Lorraine Williams did... what?

[Dausuul]

All I can say is, I'll never have anything to do with anything connected to Buck Rogers.

Buck Rogers is a big part of why TSR went belly up.

I wouldn't go so far as to say a big part. It was certainly a waste of money, but from all I hear, TSR's main problems stemmed from failure to listen to their customers, combined with fragmenting their own fanbase.

 

[ProfessorPain]

I have always been a little skeptical of the narrative of Lorraine Williams in the gaming community. It shouldn't be forgotten that early on, the company did well under her leadership, and that many of the factors (the sudden popularity of collectible card games like Magic-- I lost half my group to Magic) that drove TSR into the ground were possibly beyond her control.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I wouldn't go so far as to say a big part. It was certainly a waste of money, but from all I hear, TSR's main problems stemmed from failure to listen to their customers, combined with fragmenting their own fanbase.

You know, I was recently struck by a problem with the "fragmenting their own fanbase" part of the narrative. If your problem is that there's so much D&D material on the market that fans aren't able to keep up with all of it and are thus becoming distant from each other . . .

. . . then what are you doing creating an Open Game License that is going to absolutely flood the market?

Now, there are two possible explanations.
1) The problem wasn't too much product on the market as it was that TSR was generating products that had too small a fanbase and thus too little return for their investment; or
2) The persons behind the OGL assumed that Core D&D was so powerful that, if you didn't counter it with the might of 'official D&D' products that took away from it, everything would by nature adhere to the core D&D playstyle.

I incline towards option 1 with the "fragmenting" bit being an attempt to sell D&D players on "See! All those settings you loved weren't just not worth our while, they were actively hurting the game! You must accept the Great Purge and the narrowing of the vision! One System! One Setting! One Campaign!"

 

[ProfessorPain]

You know, I was recently struck by a problem with the "fragmenting their own fanbase" part of the narrative. If your problem is that there's so much D&D material on the market that fans aren't able to keep up with all of it and are thus becoming distant from each other . . .

. . . then what are you doing creating an Open Game License that is going to absolutely flood the market?

Now, there are two possible explanations.
1) The problem wasn't too much product on the market as it was that TSR was generating products that had too small a fanbase and thus too little return for their investment; or
2) The persons behind the OGL assumed that Core D&D was so powerful that, if you didn't counter it with the might of 'official D&D' products that took away from it, everything would by nature adhere to the core D&D playstyle.

I incline towards option 1 with the "fragmenting" bit being an attempt to sell D&D players on "See! All those settings you loved weren't just not worth our while, they were actively hurting the game! You must accept the Great Purge and the narrowing of the vision! One System! One Setting! One Campaign!"

The problem with the fragmentation narrative is the different settings like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun were all wildly succesful. There was no fragmentation going on. It wasn't until the later half of the 90s, when TSR tried to beat out the card companies that they really ran into trouble. Prior to that, TSR was pretty healthy. Especially their fiction division-- which was driven by the campaign setting material. And releasing multiple campaign settings didn't hurt wizards; nor (as you point out) were they harmed by 3pp putting out a bunch of settings (like Midnight).

 

[M.L. Martin]

The problem with the fragmentation narrative is the different settings like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun were all wildly succesful. There was no fragmentation going on. It wasn't until the later half of the 90s, when TSR tried to beat out the card companies that they really ran into trouble. Prior to that, TSR was pretty healthy. Especially their fiction division-- which was driven by the campaign setting material. And releasing multiple campaign settings didn't hurt wizards; nor (as you point out) were they harmed by 3pp putting out a bunch of settings (like Midnight).

Well, some of the campaign settings hurt them--not so much as campaign settings as the fact that TSR was getting bad price quotes, so a lot of items (such as the Birthright box and the Encyclopedia Magica) were overproduced/underpriced and thus losing money regardless of sales. Something similar may have happened in fiction, with massive numbers of hardcovers being produced for lines or authors that probably couldn't support them. And of course, the infamous "Print a Million!" order for DRAGON DICE and the returns from the book trade suggest that there was a lot of stuff that sank TSR that had nothing to do with game design or producing too many settings.

(And the bit about TSR not doing market research is either erroneous or uses a misleadingly narrow definition of "market research." They did regular surveys in DRAGON and included feedback cards in products, although those did seem to fall off near the end of TSR's run, IIRC. Then again, I also seem to recall those postcards being postage-paid, which makes eliminating them an obvious cost-cutting measure, especially once they had their AOL area up and had several employees present on Usenet.)

 

[Silver Moon]

Sorry, failed attempt at an analogy earlier.

 

[Xyxox]

I wouldn't go so far as to say a big part. It was certainly a waste of money, but from all I hear, TSR's main problems stemmed from failure to listen to their customers, combined with fragmenting their own fanbase.

Warehouses full of unsold Dragon Dice and Buck Rogers products didn't help the cash position.

 

[Odhanan]

I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...

Which made me say, "Um... what?"

"Created the TSR company"? Right. Riiiiight...
In her dreams, maybe.

 

[Henry]

The problem with the fragmentation narrative is the different settings like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun were all wildly succesful.

Were any hard figures ever released for "wildly successful?" From what I understood of Ryan Dancey's info, they would have been "wildly successful" for any company that was smaller than TSR's size and expenditures. That might have been 5,000 copies per year of any one line -- and if the line was very expensive (which those boxed sets really were, especially after paper costs skyrocketed in the mid-90's) then whatever they sold might not have covered production run costs.

That's why if I understand it WotC only supported FR and Eberron, and licensed everything else -- they didn't want to break their market into 10 different sub-genres that only a fraction of their fans would want to buy.

Back to Lorraine Williams: I've heard good stories about her as a boss, but very little good as a manager, or understanding where her sales were really going to or coming from. And Gary's recounting in her or the Blume's roles in his ouster from the company did not paint her in a good light -- this is where most of the animosity I think stemmed from by people who don't even know her.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Were any hard figures ever released for "wildly successful?" From what I understood of Ryan Dancey's info, they would have been "wildly successful" for any company that was smaller than TSR's size and expenditures. That might have been 5,000 copies per year of any one line -- and if the line was very expensive (which those boxed sets really were, especially after paper costs skyrocketed in the mid-90's) then whatever they sold might not have covered production run costs.

That's why if I understand it WotC only supported FR and Eberron, and licensed everything else -- they didn't want to break their market into 10 different sub-genres that only a fraction of their fans would want to buy.

This, I could understand, but I was always under the impression that 'fragmenting the fanbase' was something presented as bad for D&D as a game, not just as bad for TSR/WotC, which is why the OGL, which ran the risk (at least) of creating this same problem over again, seemed to conflict.

But it's possible I'm putting the worst possible construction on it--I don't particularly trust Ryan Dancey, I don't care for what I perceive as his vision of the D&D game (which sometimes strikes me as an unholy hybrid of the RPGA and the Borg Collective ), and therefore I may be judging it in the most negative light.