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.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I suspect that his flaunting of an arcane and archaic vocabulary was also a mix of him genuinely loving words, and of him overcompensating for his limited education and trying to assert and establish his intellectual credibility (or even authority).

I think it is kind of sad that we are in a place where we expect people to have an MFA to write for a living. I view Gygax as writing like a working class writer and geek (I am sure most of us used ten dollar words a lot, and many probably still do). I like writers who have a unique voice and a certain charm. Gary had both of those in his writing.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I think it is kind of sad that we are in a place where we expect people to have an MFA to write for a living. I view Gygax as writing like a working class writer and geek (I am sure most of us used ten dollar words a lot, and many probably still do). I like writers who have a unique voice and a certain charm. Gary had both of those in his writing.

I have 4 degrees and have spent more time in school than is healthy.

But I gotta say…just because someone is not “polished” does. It mean a lot to me.

In particular I don’t care if someone is using the appropriate style outside of academia. If a self taught person has picked up a large vocabulary from lots of places and self study, hats off.

Conventional does not mean a lot to me in the entertainment sphere.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, it ends up being an interesting mix. What he has to say is a mixed bag, too, but rarely...dull?

Contrast with the 2E DMG, which has a genial and supportive tone, but is so wishy-washy about everything "you could do it this way, or you could do it THAT way" that IMO (and in my experience, trying to become a DM as an adolescent) it really fails to give adequate guidance and direction to a new DM. Instead the tone seems aimed at supporting existing DMs* and not offending them, by maintaining reverse compatibility and a tone of acceptance to lots of different game styles. The rules in 2E were, of course, a lot clearer and more usable, but the tone was less inspiring and helpful by comparison, even if some of Gygax's advice in the 1E version was bad.

*(although IMO one of the significant issues with the 1E DMG is also that a lot of it is written with the assumption that the reader has already read and is familiar with OD&D, and Gygax is expanding on that and making some corrections and updates to what the reader already knows).

I think it is kind of sad that we are in a place where we expect people to have an MFA to write for a living. I view Gygax as writing like a working class writer and geek (I am sure most of us used ten dollar words a lot, and many probably still do). I like writers who have a unique voice and a certain charm. Gary had both of those in his writing.

I certainly don't check the educational credentials of a new author before reading them! And I enjoy Gygax's PH and DMG for much the same reasons.

That being said, I agree with Hemingway and the apocryphal Einstein that simplifying and making concepts accessible are good things. Especially for an instruction manual and when teaching people new things in general.

I love words and enjoy someone showing off their vocabulary (something I also fell in love with in Jack Vance, whose influence may be another reason Gygax wrote like that). But we know a lot of people found it made reading his stuff harder.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Contrast with the 2E DMG, which has a genial and supportive tone, but is so wishy-washy about everything "you could do it this way, or you could do it THAT way" that IMO (and in my experience, trying to become a DM as an adolescent) it really fails to give adequate guidance and direction to a new DM. Instead the tone seems aimed at supporting existing DMs* and not offending them, by maintaining reverse compatibility and a tone of acceptance to lots of different game styles. The rules in 2E were, of course, a lot clearer and more usable, but the tone was less inspiring and helpful, even if some of Gygax's advice was bad.

the biggest issue with the 2E DMG, and I say this as someone whose preferred edition is 2E, is the sheer dullness of it. I tis incredibly easy to work through the 1E DMG, which is saying something given how all over the map it can be, whereas the 2E DMG, despite being better organized and structured, is like drying to drain a pond with a small spoon. And all the most important advice is left out and to be found in the campaign sourcebook and catacomb guide

 

[Mannahnin]

And all the most important advice is left out and to be found in the campaign sourcebook and catacomb guide

TBF, Jaquays was a pretty singular genius.

But yeah, a lot of what she put in the CS & CG should have been in the DMG.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I certainly don't check the educational credentials of a new author before reading them! And I enjoy Gygax's PH and DMG for much the same reasons.

That being said, I agree with Hemingway and the apocryphal Einstein that simplifying and making concepts accessible are good things. Especially for an instruction manual and when teaching people new things in general.

I love words and enjoy someone showing off their vocabulary (something I also fell in love with in Jack Vance, whose influence may be another reason Gygax wrote like that). But we know a lot of people found it made reading his stuff harder.

I do think simplicity can be good. But I also think it is bad when good advice like this becomes the norm and things start to feel homogenized. Sometimes it is great for writers to be able to pair things down, be clear, etc. Sometimes I like to work a little harder with text. I read a lot of stuff from the 19th century and that is the opposite of Hemingway. I think an advantage that stuff like the romantic writers have though is it trains you to think in longer form. A sentence can contain the same level of information as a paragraph might today. My issue isn't so much with the advice to simplify. It is that too many writers follow all the same writing advice, and many of them seem to come out of similar writing programs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

TBF, Jaquays was a pretty singular genius.

But yeah, a lot of what she put in the CS & CG should have been in the DMG.

Definitely. And that is something that stands out in the campaign sourcebook and catacomb guide. In my experience the best books in terms of reading in the D&D line have always had personality to them. We often like to emphasize the utility in gaming books, but the GM still has to read these things. And reading 100 pages of pure utility without personality or a spark of wit, can be enervating.

 

[Willie the Duck]

It's kind of funny. While I respect Gary Gygax for his role in the creation of D&D, when I say something is Gygaxian I don't mean it in a good way. When I think Gygaxian it conjures up images of old style meat grinder dungeons, rules that are arcane and fiddly, tables of polearms, seriously, so many, many polearms, the high rate of PC deaths, etc., etc. I remember AD&D fondly, but I wouldn't go back.

While his prose style was often unnecessarily obfuscatory ( ), a lot of us find it charming and found it stimulatingly challenging as youths, inspiring us to expand our vocabularies.

Some of his DM advice is actually very good (like his extensive instructions in the 1E DMG on orders of battle and how different types of foes are likely to alter their defenses and responses to repeated PC attacks/incursions). Some of it is simply bad (poor thieves!). Some of it is solid advice if you have the right context (like the notes on timekeeping in an open world campaign, as long as you understand the context of an open world campaign with more players than just a standard handful attending every session).

I think a lot of what Gygax wrote, and wrote mostly quite well, was an instruction manual for a style of gameplay that didn't/only partially materialized for many. The AD&D books (especially the DMG) work best when they seem to be trying to be take #2 on oD&D played in the manner originally imagined. Mappers, callers, massive number of players with even more massive numbers of characters and henchmen, sand table distances, orders of operations for dungeon-crawling -- all these got some strangely folksy-but-sesquipedalian writing that has fascinating charm.

Where Gygax was the worst was when he was writing to head off playstyles he did not like, areas of play outside of the initial framing, and (worst of all) any time when someone might be trying to get away with something.

In the middle was stuff like the massive number of polearms. It's helpful to remember that this peaked in Unearthed Arcana which, I think we are all in agreement, was a bunch of disparate ideas and old Dragon articles thrown together to quickly make a salable object. I think that's important to note because it is a reminder that one aspect of this is that Gygax sometimes was just writing to fill page count with a deadline on his mind.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Where Gygax was the worst was when he was writing to head off playstyles he did not like, areas of play outside of the initial framing, and (worst of all) any time when someone might be trying to get away with something.

This is definitely where I think the advice is bad, if taken to heart, but it is also where the books are most entertaining. He is grumbling in these entries. There is a bristling tone to his writing, and its advice I freely ignore in most instances, but it is also one of the things that makes me not want to skip sections in the 1E DMG

 

[Parmandur]

I certainly don't check the educational credentials of a new author before reading them! And I enjoy Gygax's PH and DMG for much the same reasons.

Oh, it's not about credentialiam...but Gygax would have been a better writer if he had taken a few College level writing courses...maybe not as interesting, though.