D&D General Lorraine Williams: Is it Time for a Reevaluation?

[Deset Gled]

Is it, though?

That's an honest question. I've taken that disdain for granted--even in my post a couple pages ago--but just realized that my only basis for this belief is TSR staffers who claimed that she disdained gamers, but offer no specific examples. But maybe there are accounts that I've missed.

The chain-mail-bikini rant might have been forward-thinking and feminist, or it might have been vicious slut-shaming. ...

There are a lot of accounts of her disliking the D&D customers. Too many to ignore. I've added another account from Mike Breault to me previous post with references. Note that in this account, she also calls another female employee a "stupid, useless cow" which doesn't help the image that Ms. Williams was a forward-thinking feminist.

I look at it this way. When you dig into people like HP Lovecraft, or John Lennon, or Gary Gygax, you'll find things you don't like. Lovecraft was racist, Lennon beat women, and we're hearing more stories about questionable things EGG said in his lifetime. It's important remember and know these negative details; we should not forget or forgive their misdeeds because of the things we like. But its also okay to enjoy the good things these people gave us, without feeling shame about their misdeeds.

We should treat Lorraine Williams the same way. If anyone wants to claim that Lorraine Williams was a positive influence on D&D, tell us about positive things she did. Find out what she did to pull the company out of bankruptcy when she came on board, and how her finance skill helped with debt management. Tell us about the deals she made to get D&D in stores, or increase the number or products released. Show us things we can celebrate.

But don't try and minimize the bad she did. Don't pretend she didn't have a vast amount of negative interactions with both customers and employees. Don't try and re-write history to make her business deals about Buck Rogers or the D&D movie rights any less scummy than they really are. You have to take the good with the bad, and no good will be done by trying to forget the bad.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This is a bit arguable.

Some things seem comparable. Gary sued Mayfair. She sued GDW and Mayfair. Both seem bad.

Gary bad mouthed some fan preferences in Dragon Magazine articles. Lorraine sent out C&D letters to online fans and got lots of fan material taken down restricting other fans access to each others material. Lorraine's actions to negatively impact fans seems arguably worse.

The argument can be made that Gary had the same general IP philosophy and would have similarly legally intimidated fans, but he was out when the internet took off so the fact is he didn't and she did so their actions taken are different. They generally deserve credit and blame for their actions, not what they would have done.

If you are talking blame for TSR's financial implosion, Lorraine took over and ousted Gary eleven years before the end. Things were bad from the beginning, but she was there for the end and was responsible for the decade leading up to the end. The person in charge can make changes in a decade. The person outside is less responsible for things that happened a decade after they were ousted.


Equally to blame for things on her watch after she had been in charge for a decade seems arguable.

Gary and the Blumes deserve credit and opprobrium for the decisions and actions on their watch, Lorraine deserves credit and blame for the ones on hers. I would not say they all get equal credit and blame for the actions and decisions of TSR under her leadership.

Yes, she was the one at the helm when it was bought. But looking at the financials, if it weren't for her and Gary were to remain in charge, TSR would have died years prior to 1997. So seems silly to place all the blame on her because the company ultimately failed under her watch when it would have failed much earlier if it weren't for her.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I often wonder how much of the hate is Sexisms' (second or 3rd hand at that)

 

[Parmandur]

This is sadly anecdotal and I can't find it again, so pretty much means nothing. However I do recall one of the 2E TSR alum retelling a story about how she once made mention after a meeting that she was expecting, and that alum mentioning that no one knew she was pregnant (because she was so fat to begin with). That's when I realized, 'oh dear. I don't know if I'm right about who (if anyone) the good guys are.'


These are definitely the kinds of things we need to go back and corroborate. We've all been passing these chestnuts back and forth so long, we all assume that they are true. I think that's the OP's general point.

I think that was Jim Ward, actually. I think he can be considered a bit of a hostile witness in regards to Williams, or TSR in general.

 

[Parmandur]

And an example of why one should be skeptical of the narratives around Williams: It's widely claimed that she banned playtesting. This has been floating around for ages. However, a former TSR employee (scroll down to the comments) asserts that it's a flat-out, bald-faced lie:

"Lorraine never banned playing games. In fact, all of us played games daily at TSR and conducted playtesting of upcoming products. That includes all the members of R&D (from the VP down to the newest editor or designer), sales, marketing, warehouse staff, and more."

And correlated by another:

"I don't recall any official policy about no gaming handed down from Lorraine, not at least while I was there. We certainly playtested the wargames we put out under the SPI label, on company property and company time."

(The latter goes on to note that a lot of stuff didn't get playtested because there simply wasn't time, due to TSR's attempts to outrun bankruptcy through sheer volume of product. The blame for that doomed strategy certainly rests with Williams as CEO. But that is light-years away from forbidding playtesting.)

So... yeah. How many other "well documented" things that "everybody knows" were, in fact, just not so?

Yeah, a lot of former TSR people seem to have an ax to grind against Williams...but that there are alternative narratives suggests caution at taking all these tales about Williams at face value.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

As a collective, we do a lot of handwringing.

that said said this is a good read and interesting.

but I am a simple man. Educated with some interesting life experiences but I like to cut things down to their essential parts.

gygax brought an amazing achievement to the world. For all his flaws, he liked stuff I like and made it into a cool hobby. I would have been friends with him I think had we met at similar ages.

he was not a great businessman. But he was very smart and wanted to have fun. Seems like he was cool to people most of the time and really wanted to play.

me too on both counts. The end.

 

[Osgood]

In the end, neither Gygax nor Williams was well suited to running the company. They both ran it into the ground. One was a gamer who lacked strong business sense, the other a business person who lacked an understanding of the game.

Perhaps if they had figured out a way to work together, capitalizing on the others‘ strengths TSR would still be around today. That said, I prefer the direction D&D has taken under WotC (who’ve managed not to go bankrupt in a longer period of time), so I think its worked out.

 

[David Howery]

I have to wonder... are there a lot of old school gamers around who think EGG was a good businessman? Heck, I started with 1E way back in 1980, and even back then, I was pretty sure he wasn't. There were quite a few indicators of it at the time... the biggest one that had me scratching my head was their trying to sell former SPI games, something that really wasn't their forte. Not to mention the periodic mass layoffs, talent coming and going, etc.

 

[Ogre Mage]

So ... this may just be because there are more surviving people more familiar with it during the 90s, but TSR was notorious for being overprotective of its IP during the late 70s and 80s (the Gygax/Blume era). Which had the additional irony, back then, of the IP not always really even being TSR's.

That wasn't new "under her watch." Generally, this is a corporate culture thing, often with in-house or outside counsel. I'd be curious to see what influence that had.

The overprotectiveness of TSR's intellectual property may not have been new, but L. Williams tenure at TSR coincided with the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. It was an exciting time and people wanted to make websites for their D&D games. From what I have read including in threads on this site, people received legal notices from TSR that they would have to take all D&D content off their website or face legal action. So there was the birth of a new medium combined with TSR's heavy-handedness in policing its IP in this new medium. I believe this generated considerable ill-will toward Williams among D&D players.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Also of note, early TSR had a windfall of good luck. Artists and writers were sending them stuff left and right. For free. For the chance to be officially published. Tim Kask (editor for Dragon) said he was extremely lucky he would have his pick of any art he wanted, because so much of it was coming in.

As an indie publisher, I'm here to tell you that outside of production run costs, art is probably the biggest expense***. For a modern book with color art, the typical rate to expect to pay for an established studio is $500-$1000 per page, depending on complexity. $150-$200 for a single figure like a full body portrait, no background. Go pick up the MM and count how many illustrations are there, and do the math. So for a young company to essentially get a lot of that for free? Not an insignificant advantage to help grow the game.

***I spent roughly $10,000 on Chromatic Dungeons for freelancers alone, and I'm looking at spending $25,000 for the upcoming Twilight Fables book, and these are small indie books. Not counting production costs. I've got a rough idea how much LevelUP has for an art/writer budget (based on industry averages, what they pay for writing, etc), and it's no small amount to make that project come together and look as good as it does, as I'm sure Morrus can attest. I don't want to speak for him, but if he or I had the luxury TSR had in the early 80s, it would be pretty big to our overall profit margins (note: I fully support paying artists and freelancers a fair wage, don't get me wrong, and am not saying I am complaining about those costs, because they are worth it. Just making a comparison, that's all).