More Historical Howlers from Cecilia D'Anastasio

D&D history as herstory

I assume Cecilia D'Anastasio would describe herself as a liberal feminist. Just to be clear, I have no issue with that when it comes to gaming or gaming journalism. If you want to write about gaming, I don't care what your politics are.

The problem is that D'Anastasio's politics constantly gets in the way of her journalism, to the point where, at least when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons, she's a terrible journalist, making factual mistake after factual mistake.

I criticized the inaccuracies of a previous article here. But she's just come out with another one, Dungeons & Dragons Wouldn’t Be What It Is Today Without These Women, which in many ways is worse. Among other things, it contains a number of factual howlers. Is she lying about the facts? I'm not going to go that far. Rather, I think that in her zeal to confirm her political narrative - that D&D used to be horribly sexist and chauvinist, largely due to the misogynistic views and behavior of Gary Gygax, but now it's emerged into the light of progressive tolerance and diversity - she's not very interested in getting the facts right. So she ignores things, or misunderstands things or just gets things wrong because, well, because she doesn't really care about the facts, per se, unless they serve an ideological purpose for her.

Women are stupid, at least when it comes to gaming. They don't even really care very much about gaming, or at least, real gaming. They're just posers trying to fit in with currently hip geek culture.

I don't believe that, of course. But if I did believe it, or were inclined to, I might think that D'Anastasio would provide excellent evidence for it. She's just about the best thing now going for that misogynistic stereotype.

Let's try this one, instead:

Dishonest political hacks shouldn't be trusted when it comes to game journalism.

And that applies to men as well as women, by the way, and to political partisans of both the left, right, center or wherever else one might choose to hang one's flag. That in game writing, these days, much of this tends to come from liberals or leftists - the so-called "SJW" crowd - is obvious. But let's stipulate that this is an arbitrary historical accident. In an alternate universe, it might have been moderate Republicans or monarchists or anarcho-capitalists or whatever. Or so some would argue.

But on to D'Anastasio's latest article. No, Diplomacy was not a "play-by-mail game," although like many games at the time it could be (and was) played by mail.

But here's the most outrageous howler. I'm excerpting the entire paragraph, to be fair:

Part of why this flew [misogyny in early D&D art] was because, in its very ruleset, D&D assumed a mostly-male audience. In the mid-70s, that ruleset faced accusations of chauvinism when it became clear that women characters’ strength was capped four points lower than men’s. It compensated with the “Beauty” attribute, a substitute for “Charisma.” D&D also featured a “Harlot Table,” a bounty of twelve “brazen strumpets or haughty courtesans” players could summon with the roll of a die [the links are from the original].

Now, the Harlot Table claim is quite true, as one can verify by clicking the link provided. It did in fact appear towards the back of the 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide, although I'm not sure what she means by the "summoning" part. If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's notoriously much more of it, in, say, early Judges Guild products, such as the Ready Ref Sheets and City State of the Invincible Overlord.

One other fairly well-known actual fact that D'Anastasio could have mentioned, but didn't, is that in 1st edition AD&D, while human females are not limited when it comes to strength, some demi-human females have their strength capped a few points lower than their male counterparts, with no compensating advantages. It's particularly egregious in the case of gnomes and hobbits, whose male/female strength maximums are 18/15 and 17/14, respectively. But for some reason, female half-orcs can be just as strong as half-orc males. Don't ask me, I didn't write it.

Later edit (7/3/17): The above claim, "human females are not limited when it comes to strength [in AD&D]," isn't precisely true. See the follow-up post on 6/30/17, here.

But these didn't apply to humans, nor did any sex differences appear in "mid-70s" OD&D. That "in its very ruleset . . . women characters’ strength was capped four points lower than men’s (but was) compensated with the 'Beauty' attribute, a substitute for 'Charisma'" is just out and out false.

So, where did D'Anastasio get this from? Interestingly, she provides a link to her source, a 2014 article by Jon Peterson, The First Female Gamers. But here's what Peterson actually wrote:

The first serious backlash against perceived chauvinism in Dungeons & Dragons arose in 1976, after the publication of Lenard Lakofka’s article “Women & Magic,” which he distributed in the July 1976 issue of his obscure fanzine Liaisons Dangereuses. In October, the third issue of The Dragon reprinted the article and added the subtitle, “Bringing the Distaff Gamer into D&D.” In keeping with the wargaming tradition, Lakofka tries to specify a simulation of how women might measure up as adventurers. Virtually all of the level titles are changed: women Fighters, for example, may be “Battle Maidens” or “Valkyries.” He suggests that women “may progress to the level of men in the area of magic and, in some ways, surpass men as thieves,” though “only as fighters are women clearly behind men in all cases.” For Strength, Lakofka has women roll one d8 and one d6 (for a range of 2–14) instead of the traditional three d6; he furthermore grants women a “Beauty” attribute as a substitute for Charisma in baseline Dungeons & Dragons.

So it was in an article in the early The Dragon magazine (which was quickly slammed by many), not part of any edition of the rules. D'Anastasio simply misread Peterson. Anyone could have misread it, too, I suppose. But any gamer who know anything about the contents of, say, the 1974 Men & Magic or the 1978 AD&D Players Handbook would have instantly realized the mistake. D'Anastasio obviously has no such internal check. She writes about early D&D all the time - contrasting "bad" old D&D with "good" new D&D - but she literally has no idea what she's talking about, having almost certainly never read the early rulebooks. She doesn't even seem to be able to understand the claims of her secondary sources.

There are all sorts of other problems with D'Anastasio article that I won't go into here. The irony is that there is an interesting story to tell about women in the early days of D&D, and, to some extent, that story broadly maps D'Anastasio's desired theme - a small number of women, many largely forgotten, making important contributions to the hobby, within a male-dominated gaming culture that might have often validly been compared to that of a locker room if the participants hadn't been so nerdy.

But with all of her bias and carelessness, D'Anastasio isn't the one to tell that story. For now, read the fascinating Peterson article, instead.