TSR Did TSR Sue Regularly?

Shannon Appelcline (Designers & Dragons) talks about it here! With infographics!

"Every company interacts with the rest of the industry in a different way. For Chaosium it's been more than 40 years of licensing, while Target Games created and defined roleplaying in its home country of Sweden. Dave Nalle's Ragnarok Enterprises instead influenced designers and publishers through interactions in A&Eand Abyss. As for TSR, the founder of our industry: as wags have put it: they sue regularly."

Advanced Designers & Dragons #47: TSR Connections: Licenses & Lawsuits - RPGnet

They also sued WotC once!

 

[Cameron Guill]

Not only the crates of 1E goods, a lot of the leatherette books and boxed sets, to my understanding, cost more to make than they were charging for them.

It’s also my understanding that it was the novels & dragon dice that put the final nail in the coffin. The latter sold great initial (heck, I bought some), but quickly petered out.

I’d be curious to know how they fared with their various card games - in particular, the god-awful low-effort Spellfire game. I suspect they lost a lot during the CCG craze they tried to get into.

I bought some Spellfire and Dragon Dice. Heck, until fairly recently, my black Dragon Dice bag was still in use for my normal D&D dice bag. Spellfire was pretty terrible. It was all IP and no decent mechanics. It felt like a kids game. They also did BloodWars CCG, which I invested way too much in because Planescape and the artwork.

I was working in a gaming shop at the time and Spellfire sold well for about a month or two then you couldn't get it. BloodWars was available but no one bought it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not about TSR sueing others, but I remember when in 1982 they destroyed SPI (who had been pretty much the champion of hex-wargames for a decade or so, producing lots of great games).

I never forgave them for that, and abandoned them for other game systems - they never got a penny more of my money.

It’s quite likely that the majority of people haven’t even heard of SPI nowadays, let alone played their games, but I still love the odd game of Outreach, Sorcerer, War in the Ice, Freedom in the Galaxy, Battlefleet Mars and others!

Let's not forget the Dawn of the Dead game, Time Tripper or the Monster That Ate Sheyboygan.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Not about TSR sueing others, but I remember when in 1982 they destroyed SPI (who had been pretty much the champion of hex-wargames for a decade or so, producing lots of great games).

I never forgave them for that, and abandoned them for other game systems - they never got a penny more of my money.

It’s quite likely that the majority of people haven’t even heard of SPI nowadays, let alone played their games, but I still love the odd game of Outreach, Sorcerer, War in the Ice, Freedom in the Galaxy, Battlefleet Mars and others!

I remain a huge fan of the implied setting of DragonQuest. The details hidden amongst the rules scattered through the book (which is how you did it back then) were evocative. Like, what was the deal with the implied rivalry/intrigue between the Colleges of Magic? What was the deal with truesilver; was it the same as Tolkien's mithril or something different? The Frontiers of Alusia book was deliberately set on the fringes of the setting, so it didn't really delve into the kind of details I wanted. It's been twenty yearsforty years and I've never seen online where anybody with any of the original setting details has shared any of them. I suspect they are lost to time.

 

[David Howery]

Not about TSR sueing others, but I remember when in 1982 they destroyed SPI (who had been pretty much the champion of hex-wargames for a decade or so, producing lots of great games).

uh... did TSR take an active hand in knocking down SPI? I'd always had the idea that SPI kinda imploded on it's own, and TSR ended up with chunks of it due to various loans and stuff (IIRC, AH ended up with some chunks of SPI too)....

 

[Deset Gled]

uh... did TSR take an active hand in knocking down SPI? I'd always had the idea that SPI kinda imploded on it's own, and TSR ended up with chunks of it due to various loans and stuff (IIRC, AH ended up with some chunks of SPI too)....

Yes, TSR took down SPI. Here's a link I'm sure I got from this site but don't know who to credit it to: SPI Died for Your Sins

But also, yes, SPI had other problems. The article above goes into some of their debt issues. While TSR started the chain reaction, there's no guarantee something else wouldn't have. And, IMNSHO, the tabletop war game market was not sustainable with computer games and other factors. SPI was definitely facing hard times looking into the new millennium. TSR did the job of knocking them out before we got to see if they would have imploded or evolved.

 

[darjr]

SPI Died for Your Sins

Edit: I was going to say essentially the same. Beaten to the punch.

 

[darjr]

SPI was desperate to make payroll. That’s really bad. They needed that, relatively speaking, small loan or not make payroll. But yea TSR did them wrong, in my humble opinion.

 

[David Howery]

Yes, TSR took down SPI. Here's a link I'm sure I got from this site but don't know who to credit it to: SPI Died for Your Sins

okay, that's the whole story of which I'd only heard parts of before. Along with killing SPI, the whole fiasco seemed to be yet another drain on TSR's cash... they'd have been better off staying out of the whole thing...

 

[RealAlHazred]

Keep in mind, TSR also killed GDW, which was one of the few other wargaming companies of the era.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Keep in mind that at the time there were at least some people who thought DragonQuest might end up being a genuine competitor to D&D. I don't know if any of them were inside TSR, but if there were, that might have seemed to be a two-birds, one-stone thing.