Ray Winninger
Introduction '''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. 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. His first published work was an adventure called ''Countdown!'' for FASA's ''Doctor Who'' role-playing game. He worked for TSR, including work on ''Dungeons & Dragons'', throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.Winninger was the co-designer of ''DC Heroes'' and ''Torg''. He then worked on staff at Mayfair Games, and became Editorial Director for Mayfair after ''Chill'' was released. 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. Winninger designed the ''Underground'' (1993) role-playing game for Mayfair Games. ''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. 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. 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. He also worked as a contributing editor of ''Dragon'' magazine.Winninger later became a senior platform strategist at Microsoft.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. In October 2022, Winninger announced that he had left Wizards of the Coast.
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''.
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