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. : 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. : 168 Winninger designed the Underground (1993) role-playing game for Mayfair Games. : 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. 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. : 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. 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.