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

[Mannahnin]

Here's an interesting post where Jim's story confirms much of the worst we've heard about TSR management under Gary and the Blumes.

And if I am reading the dates right, the accountant running the numbers and management realizing that they would save money having him back as an employee rather than writing books on contract after having been laid off would have been under the Williams regime.

TSR - April 4th, 1984: TSR's 3rd Purge

Life at TSR was very good and very bad. It started out in 1983. TSR had 386 employees and nepotism had raised its ugly head. You couldn’t throw a rock anywhere in the TSR offices without hitting a cousin, daughter, son, uncle, wife or husbands of any of those, or aunt of the Blume brothers and...

www.enworld.org

Life at TSR was very good and very bad. It started out in 1983. TSR had 386 employees and nepotism had raised its ugly head. You couldn’t throw a rock anywhere in the TSR offices without hitting a cousin, daughter, son, uncle, wife or husbands of any of those, or aunt of the Blume brothers and the Gygaxs working or barely working at TSR.

Some of those relatives were wonderful.

Doug Blume was the only Blume with a business degree and he was great. Others were totally useless, didn’t game, and didn’t have any idea what D&D was. I can remember giving tax advice to one of the accounting Blumes when they should have known all about taxes and taxation laws for TSR; not good.

Anyway, in the fall of 1983 the bottom fell out of the hand held game market as well as the market for hobby games and stores just weren’t buying anything. The company was working with banks and those banks said TSR had to cut back on employees or fold. The two Blume brothers and Gary Gygax didn’t want their fat salaries to end so they started cutting back.

Eventually they went from 386 employees in the fall of 1983 to 86 employees without a cousin in the bunch in the summer of 1984. It happened in five different purges. I fell in the third purge of 55 people on April 4th, 1984.

I joke about it now, although it’s still a very painful memory. I really didn’t see it coming. Just before the first purge they sent around a questionnaire. It asked who you interacted with in the company and what your duties were. I don’t know if anyone else figured it out, but I figured out why they were asking. I filled several pages of notes on the various people I interacted with making the number large and including all the major figures in the company. To my mind I thought upper management wanted to know who they could afford to get rid of. If I dealt with lots of people I would have a better chance of surviving.

At that time I was in the Book Department. I was in charge of working with the freelance authors getting them on schedules and getting them contracts. It was a lot like herding cats, but I really enjoyed the work (more on that later). I had recently gotten a plaque joining what was called the TSR two million dollar club. All by myself with my TSR published products I had made TSR over two million dollars in profits. It was just a piece of wood, but I felt great in getting it. The plaque still hangs on the wall in my study. I also got my best job review ever and really felt I would be working at TSR for the rest of my working career. Did I say young Jim Ward was unusually naive in those days?

 

[Mannahnin]

Here's one talking about management pushing for products to be completed on schedules which would not allow playtesting and required a lot of other corner-cutting. For reference, GA was published in Sept 1988, so was all Williams-era.

TSR - TSR's "Designeritus"

We had a lot of design talent in the heyday of TSR. Zeb Cook and Jeff Grubb strode the world like giants and put together some amazing million dollar profit centers. There were other designers and editors and supervisors that also generated great stuff. However, I often had to get after those...

www.enworld.org

TSR and Six Months

The upper management at TSR often played dirty with us in design and editing. Imagine my horror when accounting came into my office with sales. They told me they needed a hardbound book to sell so that we could make enough money to pay the employees in the fall. I wasn't going to be the one to tell my group we had to suffer a loss in pay because the company wasn't going to make enough money.

I said sure the department could deliver such a product, but it wouldn't be until the Spring.

They said no, that won't do. We need it out the door in six months at the latest. I thought over the scheduling problem. We usually let designers have six months just to design a 160 hardbound book. We liked to play test the rules, proof read the rules, let an editor have it for two or three months, art had to be ordered and three months was allowed for that, the cover was vital. This product wouldn't be in the fall catalog so getting it into the budgets of distributors would be difficult at this late date.

I argued against the effort. Accounting kept bringing up the companies in ability to pay salaries. I was between a rock and a hard place. I took up the challenge of writing the book because all of the other designers were scheduled to the max.

Looking over all the excellent campaign worlds of TSR I was most familiar with the Greyhawk Campaign. Gary wasn't at TSR then so there hadn't been much Greyhawk material generated. Some of the concepts in the book were easy for me to write because I had played in Gary's game for years and years. Spells were easy to design as I had been developing Drawmij spells for years. Monsters were easy again. Some of the NPCs of Greyhawk had never been stated out and they were worth doing. I had always thought Zero level characters were a logical thing to develop.

I generated a detailed outline of things I thought our AD&D consumers would enjoy. Bruce Heard worked to get me some very good freelance designers and we got to work. We cut corners whenever we could. We started turning over art orders early. We didn't play test anything. I really regretted that as my Zero level characters could have used lots more development work.

 

[Mannahnin]

That wasn't what I meant; only that while I think that there are a lot of reasons to re-visit stories the stories people say about her and reconsider how we view her, in the end, she was in charge when TSR spiraled down the drain and was sold off.

I agree.

(Which is to say I don't even know that Jim is incorrect in his own view of the matter, but if a male CEO called him out, maybe he would have considered that inspiring and leadership, and not abrasive, or, at a minimum, been comfortable speaking privately with the CEO ... it's just a subtle thing.)

Perhaps. I agree that it's subtle.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Here's another post where Jim talks about TSR management being against playtesting. Though his use of the word "evil" could be taken as hyperbole or indicative of a grudge, he does not call out anyone specific by name:

TSR - Jim Ward: Interplanetary War (TSR)

You won't be surprised to know that the highly creative people at TSR often did amazing things in their game playing. I can distinctly remember having a fun lunch with Gary Gygax and he told me that he was very jealous of a few of the designer types at TSR because they ran their own home games...

www.enworld.org

But that's not banning all playtesting. It's "don't have a regular Thursday afternoon gaming session on company time". I'm not saying Ward wasn't right, but that's way less than she's accused of.

 

[Mannahnin]

But that's not banning all playtesting. It's "don't have a regular Thursday afternoon gaming session on company time". I'm not saying Ward wasn't right, but that's way less than she's accused of.

Eh. The total picture I've seen so far based on first-person quotes is closer to banning it than not.

Jim's story is inclusive of playtesting, and is management saying "you cannot do this kind of testing or opposition research via play on company time". Which is stupid. Bad management.

Jim's and Mike's other accounts of playtesting not being officially banned but being made impossible- the decision-makers not allowing design and development sufficient time in the production schedule to actually test the products, is mismanagement producing the same result (no playtesting permitted) without the formality of an anti-playtesting policy.

 

[Dausuul]

Here's another post where Jim talks about TSR management being against playtesting. Though his use of the word "evil" could be taken as hyperbole or indicative of a grudge, he does not call out anyone specific by name:

TSR - Jim Ward: Interplanetary War (TSR)

You won't be surprised to know that the highly creative people at TSR often did amazing things in their game playing. I can distinctly remember having a fun lunch with Gary Gygax and he told me that he was very jealous of a few of the designer types at TSR because they ran their own home games...

www.enworld.org

Now that is real evidence for the "playtesting was forbidden" argument. And in fact it puts the "playtesting was happening" posts in a new light--yes, there was playtesting on company property and company time, but it might simply have been because Jim Ward disobeyed orders from his superiors.

It is just the one anecdote, and "evil company masters" does not exactly scream objectivity; but it is a firsthand account and speaks directly to the question of "Did Lorraine forbid playtesting?" (I'm not sure I care that much whether it was Lorraine personally or someone a level or two down from her. Where corporate strategy and policy are concerned, the buck stops with the CEO.)

 

[Sacrosanct]

The thing is, nothing in this book should come as a surprise, if we didn't let our blinders get in the way. I'm just as guilty as the next person about holding Gary in such esteem while vilifying Lorraine.

The first big red flag should have been how Gary treated Dave. Not some random fan. Or employee. But his friend and co-creator. That whole lawsuit spoke volumes, and we knew about that a long time ago. That never sat right with me, but I turned a blind eye and ignored it (and all of the other red flags) simply because of who he was.

I'll be at GaryCon, and I'll be celebrating Gary's accomplishments to this industry. Because we should. But he was just a man, not to be idolized. And Lorraine shouldn't take all of the blame for the fall of TSR.*


*which an ironic thought just occurred to me. TSR was cursed with horrible leadership and management from day 1 to the day of sale, so I suppose it's fitting LaNasa and crew are desperately trying so hard to be the current "leadership" of the TSR name, because their business acumen and morals would be a natural progression of TSR leadership....

 

[Neonchameleon]

Eh. The total picture I've seen so far based on first-person quotes is closer to banning it than not.

Jim's story is inclusive of playtesting, and is management saying "you cannot do this kind of testing or opposition research via play on company time". Which is stupid. Bad management.

Jim's and Mike's other accounts of playtesting not being officially banned but being made impossible- the decision-makers not allowing design and development sufficient time in the production schedule to actually test the products, is mismanagement producing the same result (no playtesting permitted) without the formality of an anti-playtesting policy.

Stories should normally be construed against the storyteller as they are to make the storyteller look good. And Jim's story makes him sound like a Cool Manager not a good manager.

What someone (probably Williams) banned was Jim shutting down the company for half a day a week to have a generalised gaming session and some of what was done at them was playtesting, but far from everything. A question is if, instead of literally trying to turn 10% of company activity into gaming sessions Jim had e.g. put together an Opposition Research Team of two groups of five people, working through games one at a time and creating reports on them with structured outputs so people who weren't at the table would have had lessons from the games what would have happened.

As for the Greyhawk Adventures story, note the opening

The upper management at TSR often played dirty with us in design and editing. Imagine my horror when accounting came into my office with sales. They told me they needed a hardbound book to sell so that we could make enough money to pay the employees in the fall. I wasn't going to be the one to tell my group we had to suffer a loss in pay because the company wasn't going to make enough money.​

​

I said sure the department could deliver such a product, but it wouldn't be until the Spring.​

​

They said no, that won't do. We need it out the door in six months at the latest.​

If the accountants were telling the truth then TSR were right on the wire - and Jim trying to soak up 10% of the company's time with no direct outputs was part of what was driving the company under. Is it likely that they were right on the wire? I don't have enough financials right to hand - but it's plausible. Game revenue had been tumbling, and 1985/6 would have seen an uptick in sales thanks to Unearthed Arcana.

 

[darjr]

Speaking of GaryCon, the crew that played with Dave Arneson are often there, some by invitation. Some of them have a dim view of Gary Gygax. It’s to Luke’s credit that he invites them regardless.

 

[HammerMan]

And that's a perfectly legit criticism of Gary. I understand his titles were mostly ceremonial in nature similar to producer credits on movies.

He wasn't there for the day to day running of the business. Lorraine was.

EDIT: I don't mean to call you out per say, but the whole "CEO is really not a job" thing comes up a lot and not just in gaming things so I always want to explain it... also I am not a CxO as much as I wish I were

Okay, I see this alot. CEO is NOT an easy do nothing job (most times) none of the CxO jobs are. People tend to think of that high on the food chain as just "sitting back and collecting money" but that isn't what the job is supposed to be (yes some lazy people do that, but that is true of every level of title all the way down to janator/cook/cs rep). Now I wont say a CEO is working like a sweat shop or an amazon loader, but they have (again IF they are doing there job) a lot of weight on there shoulders, and a lot of managing to do.

Yes jobs get physically easier at the cooperate level, but they are still hard stress filled jobs. I have seen many GOOD (yes I want to emphasize that) CxOs go grey real quick in those jobs when they are always hopping. In the last two years the CEO and CFO where I work now (not the biggest company but an international one) age 10 years trying to keep things going... and the poor COO with the shipping things is loseing her mind.