.

I don't agree with screwing over Thieves all the time but do agree that monsters should not be player characters except in highly unusual circumstances. That, and the few times IME a player has asked to play a monster as PC a little questioning has found that it has in fact been for power reasons.

"or without"? Absolute nonsense. My players have no need or desire to cheat. If you instill that desire in them, IMO you're Doing it Wrong, much as I hate to use the phrase. All good if you're all having fun with it, but it's Not For Me, Thanks.

You saw that big long "rule of cool" thread last month, right? The example in the first post was of a player having a character do a 30-foot pole vault using a 5-foot pole, in order to get on top of a (dragon?); a cool action, sure, but breaking a bunch of established rules in the process.

That's the sort of thing I mean when I say "or without" the rules: players trying some shot like this and hoping the DM lets it happen, because if it happens once it can happen again. The DM's just gotta push back here and say "That's not gonna work".

Some of it was just bad and misguided advice, such as screwing over the poor pathetic Thieves at every turn, rather than explaining to DMs how to referee them so that they were useful and viable despite their terrible skill percentages and bad saves. Or his "do as I say, not as I do" advise on being super stingy with magic items, which implied being far more tightfisted than his modules were. Or his batspit insane advise on Wishes, particularly on them and ability scores, which again only make sense if you understand that he and his groups must have handed out Wishes like candy.

He was running games that had MUs of high enough level to hard-cast Wish whenever they felt like it, so of course he had to rein it in. That, and there's also numerous other ways for wishes to occur in the game: luck blades, Genie encounters, Decks of Many Things, Bag of Beans, rings of three wishes, etc. - they're not as uncommon as it might seem.

Never mind that PCs might think to go and pay an NPC to cast a wish for them, if the DM allows such.

There was an X-Files episode where the whole plot revolved around the idea of inaccurate wish wording.

 

[TiQuinn]

Even as written, they could have had the room filled with gas to knock out the entire party rather than have buff bosses beat the party into submission. I enjoyed the tough battle though, and I do recall it was the first time the players "lost" a fight and had to reassure them they were not all dead.

Am I completely misremembering this? I thought that is what it did - you are held in some room that has a magical knockout gas or something to that effect. This occurs after beating some of the boss slave lords.

 

[Mannahnin]

He was running games that had MUs of high enough level to hard-cast Wish whenever they felt like it, so of course he had to rein it in. That, and there's also numerous other ways for wishes to occur in the game: luck blades, Genie encounters, Decks of Many Things, Bag of Beans, rings of three wishes, etc. - they're not as uncommon as it might seem.

Pfft.

In OD&D, once Greyhawk arrives and makes the spell available, you get the possibility of casting Wish at 18th level, but doing so nullifies all your magic powers for 2-8 days. (Greyhawk page 28)

In AD&D it's also 18th, and the spell instead weakens you and puts you helpless in need of bed rest for 2-8 days, unless it's used to escape danger, restore HP, or raise someone from the dead. (PH 94) It also ages you three years. (DMG p13)

No one's casting it willy-nilly whenever they feel like it under those rules.

Also in AD&D, once an ability score is at 16 or above it takes TEN wishes to raise an ability score a single point! TEN WISHES. (DMG p11)

Gary in TSR V2#2, 1976:

It requires no careful study to determine that D & D is aimed at progression which is geared to the approach noted above. There are no monsters to challenge the capabilities of 30th level lords, 40th level patriarchs, and so on. Now I know ofthe games played at CalTech where the rules have been expanded and changed to reflect incredibly high levels, comic book characters and spells, and so on. Okay. Different strokes for different folks, but that is not D & D. While D & D is pretty flexible, that sort of thing stretches it too far, and the boys out there are playing something entirely different — perhaps their own name “Dungeons & Beavers,”tells it best.

It is reasonable to calculate that if a fair player takes part in 50 to 75 games in the course of a year he should acquire sufficient experience points to make him about 9th to 11th level, assuming that he manages to survive all thatplay. The acquisition of successively higher levels will be proportionate to enhanced power and the number of experience points necessary to attain them, so another year of play will by no means mean a doubling of levels but rather the addition of perhaps two or three levels. Using this gauge, it should take four or five years to see 20th level. As BLACKMOOR is the only campaign with a life of five years, andGREYHAWK with a life of four is the second longest running campaign, the most able adventurers should not yet have attained 20th level except in the two named campaigns. To my certain knowledge no player in either BLACKMOOR or GREYHAWK has risen above 14th level.

While I think he did continue running some regular games for a couple more years after that, the idea that he had a bunch of 18th level M-Us running around in 1978 or '79 seems insupportable.

I'm open to you providing sources and quotes, though!

The rules on DMG p11 strongly imply that wishes were given out like candy in the 70s games in Lake Geneva. It's an absolute mug's game to use cast spell Wishes on ability scores.

 

[Lanefan]

So this ends up feeling like something different to me, and this could be a case of you conflating many things I divide. Looking at the rules in terms of long-term playability is not adversarial DMing to me. I have had many times the players want to press the rules in weird ways, or to shift something in the rules. And when I look at something holistically and see that it would harm the game, I tell them that. I will inform them, "hey this seems like a cool idea, but it would break things long term, so I don't think we should do it". And in this "mode" I have acted both as a DM, and as a fellow player.

And in doing so you've just pushed back as DM. Perfect.

At some tables (maybe including yours) this would be accepted and everyone just carries on. At others where people are more stubborn there'd be an argument - I'm very, very used to this - until eventually the DM has no choice but to say something like "This is my ruling, and I am god: abide or die."

And I see this conflation/division here again. Dead? Yep, I agree you can't play your character. Captured? Well... no, you can still play your character. We recently had a session in one game where two of our party members were captured, and they were still active participants in the story. Losing Gear? You can still play your character, though it can suck.

How do you play a captured character other than:

DM: "What do you do now?"
Player(s): "Given that we're near-naked, bound, and locked in, we stay put until someone comes that we can talk to."

Keep in mind that ideally the players of the captured characters don't know what the rest of the party is doing, and vice-versa.

And I think the gear is where there is a dividing line. I once had a DM who had us fight a Beholder who was backed up by Rust Monsters. This was maybe three sessions after we had just gotten brand-new high level magic gear. And the DM pointed out that, intentionally, this fight could destroy our new gear, by stripping the magic that protected it and having the rust monsters eat it. I despised that fight. The beholder came out of nowhere, the fight wasn't hard, it was just a quick scramble to not have our brand new gear destroyed. That felt like adversarial DMing, because the goal of the entire encounter was simply to destroy our stuff. Meanwhile, in another recent campaign (the same with the prison) we currently have a powerful magical item in our party that the DM has tried to swipe or force us to give up two or three times. However, each time it made perfect sense within the story. The item is the symbol of the royal family, and the reason we want it is to hide us from our enemy, but other people have other motivations for getting it. And, even if we lose it... our characters still function the same, with the same tricks, we just have a new challenge to deal with.

I think there is a reason incredibly few monsters and essentially nothing else affects gear. It is a legacy holdover from a time when destroying the player's stuff was far more acceptable. I don't like breaking my player's stuff, because it isn't interesting, and it erases the hard-work they put into getting it.

I much prefer the easy-come easy-go model of 1e, where there's lots of items to be found but they're also relatively easy to destroy. The beholder-rust monster fight you describe sounds a bit over the top; the DM could have achieved much the same end by simply fireballing you all a few times and - when you failed your saves - letting your geat melt down when it too started failing saves.

Doesn't matter. IF only the thief makes it out, the story that was being formed is already dead. Unless he makes it out, gets all the bodies, drags them to a temple, revives everyone.... and by that point, isn't it just faster to handwave that entire process? Or have the party TPK and then wake up in the temple being revived because someone else did that?

I've only ever DMed one true TPK, but I can think of at least half a dozen occasions where of a party of 6-10 characters there was one survivor, or maybe two. The game and campaign continued each time.

I have played in many a group where we had to replace a PC, and it is always awkward, because the new PC no matter what else has happened, does not have the same story hooks as the rest of the party. And there can even be unique story hooks lost if only a single PC dies, that drastically shifts around the plans and future events.

The trick is to focus on the story (or mission, whatever) of the party as an entity; which can resemble a Ship of Theseus as its parts (the characters) come and go for various reasons. "You're new to this party? Good. Here's what we're doing, and why. Tell us your adventuring capabilities now; we'll get to know you otherwise over beer once we're back in town."

You know, people say this all the time. That is would be boring if the player's always win. But that is just factually untrue. But it depends on a few definitions to be agreed on. Winning is different from succeeding on every single skill check.

I've been in games where we never lost, and it was still a blast. Because it isn't about needing to lose to have fun, it is about the challenge. PLayers who are never challenged will not have fun, that is true. But, a well-crafted challenge ends with the players victorious. You ca never lose, and still be challenged in every fight, and that feels AMAZING. I think people misunderstand when we talk about not having character death (aka preventing loss) that this means there is no challenge. But that isn't true. Because challenge takes many forms, and it is easy to add WITHOUT PC death being on the table.

If the DM/game doesn't follow through now and then on the threats presented then sooner or later they aren't really seen as threats any more, and once this happens play can degenerate in a real hurry.

Right, but if you keep using the language of "I am adversarial because my players want to win and I want to stop them from winning" people see that language and hear "my job as the DM is to try and win". And we've seen this. RPG horror stories are filled with this. And it stems from this language, in part, because it sets up the dynamic of opposing sides and and opposing teams, each seeking victory.

But that isn't the role of the DM.

Maybe I should put it a bit differently: it's the players' job to try to win the game; it's the DM's job to win the at-table arguments.

It depends what you mean by losing. I've seen players have a great time failing at ability checks. I've rarely seen players have a great time being reduced to a bloody smear by a powerful monster they can't win against.

The first adventure in my current game was Keep on the Borderlands. Four players (all experienced players but two of them new to our crew at the time), two PCs each most of the time.

Over 20-odd sessions they lost 22 characters (!) in that disaster of an adventure and I don't think any of us stopped laughing the whole time. Crazy, gonzo, anything-goes adventuring by a party who collectively didn't have a clue but kept banging away regardless. Wonderful stuff!

Stories from that mess (which was 16 years ago, now) still get told and laughed about. And to me, that's what's important: the fun in the moment and the stories that last for years later.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Am I completely misremembering this? I thought that is what it did - you are held in some room that has a magical knockout gas or something to that effect. This occurs after beating some of the boss slave lords.

They have such a good battle strategy and buffed stats that they made short work of the party before any gas was needed. That might have been the “if the slavelords are losing section.” I’ll have to look at it again but It might have been better just to skip straight to the gas.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Because people want to argue that the name itself and the role of chaotic evil queen is or is not sexist, instead of Gygax being sexist. People keep picking that nit, because it is weak evidence.

The D&D Community should never get into detective work.

Dude walks in drenched in blood, dressed in a clown outfit, carrying a corpse and a knife and people will spend DAYS ignoring his pleas for someone to stop him before he kills again trying to decide if they're dressed as a jester or a clown and suggesting that jesters can't possibly kill people. And never once try to see who the victim is of course.

But bloody knives aren't evidence if you don't want them to be anyway.

 

[Cadence]

The D&D Community should never get into detective work.

Dude walks in drenched in blood, dressed in a clown outfit, carrying a corpse and a knife and people will spend DAYS ignoring his pleas for someone to stop him before he kills again trying to decide if they're dressed as a jester or a clown and suggesting that jesters can't possibly kill people. And never once try to see who the victim is of course.

But bloody knives aren't evidence if you don't want them to be anyway.

I mean, I thought it was convincingly shown the clown/jester was a murderer on page 1 of the thread. What's left but quibbling about details? (Isn't quibbling about something tangential de rigueur on ENWorld).

 

[DarkCrisis]

The D&D Community should never get into detective work.

Dude walks in drenched in blood, dressed in a clown outfit, carrying a corpse and a knife and people will spend DAYS ignoring his pleas for someone to stop him before he kills again trying to decide if they're dressed as a jester or a clown and suggesting that jesters can't possibly kill people. And never once try to see who the victim is of course.

But bloody knives aren't evidence if you don't want them to be anyway.

There is far better evidence than the Evil Queen thing. Like him admiting it. Dude may have watched Snow White before creating Tiamat.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There is far better evidence than the Evil Queen thing. Like him admiting it. Dude may have watched Snow White before creating Tiamat.

Is this a joke or are you somehow not getting that you are 100% proving @Vaalingrade's point?

This dude literally put a "Haha screw you dumb broads who think equality is important" in the TEXT not the subtext. But your post attempts to put in some ludicrous alternative reason despite that.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Is this a joke or are you somehow not getting that you are 100% proving @Vaalingrade's point?

This dude literally put a "Haha screw you dumb broads who think equality is important" in the TEXT not the subtext. But your post attempts to put in some ludicrous alternative reason despite that.

Which was written after he created the character.

The only one who knows what Gary was thinking when he made Tiamat is Gary and he’s not answering questions right now.