The Multiple Designer Model

While tradition ascribes the authorship of Dungeons and Dragons to a legendary figure called Gary Gygax, a recent wave of scholarship has posited a multi-author model as the best explanation for inconsistencies in the rules. The inquiry began by noting differences in language and then noticing different viewpoints systematically associated with vocabulary and style.

Whenever the text uses terms like “D&D” and “referee,” the author emphasizes that the game is endlessly flexible and customizable. In contrast, passages using vocabulary like “AD&D®️” and “the DM” uniformly stress that the rules must be strictly followed to ensure compatibility between tables and even warn of the curses that will befall anyone who uses unlicensed supplements and accessories.

These patterns have led game scholars to a two Gygax model, with the current text being redacted by a source called “M” because in German, “Mike Carr” starts with “M.”

Recently, scholars have split over whether the source who uses “D&D” and “referee” vocabulary is one source or two. The current consensus is that all of the surviving text comes from a single author, but this author was working from an earlier oral tradition that never produced any surviving written texts.