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.”

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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.

 

[Hussar]

Here electricians and plumbers are a tertiary level qualification.

But not a degree. It’s two years of community college.

 

[Zardnaar]

But not a degree. It’s two years of community college.

Polytechnic here. Better than most degrees as well.
Also I said formal qualification not degree. Nice strawman.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Polytechnic here. Better than most degrees as well.

I would say it is probably even more important your electrician or plumber be properly trained/apprenticed and licensed than your historian . My folks had to rewire a whole house when they discovered the previous owner had done the electric wiring himself. Here I am pretty sure both require a certain number hours of apprenticeship (and there may be coursework requirements as well).

 

[Zardnaar]

I would say it is probably even more important your electrician or plumber be properly trained/apprenticed and licensed than your historian . My folks had to rewire a whole house when they discovered the previous owner had done the electric wiring himself. Here I am pretty sure both require a certain number hours of apprenticeship (and there may be coursework requirements as well).

Yp you have a handyman and tradie here. There's a difference.

I think a lot of polytechnic qualifications beat most degrees for a career outside the top ones. Alot of degrees are essentially useless.

 

[ColinChapman]

Perhaps all responses to new posts trying to defend Gygax should be copy-pasted?

Something like:

Hey there,
1) This thread is about the fact that folks were hugely outraged (to the point of lying and attacking the historians) about a small disclaimer in a huge book otherwise lauding Gary and co. about the early history of D&D's creation.
2) The disclaimer noted some of the historical work didn't reflect modern values, and was wrong then and now. Said disclaimer didn't name Gary, by the way. It was pretty standard as disclaimers go, and wasn't otherwise remarkable (except for the histrionics it provoked in those defending Gary).
3) The facts are undeniable: Gary was sexist as was some of the material in the original game. Even by his own admission! He received pushback in the 70s and continued to hold the same ideas well into the 2000s, until he died. He said women can't really enjoy RPGs like men, ad nauseum. This thread is FULL of evidence.
4) The "man of his times" argument has been examined and debunked. The "Tiamat was a Babylonian goddess" argument has been examined and debunked. Countless whataboutisms and strawmen have been shattered. Nits have been picked in the manner of fastidious chimpanzees. Hairs have been split so finely that nuclear warnings were issued. We also really don't need to know that you don't care (seriously... spending time writing that you don't care, shows that you actually do).
5) No one has said you can't appreciate the man, his work, or that his flaws (of which sexism was just one) are the sum total of who he was. No one is calling to cancel anything or anyone, or called anyone bad for enjoying older works, "warts and all." Only one group has reacted with ridiculous outrage and condemnation: those so desperate to defend Gary that they shrieked about a minor, accurate disclaimer, attacked the writers, ignored the evidence, and generally behaved like perpetually offended reactionaries.

So, what's really left, you might wonder?
It really is pretty simple:
Q; Was Gary Gygax sexist (and was some of the older material dodgy and wrong, both then and now)? Thus validating the disclaimer.
A: Irrefutably, Yes. At the time, now, in his own words, and in a LOT of evidence (including from the man himself) in this thread. The disclaimer was correct and mild. The reactionaries were wrong.

Logical Result: Accept it as what it is (a true historical fact, of interest to some but maybe not you), ensure your knickers aren't twisted, and get on with enjoying your gaming.

Illogical Results: a) Disagree that Gygax is sexist despite overwhelming evidence and still be personally aggrieved. b) Actually agree that he is, but still be determined to "win an argument on the internet", insistent on splitting hairs beyond the molecular level/moving goalposts to a neighbouring continent/picking that nit until the scalp bleeds profusely.

 

[Maxperson]

In 1975, when he invented the monster, she was a big evil female opposite to the big good male dragon king, but neither of them had a name from real world mythology. So you've missed an important data point. He made up an evil opposite number to his good male dragon king, made a crack about Women's Lib explicitly acknowledging that he was aware of the implications and didn't care, and only two years later retroactively attached the name of a real world female deity to her.

He made the women's lib crack in that paragraph, yes, but that doesn't mean that he created Tiamat* with that sexism in mind. Perhaps he received complaints about Tiamat*and was upset about those comments when he wrote that. That doesn't excuse what he wrote, but it still isn't certain that he created Tiamat* with sexism in mind. Maybe he was irritated by something else when he picked Tiamat* to be the focus of his comment. Or perhaps he was being deliberately sexist when he created her. We can't be certain about why he did what he did, because there are many plausible reasons for her creation, only some of which are sexist.

If you buy a hunting rifle and eventually shoot your neighbor with it, that doesn't mean that you bought it for that purpose. You might have, but you also might have purchased it for hunting and just used it for that purpose later because you were mad at your neighbor.

*Yes I know she didn't have that name then.

 

[Lanefan]

I will drop this because I don't want to derail the thread further but this really isn't that crazy and I feel like I have taken a lot of effort to make clear this isn't about preventing people from writing histories. We do this all the time in discussions around topics involving expertise where distinctions are made between peer reviewed university books and popular books. It is about when that title matters in terms of expertise and the degree of trust we should be putting in sources. My point it is this a label I general reserve for academically vetted historical research. I don't think I am alone here in that. There is a difference between someone operating on their own as a history writer, with varying degrees of credentials and someone who is writing to the standards expected at a history department with full educational credentials and operating in the peer review system. Someone can still write a great history book outside of that system but I am going to approach it with more caution. Someone can write a history book outside of that and do so with the appropriate amount of rigor and methodology. But it does mean it hasn't been vetted in the same way, we should probably be more inclined to examine their sources, etc. I don't think this is that crazy of an idea

While I somewhat agree with the sentiment here, it's also a fairly short step away from outright elitism.

For me, if a researcher a) uses the "appropriate amount of rigor and methodology" and b) presents the findings without bias, that ought to be enough in itself regardless of the researcher's prior credentials; never mind that not every field (as per @Steampunkette 's example upthread) even has a peer-review system in place.

 

[Zardnaar]

While I somewhat agree with the sentiment here, it's also a fairly short step away from outright elitism.

For me, if a researcher a) uses the "appropriate amount of rigor and methodology" and b) presents the findings without bias, that ought to be enough in itself regardless of the researcher's prior credentials; never mind that not every field (as per @Steampunkette 's example upthread) even has a peer-review system in place.

Elitism in nerd culture never!!!!

Where I draw the line is hard vs soft fields and if one can make a living off your skill set.

So a high school drop out working as a PC technician is more impressive to me vs a graduate with a piece of paper.

But that piece of paper is very important for insurance purposes involving your house eg builder, plumber, or electrician.

 

[ColinChapman]

Geeks keep picking nits
All to win an argument
Main points are ignored
- "godawful haiku", by me

 

[Hussar]

nope bad idea.