TSR D&D Historian Ben Riggs on TSR's Salaries in the 1990s

We're talking about the original TSR (TSR1) here, not the controversy-laden TSR3. Benjamin Riggs is a D&D historian, and his latest book Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, which takes a deep dive into the sale of TSR to WotC in the late 1990s, is available to pre-order now.

Ben wrote about the salaries of TSR employees back in 1997.

Hi! I’m a D&D historian, and given some of the issues around worker pay in the #TTRPG industry raised by the Paizo Union and others, I thought I’d tweet a little bit about pay at TSR in 1997, a time for which I have a ton of primary source documents.

First, let’s look at TSR as a whole. It had 94 American employees, and I believe 15 UK employees though my documentation on that is thin. The company spent $3,551,664 on payroll in 97.

The highest-paid person at TSR in 97 made $212,973. ($360,000 in today’s dollars.)

The lowest-paid person made $15,080. ($26,000 in today’s dollars.)

The highest-paid creative at TSR in 97 was an artist who took home a $100,000 salary. ($173,000 in today’s dollars.)

The highest-paid game designer made $50,000. ($86,000 in today’s dollars.)

The lowest-paid game designer made $27,500. ($47,000 in today’s dollars.)

I’m not an econ major or in business, but a few things jump out at me when I look at the payrolls and salaries as a whole.

First, game design seemed to have the lowest salaries as a group, excepting administrative assistants. It was also the largest group of employees on the payroll.

That said, hiring a full-time game designer based in outstate Wisconsin today and paying them $47,000 plus benefits seems a generous starting wage. That said, a starting game designer working on D&D at WoTC has to live in Seattle, which is not nearly as affordable as Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

While I haven’t done the math, at a glance, it looks like the average salary in every other department was higher. Cartography, books, sales, and art all seemed more financially remunerative than game design.

One reason for this could be that there was a massive layoff at TSR the Friday before Christmas in 1996. I do not know the salaries of the 20+ people laid off that day. It could be that they were higher-paid individuals, and since my data is from 1997, it leaves the RPG department looking underpaid.

But there were also people who had been with TSR for I believe 20+ years working in the RPG department who were still making less than $30,000 in 1997. I did not see anyone with that kind of longevity still making that little in any other department.

So perhaps management simply took advantage of the fact that people would work for less if they got to make D&D. A suggestion that might help ensure better pay for RPG designers going forward is royalties.

Gygax & Arneson made incredible amounts of money off their D&D royalties. Early D&D developers who were given royalties described them as a portal to the middle class. While not every adventure will sell so well that it will allow the designers to buy mansions, it would allow those whose work really took off to directly benefit.

Furthermore, royalties can provide income for a long time after work is completed, and one of the tragedies of the industry today is watching RPG legends beg for money to pay medical bills online. Perhaps royalties could provide long-term security for designers.

In sum, RPG designers are vital people to the lives of our imaginations. It is important they not just survive but thrive economically from their inspiring and important work.

If you find me amusing, consider pre-ordering my book on the sale of TSR to WoTC at [this link]!

Ben Riggs's Slaying the Dragon tells the secret and untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, then purchased and saved by their bitterest rival.

For twenty years, a story has been told about the first company that made Dungeons & Dragons, TSR, and the story goes something like this: Dungeons & Dragons created the genre of role-playing games in 1974, and that made TSR successful. In the 1990's, Wizards of the Coast created a new kind of game, the collectible card game. People started playing Wizards’ flagship product, Magic: The Gathering, and that competition killed TSR. In a twist worthy of a Greek tragedy, Wizards ended up buying TSR. It is a story of competition and creative destruction, as capitalism teaches us is right and good.

That story is entirely wrong.

Through hundreds of hours of interviews, endless research, and the help of anonymous sources providing secret documents, the true story of what happened to TSR and Dungeons & Dragons can finally be told. TSR did not so much die in capitalist combat as it bled to death of self-inflicted wounds. The true history is that of disastrous mistakes, and decisions founded on arrogance rather than good sense. Debts were racked up, geniuses driven from the company, and countless of thousands of products were shipped and sold at a loss, with no one noticing until after the fact. The story of TSR provides a negative blueprint, an example of what a company should not do in the geek business space.

And it is a story entirely untold until now.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is undoubtedly why Wizards hires designers who've already made a mark in the RPG industry. It's the equivalent of an artist's portfolio; you can see what they made and how it was received, and playtest it yourself. It ain't perfect--as in any industry, no matter how many certifications and portfolios and tests you look for, there's no way to know absolutely-for-sure that a new hire will work out--but it's decently effective.

TSR, of course, did not have that luxury in the early days. Still, there was a pretty lively RPG market going by the late '80s*; they could have adopted such a strategy. But it didn't seem like TSR execs knew or cared much about the quality of their output. And if you don't care about something, you're not going to pay much for it.

It seems to me like, until sometime in the mid-late '90s, RPG design was seen as an "unskilled" or at least "amateur" field, both by the companies involved, and by the audience.

In discussions in the '90s you almost never heard "Maybe try the rules as they are - the designers were competent and playtested this heavily". On the contrary, the normal assumption was that basically any random DM was just as competent at game design as the people who actually made the game.

As the '90s progressed this attitude changed, I think because we started to see more and more designs which didn't seem slapped-together, full of contradictions and peculiarities and so on. Whether it was Feng Shui or Marvel SAGA or whatever people started to realize that maybe there was more to designing RPGs than just slapping some numbers on a page or making up rules that "sounded right".

Certainly WotC, with 3E, took a very different approach, perhaps partly because MtG had demanded it, and clearly believed "good game design" existed. And whilst the d20 boom brought "amateur hour" back to some degree, I think since then (and with more discussion of theory behind RPGs) we've seen a big change in how RPGs are designed. 5E actually has some rather poorly-developed bits that I think are the result of coming out of the oven slightly early, moreso than 3E/4E in some ways I'd say, but there's also a lot of very tight math and logic in there (much better logic than 3E too, I'd note).

 

[Blue Orange]

One of the big problems is the simple law of supply and demand.

You can find, even (especially?) now, plenty of absolutely free D&D material online...people make & release this stuff for fun. So when it comes to design, as people, say, it's harder to tell good from bad, and there's a lot of people willing to fill a designer's place if they don't like the salary...which drives down wages.

 

[Mannahnin]

The sales blurb certainly is doing a good job of un-selling me, personally. However, it is important to remember that people like us, who spend huge amounts of time hashing over the game while not playing the game, are a minority. Forumites are what, half a percent of TTRPG gamers maybe (I know, hard stats on something like that is going to be impossible). I think HM's people thought TSR died of people playing other things notion is probably more widely held amongst the wider world of D&D-playing people. Those that probably could come up with TSR as the company that came before WotC for D&D by themselves, That probably remember the name Gary Gygax when you bring it up ('didn't he have a cameo on Futurama?'), and have no idea who Lorraine Williams or the Blumes are. I certainly know that in the 90s, there were a lot of people in my local circles who thought White Wolf and Magic: the Gathering were who/what were to blame for D&D's decline.

This is much my thought as well.

In the 90s it looked like gamers had voted with their feet, moving en masse to Magic and to newer, shinier games, and away from D&D, looking at it as old-fashioned and to some extent marketed at kids (a hangover from late 1E, early 2E era marketing, especially). Even relatively hot concepts like Dark Sun, with its outstanding Brom art, somehow failed, though in retrospect we know TSR had screwed up their math badly and were losing money on those wonderful setting boxed sets. And after a couple of years of Magic, you got the rise of the first big MMOs (EverQuest dropped in 1999, ja?).

The details about TSR's management woes, the Random House deal and such have really only emerged pretty recently, and are probably only common knowledge among, as you said, a hardcore dedicated set of fans like us.

I am interested in this book as a complement to Game Wizards, covering the later, post-Gygax period at TSR. Although I hope it's either good (and obviates the need for Jon Peterson to cover the same period), or very bad (and gives Jon reason to do it better).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Even relatively hot concepts like Dark Sun, with its outstanding Brom art, somehow failed

Just on this specific concept, did it?

I ask because my impression was the original Dark Sun boxed set was extremely successful, but then WotC put out a second Dark Sun boxed set to replace it, which showed a huge lack of understanding of why anyone might like Dark Sun, and IIRC, deleted all the Brom art - I just checked it absolutely did. The second version also just has drastically less style and "edge". The art is far more subdued, there's a lot less of it, the layout is I think objectively worse and more text-heavy (I have both to hand), and so on.

So to me it looks like the Brom/Baxa-era Dark Sun boxed set was a success, at least enough of one that they decided to double-down on it and put out a new boxed set, but that that second boxed set might well have been a failure. And with good reason - it moved in the exact wrong direction. Just as art and design and getting people excited about RPGs was being better and better done by competitors, WotC moved away from excitement and towards looking staid and nerdy.

 

[Mannahnin]

Just on this specific concept, did it?

I ask because my impression was the original Dark Sun boxed set was extremely successful, but then WotC put out a second Dark Sun boxed set to replace it, which showed a huge lack of understanding of why anyone might like Dark Sun, and IIRC, deleted all the Brom art - I just checked it absolutely did. The second version also just has drastically less style and "edge". The art is far more subdued, there's a lot less of it, the layout is I think objectively worse and more text-heavy (I have both to hand), and so on.

So to me it looks like the Brom/Baxa-era Dark Sun boxed set was a success, at least enough of one that they decided to double-down on it and put out a new boxed set, but that that second boxed set might well have been a failure. And with good reason - it moved in the exact wrong direction. Just as art and design and getting people excited about RPGs was being better and better done by competitors, WotC moved away from excitement and towards looking staid and nerdy.

That's fair. It's an open question, and perhaps I'm inferring too much in assuming that the original box set lost money based on information that the 2E-era boxed sets in general lost money because as a rule their production costs were higher than their actual price.

I'm sure it was successful from the perspective of selling well and getting a bunch of gamers excited. But if its production costs were higher than its selling price....

Heck, that could conceivably be why TSR re-did it. Did Brom maybe negotiable a royalty deal or something, which TSR later regretted? Like what happened with Arneson, and with Mike Carr's In Search of the Unknown? If he was getting too high a cut, maybe they thought they could make it profitable by cutting him out and re-doing it, like with subbing B2 into the Basic boxes in place of B1.

 

[humble minion]

Did Brom maybe negotiable a royalty deal or something, which TSR later regretted?

I remember reading somewhere that Brom thoroughly burnt himself out on the Dark Sun aesthetic though the sheer volume of work he produced for the line, and wanted to work in a different style for a while.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That's fair. It's an open question, and perhaps I'm inferring too much in assuming that the original box set lost money based on information that the 2E-era boxed sets in general lost money because as a rule their production costs were higher than their actual price.

I'm sure it was successful from the perspective of selling well and getting a bunch of gamers excited. But if its production costs were higher than its selling price....

Heck, that could conceivably be why TSR re-did it. Did Brom maybe negotiable a royalty deal or something, which TSR later regretted? Like what happened with Arneson, and with Mike Carr's In Search of the Unknown? If he was getting too high a cut, maybe they thought they could make it profitable by cutting him out and re-doing it, like with subbing B2 into the Basic boxes in place of B1.

The original DS includes some unusual elements like two flip-pads on good card stock with colour printing, and is generally produced to a higher standard than the 2nd version, so it's highly possible it was more expensive. I don't buy royalties or him taking a cut unless there's evidence, because that would basically be unheard-of for an artist back then (correct me if I'm wrong), and TSR had already been burned on that sort of thing, so I doubt they'd do it again in 1993.

However, the second version just makes a ton of bad aesthetic decisions to the point where it looks a lot more like there was a conscious hand behind them than it being accident or necessity. I feel it likely re-using Brom and Baxa's art would have been cheaper than commissioning a bunch of new art (which doesn't look "cheap" or anything, just nowhere near as sharp, memorable or stylish), and the layout/graphic design choices won't have saved money on the book interior, they're just bad. This is from an era when WotC made quite a number out outright-bad, like objectively-bad graphic design and layout decisions. The most spectacular being the reprint of the PHB, which is absolutely HIDEOUS and whoever was in charge of the graphic design/layout there (and cover choice and some of the interior art choices) should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. The 1st PHB for 2E is a work of art. It's not perfect, but it is extremely attractive. It's just outright pleasant to look at. I've had people who aren't D&D players comment on how it was, particularly the interior - but even cover's colour-dominance complements the interior. It's just good work. Then the second version comes along and it looks like a ogre who works as an accountant designed it whilst in a bad mood.

No idea what happened at WotC there. At the same time Planescape stuff is coming out with often-great visual design, but even that began to trail off and get a lot uglier. It wasn't a trend in general in the mid-late 1990s - plenty of other RPGs were highly attractive or even becoming more attractive in that period. Just not AD&D. Not all books were disasters, note, but the 2nd version of the PHB and the 2nd version of Dark Sun were.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I remember reading somewhere that Brom thoroughly burnt himself out on the Dark Sun aesthetic though the sheer volume of work he produced for the line, and wanted to work in a different style for a while.

Yep. From Brom himself. He basically wasn’t allowed to do other stuff and it just burnt him out.

 

[Alzrius]

The original DS includes some unusual elements like two flip-pads on good card stock with colour printing, and is generally produced to a higher standard than the 2nd version, so it's highly possible it was more expensive.

The revised boxed set (affiliate link) came with a cloth map of the Tablelands, so I'm not so sure about that.

 

[Jimmy Dick]

You do miss out on in person networking though things like zoom only go so far.

Who you know is just as if not more important as what you know in a lot of job sites.

I've worked online for over ten years. You can easily do in person networking online. You don't even need Zoom for that. Zoom helps with some other aspects of networking but the pandemic is showing us that the need to have physical offices for most things is an illusion. I am teaching college courses in history via Zoom and live students in the classroom at the same time. I can connect with students either way at the same time. It's all in how you develop the material.

Networking is just an extension of conversation. It can be done via text messaging and e-mail for that matter. It works well via Discord too. You can actually meet more people online than in the physical world. Another thing the pandemic has shown us is that a lot of office problems can be eliminated via working from home. Office politics tend to decrease significantly and productivity increases. Makes you wonder just how much of the so-called networking was really about work related things.