cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/7946465
From a blog post by Ben Riggs. I thought it was interesting.
------------“Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men… They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.” -Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11 August-September 1975
Do TTRPG Historians Lie?
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 Wizards of the Coast’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.”
— Making OD&D
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?
Is there misogyny in 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.
I can’t believe Gary wrote this
:(
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.”
— -Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11 August-September 1975
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.
Peterson & Tondro are truth-tellers
The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases, 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.
That D&D is for Everyone Proves the Brilliance of its Creators
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 the world loves?
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 shit and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is shit 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 shit 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 shit 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 fucked 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.
Page 9 of Book 1 of OD&D. Note that the “Evil High Priests” are also chaotic.
“Grown ass adult finally learns about engaging with a creation as separate from its creator, more at 11”
Yet apparently a bunch of people need to learn that, because according to the author when they brought up his flaws in a book, people were falling over themselves to say he was besmirching his good name or slandering Gygax and stuff like that. People need to learn their heroes aren’t perfect, even now, and that’s why I think it’s good this article is spread and read. Not everyone knows to separate the author and their work.
I would blame social media for encouraging parasocial relations, but this is the kind of stuff that existed before the internet, with other musicians and artists and authors, and it’s brought up in academic courses on similar work, so I guess it’s just a human thing that people need to be aware of.
Death of the Author, 101.
whatabout Dave Arneson? He’s the other half of the equation.
Maybe Gygax said genuinely sexist things about “women’s lib” when he got defensive about the topic, but if the only example you can find of that being reflected in D&D is that one time they added a male dragon who was good and a female dragon who was evil it seems difficult to justify writing that many words about it.
I mean there’s a pretty blatant quote in there, too.
I’ve read quite a few anecdotes and quotes about Gygax’s misogyny before but I agree with you, I don’t think there is nearly enough information I these gods to extrapolate that it’ embodies all powerful masculine forces as good and all feminine as evil, especially as the article mentions how this perpetuates pre-existing coomo themes in story and myth. Everything we know about Gygax would say he’d lift from myths with sexist themes without adjusting that, rather than add them with intention.
Do do think there is myriad evidence that Gygax believed femininity to be inherently inferior, but that’s different from evil. It’s still stupid and worth highlighting but by excessively demonising him to the point of nearly making things up, it’s just fuel for people to dismiss the valid points.
@Khrux @kbal The impression I’ve gotten over the years is that Gygax was certainly sexist at the time (expecting that D&D would obviously not be for women, for example) only to ease off as the years went by (being pleasantly surprised that actually women do like D&D). This contrasts with his racism, which I understand him to have hewed strongly to until the day he died.
As a biological determinist, I am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing.
In short, there is no special game that will attract females—other than LARPing, which is more csocialization and theatrics and gaming—and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.
That’s a quote of his from 2006. So, I guess he ‘eased off’ in the sense that he decided ‘females could play as well as males’, but it’s pretty clear he was still a sexist ass until the day he died.
Edit: also, anyone know what the heck he had against LARPers?
Wow. Gygax sucked!
@pteryx @Khrux @kbal the man was so racist he *casually* threw out parables and aphorisms that were exclusively popular among explicit racists & fellow-travellers. [Like the “nits make lice” comment.] To be explicit, he was wayyy up in the northwestern end of the Rust Belt. Those casually racist Southern-style quips are not exactly native to that area, except among KKK, white biker gang, and neo-nazi circles.
I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes. -Gygax
There is clearly more than dragon alignment. Apparently, Gygax has made some bad experiences and calls out women as a threat to his wargaming (i.e. ttrpg) hobby. It also doesn’t seem to be an off-hand mention since he dares his readers to ask for more.
Btw he wrote this years before he even met Lorraine Williams, so more bad experiences ahead. He was married for nearly twenty years at the time of this quote. Not sure if that means anything.
Gygax also elevated Jean Wells in the company before the subsequent management basically made her a secretary. Wells had a decent working relationship with Gygax, which you can see if you read in Dragon magazine “Sage Advice” column from the mid 80’s. Gygax should have listened to Wells more often than he did, but he did try to empower her to make the game more friendly to women.
Still, his legacy towards women in gaming is mixed at best. In the 80’s, TSR games which Gygax was less involved in tended to do better with women, notably Star Frontiers, but also “Basic D&D” which did not include rules making it disadvantageous to play a female character, unlike Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which capped female strength below male strength for each race. And I think telling a new D&D player their character would be a lousy fighter is pretty rough.
Yes, there was a pattern in Gygax’s creations of evil female power that went beyond the dragon example. Most notably drow were the only evil elves, and the only matriarchal (he would have said “female dominated”) ones. This pattern wasn’t his invention — it’s as old as Snow White, Cinderella, and the rest — but even in his own time, others (for example, Tom Moldvay) created more inclusive games.
Tbh the only person I would be devastated to find out is a huge sexist would be Dave Arneston.
I mean his collected works of modules have quite a bit of sexism. The age old shit of rape and exploitation as set peices, maidens in need of rescue, duplicitous backstabby honeypots, women depicted as sparsely dressed supermodels or villians and just general statements that women were less capable of enjoying his stuff because of “biological differences in the female brain” is kind of all over the place. We could dredge that all up as the article sumerizes but we’d be here awhile. There’s not much point. Guy is dead.
Well, Remember why boomer are so conservatives ? Because they were young in the 70’s where these things were “normal”.
RPG needed years to stop being a boys club, and if you go to wargaming and video-game it’s even worse. Add that many of us, are at least “socially awkward”. So not surprising that Gigax was sexist and provocative.
If you look at some old D&D imagery, it was half naked sexy girls prisoner in a dungeon, which was perfect to appeal the uncomfortable teen audience.
Actually, I am not sure which game really brought women to RPG, feel like the LARP scene have always been way more feminine than the RPG one. But it may be my impression
The reason many still associate D&D and anything else remotely related to it with fat, basement dwelling, socially inept virgin incels is because those people actually made up a significant percentage of the original following of the hobby. Because it’s founders were only a half step away from most of those descriptions in many cases. And anybody that insists otherwise is either willfully ignorant or, more likely, angry at being called out by association because they’re the same.
So either get over it or go join the people that still insist that the confederate flag is anything but the war banner of a rebellion raised as an attempt at preserving slavery as a legal institution. You have the same mindset and validity as they do on this matter.
@Shyfer Not gonna lie, I’m surprised this has to be said?
Like… everything I’ve *ever* heard about Gygax pushed the idea that he was THE prototypical grognard that causes the TTRPG hobby so much trouble.
Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, all the way up through at least 3rd Ed and with continuing themes past that… it has obvious racist and sexist roots in so much of how things are set up, and that’s always the first thing I try to throw out any time I run a game.
He was also heavily inspired by racist fantasy novels. I’m not here to say he was an active racist (someone who promotes racist views) but he was for sure a passive racist (someone who doesn’t recognize racist literature when its right in front of them).
I’m not even trying to say we need to cancel Gygax for passive racism. I’m just saying we need to assess the roots of tabletop role playing and figure out how to keep the good parts while abandoning the bad parts. And part of that means discussing that the pulp fiction of the 20s, 30s, and 40s that Gygax was drawing from was HORRIBLY racist.
*nods*
I like that the broader hobby is at least trying right now - even with as small of changes as shifting from ‘race’ to ‘ancestry’ or ‘background’ for establishing starting character genotype/phenotype - but it’s depressing how much pushback even that gets from folks who want to defend the way it’s always been.
The fact that most of the folks looking to defend the racism are *also* the ones who want to insist that incredibly sexist worlds are “historical”… in a fantasy game?
At least part of that crowd wants D&D to be a gateway into Mein Kampf. I think it’s fine, possibly even good, to have table top games that explore the darker parts of humanity so we can get that shit out of our systems in our basements, but I think the super mainstream games kind of have a responsibility to focus on creating an inviting space for everyone, and the games that get dark need to be considerate in how they design their darkness. Like exploring darkness needs to be the point of the system and it needs to not glorify the darkness. I think D Vincent Baker is a really good example of someone doing that. In Dogs in the Vineyard you’re effectively roleplaying a secret police member and you know what? Its fun! You know what else? It opens your mind up a little bit to how fucked up elements of history have been.
@GuerillaGrue @Shyfer 3rd Edition is when they even started *trying* to push back, by getting rid of class and level limits by species.
Surprisingly perhaps, I’ve never heard anything but good things about him. But then I’ve never actually looked into his personality or life, just his contributions to D&D.
I think the author of the article is making Gygax out to be a bigger misogynist than he actually was. His responses seemed to be edgelord responses because he was tied off being asked the questions not because he was that sexist.
I hate Gygax because his system was all over the place and had no balance.
