Ryan Dancey

Ryan S. Dancey is a businessman who has worked primarily in the collectible card game and role-playing game industries. He was vice president in charge of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast.

When the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons was facing bankruptcy, Dancey helped negotiate sale of the property to Wizards of the Coast.

Dancey promoted the D&D's open gaming license (OGL), which reversed the policy from opposing third-party publications to supporting them.

Career Dancey was the owner of the distributor Isomedia Inc, a company that was helping fund the collectible card game Legend of the Five Rings (1995), and Dancey joined in on the project. The principals behind the game created the new company Five Rings Publishing Group in 1996 with better funding from Robert Abramowitz as its President; Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) and Isomedia gave over their rights to Legend of the Five Rings, with Dancey becoming Vice President of Product Development and John Zinser of AEG becoming VP of Sales. Dancey also co-authored the Hero Builder's Guidebook (2000). Dancey later moved to being a consultant, and was among those employees Wizards laid off before the end of 2002.

In 2011, Dancey began working on Goblinworks "Pathfinder Online" Sandbox MMORPG. In August 2015, interim Goblinworks CEO Lisa Stevens announced that Ryan Dancey had left Goblinworks for personal reasons. In a separate letter to players, she indicated that Dancey was still involved, and would continue to consult on the project.

In 2026, Dancey went viral for claiming that AI could replace game designers. The next day, he was terminated from AEG.