From a blog post by Ben Riggs. I thought it was interesting.
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“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.
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Additional Note from me: Images where he sourced the original quotes are in the blog post. They didn’t copy over right.
The author of D&D is dead, both figuratively and literally. I haven’t noticed any particular sexism in 5e. I haven’t played any other systems, so I can’t comment on those. But the system itself, in its modern incarnation, seems to have shed any sexism Gygax might have written into it.
It’s got plenty of latent sexism, much of it carried in the bestiary, and inherited from the original monster manuals. The fact that you don’t see it just means it doesn’t exceed your own internalized sexism.
Which is fine. We’ve all internalized sexism, racism, and other prejudices. But you not being able to see it is not the same thing as it not existing, and declaring it absent because you don’t see it is probably not wise.
I don’t know basically anything about dnd, can you give me some specific examples so i can understand what you’re saying? Thanks
Not the person you’re replying to, but one example is something like the “hag.” I mean I know it’s drawing from established folklore, but the original folklore and the word hag itself has some obvious sexist undertones that are carried forward.
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hag
Not saying they can’t be used in a game, but could be fun to turn it on its head or something and do some subversion of the trope. In general, always good to feel out your players comfort levels with various things beforehand and establish good ground rules before a game starts. Also giving players the opportunity to let a dungeon master know privately if something in the game is overly uncomfortable or alienating or making the game not enjoyable for them.
Interesting to know, thanks. But how is that any different than for example a troll as it pertains to men?
I’m not really aware of that. Not to say troll couldn’t be used in a sexist way (“men are brutish trolls”). Even from the earliest myths of trolls I believe they could be either sex. There’s also nothing I’m aware of to suggest in d&d that trolls would all be represented as male.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergsrå
Trolls also are not a myth that comes from a matriarchal society directly used to opress men, unlike how the idea of hags and witches was used in a patriarchal society to opress women.
Just some examples, male doctors trying to eliminate female competition:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358198427_Healer_or_Hag_Female_Medical_Practitioners_and_Witch_Accusations_in_17th-Century_New_England
Women were far more likely to be accused of witchcraft. It was often used to persecute those who chose not to settle down with men or become housewives, or those who were running their own businesses:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/witchcraft-work-women
There’s lots of sources and writings out there on the history of witchcraft and its relationship to misogyny. Especially in the middle ages, renaissance, and colonial America.
And at least in d&d hags are described as being exclusively female. Some creatures that might be problematic in some contexts like the succubus have added a male equivalent like the incubus. Hag is also still used as a sexist insult for older women.
There are female trolls. Hags are exlusively women.
Huh, TIL. In general society I’ve only ever heard of trolls being male
This is D&D, don’t know about actual myths. There are female giants, usually, and the ones I can think of where there isn’t, it is because they are all dead. Though you will likely see only male trolls in most D&D media. Dungeons and Dragons online has, at least, one notable exception though, named Lucy.
D&d also explicitly describes female trolls too. Female trolls are also described as larger and stronger than males. Here’s a happy troll family from a d&d source book, lol.
Again not saying you can’t enjoy something or use it in an rpg just because the person who wrote it may have problematic opinions or it might have some mixed history. Like I really enjoy Lovecraft, but holy crap is it a mess in terms of racist undertones because of the author.
I’d agree with that, and I think that’s what makes it acceptable to play the game nowadays and not be ashamed. If we didn’t move past that as a hobby, it would be bad and we should boycott it. But because we have, it means we can instead acknowledge the past and learn from it. So there’s no need to ignore it or hide from it.
Dave Arneson was the co-creator of D&D. Although he is also dead.