Ray Winninger
Winninger in 2008
Winninger in 2008
BornRay Winninger
OccupationWriter, game designer
NationalityAmerican
GenreRole-playing games, miniature wargaming, fantasy

Ray Winninger is a game designer who has worked on a number of roleplaying games, including the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. He is the former Executive Producer for the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons studio.

Career

Ray Winninger was a competitive chess player as a child, and at age nine he discovered Avalon Hill games and Dungeons & Dragons while looking for chess opponents at a local hobby shop/game store.[1] He designed his first game as "a futuristic man-to-man miniatures system", and by age fourteen he had designed an enormous campaign world for the Dungeons & Dragons game system.[1] His first published work was an adventure called Countdown! for FASA's Doctor Who role-playing game.[1] He worked for TSR, including work on Dungeons & Dragons, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.[1]

Winninger was the co-designer of DC Heroes and Torg.[2] He then worked on staff at Mayfair Games, and became Editorial Director for Mayfair after Chill was released.[3]: 168  He brought back the Role Aids line, intending to recreate it with more sophisticated material for AD&D than that which TSR was producing at the time.[3]: 168  Winninger designed the Underground (1993) role-playing game for Mayfair Games.[3]: 169  Underground was set in the year 2021 and "allowed players to assume the roles of superhuman, genetically enhanced soldiers fighting a patriotic war to take their society back from a corrupt government"; when Mayfair Games withdrew much of its support of the game despite its popularity, Winninger moved onto other projects.[1] Mayfair also intended to produce a game called D.O.A. by Greg Gorden with major contributions by Winninger, but the game was never published.[3]: 170  He worked for Dragon magazine, first taking over the "RPG reviews" column from Chris Pramas, before moving on to "Dungeoncraft", a column for guiding Dungeon Masters to create their own campaign worlds.[1] He also worked as a contributing editor of Dragon magazine.[2]

Winninger later became a senior platform strategist at Microsoft.[2]

In 2020, Winninger became the Executive Producer in charge of the Dungeons & Dragons studio at Wizards of the Coast replacing Mike Mearls, the previous Dungeons & Dragons design team head.[4][5][6] In October 2022, Winninger announced that he had left Wizards of the Coast.[7]

Works

Ray Winninger has worked for TSR, West End Games, Mayfair Games, Last Unicorn Games, and Pulsar Games. His "Dungeoncraft" column ran in Dragon from 1999-2002, during which time he also served as a contributing editor to the magazine.

He was the executive producer for Harebrained Schemes' 2014 Miniature wargaming game Golem Arcana.[8]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Ryan, Michael G. (March 2002). "Profiles: Craftmaster: The Making of a Dungeoncrafter". Dragon. Renton, Washington: Wizards of the Coast (#293): 20–21.
  2. 1 2 3 Winninger, Ray (2007). "Squad Leader". In Lowder, James (ed.). Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Green Ronin Publishing. pp. 288–290. ISBN 978-1-932442-96-0.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Shannon Appelcline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7.
  4. ↑ Thomas, Jeremy (April 29, 2020). "Dungeons & Dragons' Design Team Has a New Head, Mike Mearls Exited Last Year". 411MANIA. Archived from the original on 2020-05-02. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
  5. ↑ Crawford, Jeremy (2020-04-28). "He no longer works on the tabletop RPG team and hasn't since sometime last year". Twitter. Jeremy Crawford. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
  6. ↑ Winninger, Ray (2020-04-24). "Welcome to Dragon+ Issue 31". Dragon+ Magazine. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
  7. ↑ Winninger, Ray [@WinningerR] (October 18, 2022). "Sorry for the radio silence; I'm in the midst of a SORELY needed Long Rest. I have indeed left WotC, having accomplished the ambitious goals we set when I took over the D&D team. [THREAD]" (Tweet). Retrieved October 18, 2022 – via Twitter.
  8. ↑ Hsu, Dan (7 August 2014). "Golem Arcana: The hybrid tabletop/video game that's going to make a lot of money (but off just a few of you)". VentureBeat. Retrieved 3 October 2015.


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