D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking about it is Key to Preserving His Legacy. - The TTRPG network
cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/7946465
[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.
