TSR TSR's Amazing Accounting Department

[Jay Verkuilen]

They were playing Russian Roulette with their whole business model, they got themselves in trouble way before 1993: they had a very strong run of luck.

They really started having some stern competition from White Wolf on one hand and many CCGs and computer games on the other. (And probably yet other hands I'm not thinking about.)

It's amazing how high quality a lot of the '90s TSR material really was, though. Planescape, al Qadim, and Dark Sun, just to name a few of their lines were really excellent. Seriously, take a look at the material from then---it was well-written, clearly thought through, and often had quite good art and play aids, too.

It might well have helped them to have update the ruleset more, though. 2E was really a bare update on 1E with the decision to make such a minimal change due to, as far as I know, the fact that there was a bunch of 1E material sitting in the warehouse.

 

[Sacrosanct]

They really started having some stern competition from White Wolf on one hand and many CCGs and computer games on the other. (And probably yet other hands I'm not thinking about.)

It's amazing how high quality a lot of the '90s TSR material really was, though. Planescape, al Qadim, and Dark Sun, just to name a few of their lines were really excellent. Seriously, take a look at the material from then---it was well-written, clearly thought through, and often had quite good art and play aids, too.

It might well have helped them to have update the ruleset more, though. 2E was really a bare update on 1E with the decision to make such a minimal change due to, as far as I know, the fact that there was a bunch of 1E material sitting in the warehouse.

Nope. Skip Williams did an interview years ago, and said the reason they kept things like descending AC was because they wanted players to be able to use their 1e stuff with 2e. Nothing about still having 1e material in a warehouse.

 

[Von Ether]

Nope. Skip Williams did an interview years ago, and said the reason they kept things like descending AC was because they wanted players to be able to use their 1e stuff with 2e. Nothing about still having 1e material in a warehouse.

Ordinarily, I'd say a chapter on simple conversions would have taken care of that but my GM at the time was highly irked just because the tables were on the "wrong" pages.

 

[Jer]

Ordinarily, I'd say a chapter on simple conversions would have taken care of that but my GM at the time was highly irked just because the tables were on the "wrong" pages.

I remember the sheer ugliness of some of the hate that 2nd edition got in my neck of the woods. It broke at least one game group apart because half wanted to upgrade and the other half actively despised every single thing about the new edition - from the artwork to the organization to every minor rule change (and if you really wanted to see them mad, get them started on the loss of the assassin or the introduction of the new bard to the game). I hesitate to think of what might have happened had there been any actual rule changes of the magnitude we expect of an edition shift these days.

(I assume they all outgrew it - Junior High Drama is the second stupidest kind of drama, second only to Ostensibly Grown Adults Who Should Know Better Drama, which is the stupidest of all).

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Nope. Skip Williams did an interview years ago, and said the reason they kept things like descending AC was because they wanted players to be able to use their 1e stuff with 2e. Nothing about still having 1e material in a warehouse.

Of course, those explanations aren't really all that different, one's just a bit more diplomatic/positive spin than the other. The interview I recall is quite long but here it is. I'm trying to find the spot where they mentioned the fact that management wanted minimal changes, but I haven't yet.

 

[Orius]

A senior professor I knew in grad school had done a good bit of work on the topic of business failures. Especially a company that had a killer product generated by a founder can often last a long time on the momentum started that way, which can cover for a lot of business shenanigans. But yeah, TSR sure did seem to have some real problems along the way until they finally died.

It may be hard (and sobering for those of us of a certain age) to realize, but WotC has owned D&D for nearly as long as TSR. TSR went from 1974 to 1997, so 23 years, and WotC has owned it for 22....

Yeah, TSR had a lot of momentum from D&D, which is probably why it took them a bit over 10 years to finally burn out after Gary left.

And I'm aware of that bit about WotC -- and I'd add that they've had far fewer stumbles than TSR did during that time. The biggest weak spot they had was during the release of 4e and the big flop over pulling the .pdfs not long afterwards, and even that wasn't anywhere near the idiocies that TSR was doing.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Yeah, TSR had a lot of momentum from D&D, which is probably why it took them a bit over 10 years to finally burn out after Gary left.

Yeah, and Gary for all his flaws, seemed to be a fairly savvy businessman. Still, it's a very difficult thing to scale a company up from small to medium sized and, from what I've heard of folks who run companies, one reason it's so hard is that you're always only a few bad decisions away from disaster, especially if your expenses are high, which, evidently, was what happened at '90s TSR.

And I'm aware of that bit about WotC -- and I'd add that they've had far fewer stumbles than TSR did during that time. The biggest weak spot they had was during the release of 4e and the big flop over pulling the .pdfs not long afterwards, and even that wasn't anywhere near the idiocies that TSR was doing.

I think it's really important not to let hindsight bias creep in. TSR certainly made a number of bad decisions and seemed to have truly messy internal politics, but that can often describe many organizations. I do suspect that being owned by Hasbro provides a lot of external discipline that, being privately held, TSR clearly lacked. However, 4E rollout was pretty nasty and I suspect that by 2011 the powers that be in Hasbro were more or less saying "do or die". A priori it's hard to know that 5E would be as much of a success as it has been. I doubt, for instance, that anyone was thinking about streaming live play seriously then, for instance. (To be clear, I actually don't care about all the social media hype and the like, but I'm pretty old skool and part of a demographic that WotC doesn't really care about.) The real test of an organization is during a downturn, though, so... we'll see how it goes when that comes.

 

[Dausuul]

Of course, those explanations aren't really all that different, one's just a bit more diplomatic/positive spin than the other.

What? Trying to ship outdated product in a warehouse so you can realize a little more profit is very different from supporting product in customers' hands, when you already have the profit.

Normally, if you want to maximize profits from a new edition, you make it deliberately incompatible with the previous one, and then you look at every sourcebook that sold well in the previous edition, and you reissue it using the new rules.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

What? Trying to ship outdated product in a warehouse so you can realize a little more profit is very different from supporting product in customers' hands, when you already have the profit.

Normally, if you want to maximize profits from a new edition, you make it deliberately incompatible with the previous one, and then you look at every sourcebook that sold well in the previous edition, and you reissue it using the new rules.

See what was said by Jon Pickens at 46:30 in this podcast where he talks about the biggest challenge regarding the transition between 1E and 2E: "You can't invalidate it." He noted that they were reminded about the warehouse full of product (presumably they were also likely worried about book returns but he didn't mention that). They talk more about why the revision was as light as it was about 49:00 with regards to the fact that Gygax was gone as well. I guess, ultimately, the exact motivation isn't that huge: 2E was constrained in terms of how much alteration was allowed by management.

In addition, what about "crazy management decisions by TSR business side" is inconsistent with that kind of reasoning?

 

[Sacrosanct]

Of course, those explanations aren't really all that different, one's just a bit more diplomatic/positive spin than the other. The interview I recall is quite long but here it is. I'm trying to find the spot where they mentioned the fact that management wanted minimal changes, but I haven't yet.

I’ll try to find the interview. The question asked of Skip was why they didn’t think of ascending AC when designing 2e. He responded, “Of course we thought of ascending AC, but we wanted the players, who had all of this 1e material already, to be able to use it in 2e”