Lorraine Williams did... what?

[Dausuul]

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.

I don't recall hearing anyone say fragmenting the fanbase was bad for the game, except indirectly in the sense that TSR going out of business would be bad for the game; all the criticism I've heard has been directed at the business side of it. It's the worst of both worlds, business-wise. You get the overhead of a big company, but not the economies of scale.

And while I'm sure many of the products had respectable sales, gross sales figures are not all there is to success. (Besides, while Dark Sun may have been successful, what about settings like Maztica?)

 

[JLowder]

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

Actually, the first line on the page is a bit of history bending, too. John F. Dille did not create Buck Rogers. The character originated in a short story by Philip Nowlan, in Amazing Stories, and Dille, a newspaper syndicate owner, arranged for the character to become a comic strip. Now, the comic strip was certainly the basis for Buck's popularity, so Dille deserves a prominent place in the history. But while it's fair to say Dille "popularized" Buck, but he did not "create" him.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

 

[Scribble]

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!"

I think what they ran into with the "fragmenting their fanbase" thing wasn't so much that there were different settings, it was that each setting had it's own version of everything.

So you'd have the Forgotten Realms Monstrous Compendium inserts... But then you needed to also do a Dragon Lance Compendium insert (with all new artwork, and new monsters) Same for Dark Sun, and Ravenloft, and one for Spell Jammer can't forget them. Wait lets do one for Planescape too.

The we do a Deities and Demigods of X world... Oh wait everyone who plays in Y world also needs that, so lets redo it again with new artwork, new layouts, and such...

You have one big fan base (D&D players) but you now need to do like 6 times the work to make products for them.

 

[Deset Gled]

A very good thread with info and history of Lorraine, with input from a number of people who were there (including EGG) cab be found here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/archiv...e-williams-includes-opinions-gygax-et-al.html

 

[ProfessorCirno]

The rash of posts here that've been edited and reading through that thread only cements my position: Quite frankly, gamers deserve to be dismissed at times. Look at how we react to this, how we rip each other apart in edition wars, or the darkly humerous (VERY darkly) response to the charity fiasco at Gencon, where hundreds and hundreds of gamers sent angry and threatening emails to Gygax's charity of coice because of a stupid misunderstanding.

We aren't saints. We aren't wonderful golden rainbow people who never argue and never fight with one another.

People are allowed to look down on us just as much as we're allowed to look down on others. We deserve it. I'm not saying we're less then human. I'm saying that we're human, and people woh tweak our nose are going to exist.

Lorraine was a bad manager, yes, there's no doubt about that, but was she a bad person? Those two are not connected. Yet from how people react to the woman they've never met, who never really touched their lives, they make it sound like she abused their goldfish. You could make arguments she's a bad person. You could make arguments she's a good person. There's nothing to back up either save from second hand information. For every story of this maniacal witch-hag that mistreated her employees and hated the world, there's a story of her employees being treated just fine with animal charities and bring your pet to work days. Yet so many people choose to side with the worst of the two.

 

[Ranger REG]

I bet the Gygax family trust would like to review that for "accuracy."

So would Dave Arneson, one of the CO-CREATORS of Dungeons & Dragons --with E. Gary Gygax -- in case someone would deliberately dismiss/neglect him.

 

[Plane Sailing]

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.

Further information from Ryan Dancey relevant to this issue can be found here
Ryan Dancey on the Acquisition of TSR

including things like

I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products. I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s. I was 10 pages in to a thick green bar report of inventory, calculating the true value of the material in that warehouse when I realized that my last 100 entries had all been "$0"'s.

It makes a very interesting read, and it is genuine first-hand reporting.

Cheers

 

[JohnRTroy]

So would Dave Arneson, one of the CO-CREATORS of Dungeons & Dragons --with E. Gary Gygax -- in case someone would deliberately dismiss/neglect him.

That Buck Rogers web site didn't mention D&D, but TSR. It was Gygax and Kaye who were the original founders. Dave joined temporarily as did Brian Blume. When the partnership disbanded the new company was Gygax and Blume.

 

[JohnRTroy]

The rash of posts here that've been edited and reading through that thread only cements my position: Quite frankly, gamers deserve to be dismissed at times. Look at how we react to this, how we rip each other apart in edition wars, or the darkly humerous (VERY darkly) response to the charity fiasco at Gencon, where hundreds and hundreds of gamers sent angry and threatening emails to Gygax's charity of coice because of a stupid misunderstanding.

Unfortunately, by other points, she went quite beyond just "dismissing gamers". The best quotes from the other thread were by Jose Feritas, a person who had interacted directly with Lorraine...

These are my opinions based on stuff I heard from a lot of the insiders, they may not be entirely true and as usual one's perception of reality is skewed by the people we know, those we call friends and so on. To me, Ms. Williams was always unfailingly nice and polite, even though the 2000 or 3000$ royalties per year my company was sending her were probably close to insignificant. But she did despise gamers in general and made no secret of this. I remember her throwing a fit at GenCon (92 or 93, can't remember) because some girls were in a bikini chain mail suit, and she was on a roll and badmouthed and cursed gamers (loudly!) for at least ten minutes....

She once joked (in front of me) that the gaming industry was actually much worse than the entertainment licensing industry, because in licensing you could always credibly "pretend" that you knew what the fans wanted without ever speaking to one of them, whereas in the gaming industry you actually had to go and actually speak with "the disgusting little idiots". (almost sure these were the actual words)...

It's one thing for a company manager to get upset at so-called "nerd rage", as I know many creative people who lament that, but from all accounts, this woman went beyond that and loathed gamers. It would be like somebody who hated animation and Disney running Disney. I don't think you can be a very good company manager and have that attitude.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I think this is the most informative part of the quote from Jose Freitas from the older thread.

But I am quite convinced that Ms. Williams really ran the company to the best of her abilities, which were very good, but this meant that she ran it to benefit herself to the exclusion of anyone else, employees included. There are some very fine lines re. ethical issues, but one might very well question the continued release and overprinting of a game that was really selling close to zero, while paying yourself royalties advances based on 60% of the printruns. And since I was a partner of a company that distributes RPGs and MtG and WotC products in general in Spain, Portugal and Brasil, and I was there when WotC bought TSR, and talked to pretty much everyone, including Peter Adkinson, I was told there were TONS of unsold Buck Rogers in the 25th Century RPG in the warehouses.... And at the same time that Ms. Williams got paid a really good salary, employees were underpaid, given bad equipment to work on things, etc.... Just read Ryan Dancey's accounts of what he found when he went and audited TSR for WotC before they bought it.

Link to full post:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/archiv...ludes-opinions-gygax-et-al-6.html#post3971894


And just a few posts beneath that:

To the best of my knowledge and belief Lorraine Williams has no redeeming qualities.

Here are a few choice examples of her conduct:

She set out to get me because I said aloud in her presence that when the financial difficulties of 1984 were finally cleared up I intended to give employees shares fo stock and eventually make the corporation employee owned. She was overheard to mutter: "Over my dead body. This company is going to be my retirement."

CBS dropped the D&D Cartoon Show spinnoff that was in pre-production with three approved scripts, and Edgar Gross dropped negotiations for having John Boorman direct a D&D-game-based major motion picture when Williams took over the company because her reputation in the entertainment industry is what it is.

She sued her own brother, Flint Dille.

Her srep-daughter emailed me stating what a witch Lorraine wasm how she had ruined her life, and comisserating with me. Yes. I have kept that email.

Happy New Year,
Gary

http://www.enworld.org/forum/archiv...ludes-opinions-gygax-et-al-6.html#post3971900

While I am sure that Williams did do a few things that were kind to people, based on that thread it seems to me that she has absolutely no ethics when it comes to running a business.

END COMMUNICATION