From a blog post by Ben Riggs. I thought it was interesting.
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âDamn right I am a sexist. It doesnât 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.â -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&Dâs 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 Coastâs disclaimer for legacy content which states:
âThese 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.â
â 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 Tondroâs work as âslanderous.â On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it âdisparagement.â 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, letâs look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as âmisogyny â from 1975âs 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 wouldnât know dragonâs 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 âpoliticsâ 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: âWomenâs Lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.â
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 powerâperhaps even female equalityâis 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 didnât 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 canât believe Gary wrote this
:(
Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said,
âI have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isnât 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 âRaping and Pillaging[â] section, in the âWhores and Tavern Wenchesâ chapter, the special magical part dealing with âHags and Cronesâ, and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on âMedieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Vikingâ. Damn right I am sexist. It doesnât matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the menâs locker room. They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. Iâve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. Iâll detail that if anyone wishes.â
â -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 hobbyâs 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 isnât for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know shit when they smell it. To say it isnât 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 isnât 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, âHey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldnât contain messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others. So we just want to warn you. That stuffâs in there.â Yâknow, 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&Dâs 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 isnât 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 âCharacter Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures,â Evil High Priests are included under the âChaosâ 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 âEvil High Priestsâ are also chaotic.
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Additional Note from me: Images where he sourced the original quotes are in the blog post. They didnât copy over right.
Not an excuse but I think shitty moms often have a role in creating a dude like Gygax. As many people grow up, theyâre able to realize that their bad experience shouldnât be applied to every woman out thereâŠobviously. I guess he just went with his damage instead of ever questioning it and dealing with it.
Shitty dads too.