D&D General Not the Wicked Witch: Revisiting the Legacy of Lorraine Williams

[Alzrius]

sigh I will once again point out that I wrote a LOT OF WORDS in the OP. This is not a new issue; I encounter it a lot. It is neither "sus" nor a conflict of interest. There are, in fact, rule about this. Because it is common.

Think of any closely-held corporation, and you will understand this. If you don't understand this after what I wrote, I can't help you.

I'll say again that I do understand, I just disagree about what's salient. From a legal and economic standpoint, I'm sure you're correct, and I readily acknowledge that this isn't at all uncommon. I simply find it, personally, to be ethically dubious at best; it is, to my mind, one of the failures of our current economic system (or at least, one of the areas where things need to be improved).

(as came out in court, the self-dealing was an issue for the Blumes).

I'll be the first to agree that we should all have been much harder on the Blumes for a much longer time.

With that said, I'm pretty confident that I've said my piece, so I'll go ahead and bow out of the thread now. Bards, play me off please!

 

[Iosue]

I agree with pretty much all of Snarf's post.

The matter is made difficult because Lorraine has never provided her side of the story. Virtually everything we have heard from her has come from Gary, Gary's friends and admirers, and the creatives who worked for her. Though the last, we should note, disliked everyone in management, since the early days of TSR.

It's especially frustrating in that so much that she gets the blame for started before she got there. They Sue Regularly has been brought up, but this was not just a Lorraine thing. TSR under Gary and the Blumes was just as litigious and happy to send C&D letters. The Williams TSR's treatment of Weis and Hickman was in the company tradition of Gygax/Blume TSR's treatment of Rose Estes. While I can certainly see assigning her some blame for not changing these policies, I don't know why she gets more blame than the originators. This was the culture of TSR, and not even CEOs can change culture by themselves.

(And while I don't agree with TSR's going after fansites in the 90s, but at the same time, I understand that the Internet was new and poorly understood at the time, so I can understand the reasoning: it looked like simply an alternative publishing medium.)

I think also that it's clearer now that Lorraine didn't run TSR into the ground. That was already done before she got there. She kept it afloat for another 12 years, but it never got out from under the crippling debt it incurred during the Gygax/Blume years. This is also mitigated, in my view, by the fact that the RPG publishing business was simply not viable at that time. None of the major companies of the 90s has survived intact. (With the exception of Steve Jackson Games, but even that's involved a pivot from GURPS to the Munchkin card game.) In fact, it may have become viable only in the last decade, as subscription services have allowed for an alternative revenue stream, and Kickstarter has reduced uncertainty in print-runs and distribution.

I don't think Lorraine needs to be lauded. Not even for keeping TSR going after taking over, since this basically involved putting out a new edition for a quick infusion of revenue, and then leveraging the Random House contract (signed in 1979) as an off-the-books credit line.

But, I do think she's been unfairly vilified over the past few years. Beyond the second guessing of every decision that wasn't an unqualified success, there's long been this narrative that TSR was run by Gary and the Gamers, and everything was great except for a few bad business decisions by the Blumes. Then Gary brought Lorraine in to help right the ship and she stabbed him in the back and kicked him out of the company. Then, not being a gamer, and not liking gamers, she ran the company into the ground. Oh, if only Gary hadn't been deceived by her! TSR and D&D under Gary might have continued into a golden age!

The reality is that TSR was run into the ground as much by Gary as the Blumes. Lorraine did betray Gary, but only after he belittled her and demonstrated that he had no intention of tightening his belt* for the good of the company. Her tenure has CEO was mixed at best, but there's little to no evidence it would have been any better under Gary, and some to suggest it would have been a lot worse.**

*In this case, giving up the lease on his expensive Hollywood mansion and company Cadillac.

**My takeaway from When We Were Wizards is that the likely result of Gary continuing as CEO is that he would have bled the company dry enriching himself, before abandoning it to become a Hollywood producer.

 

[Count_Zero]

Before I bow out myself, one final point about the lawsuits. The lawsuits that TSR filed under Lorraine Williams time as head of the company - particularly the ones against GDW and Mayfair Games, left deep lingering scars on the RPG industry.

If those lawsuits had not happened, the OGL would not have needed to exist as an olive branch, nor would the suspension of the OGl by Hasbro been cause for such distress. It made clear that publishers, and the publishers of D&D in particular, can and would take competitors to court to seek to destroy them and - in the case of the GDW suit - have a court case that would imply that anyone else in the industry could be next. Downplaying them, pretending they didn't happen or claiming that they weren't that bad denies the realties of everyone in the industry who were active in that period, especially those who left the industry after the lawsuits.

Those court cases matter - they shaped the industry for decades to come, and if any of that was for the better, it was due to changes made out of trauma - to avoid a return to the times when the biggest publisher in RPGs could take out their competition in legal battles of attrition. It might have been a change for the better, but there were better ways to get here from there.

 

[Dausuul]

While I appreciate the nuance Snarf points here, I'm kinda with Alzrius with this one. Too many bad decisions seem to have piled up under Lorraine's tenure to argue that she was a net positive influence.

From what I can tell, TSR was in a fiery screaming dive into bankruptcy when she took over. She pulled it out. If she hadn't, then D&D might have gone the way of a thousand other '80s fads.

So "the game might have ceased to exist without her" seems like a pretty compelling case for her being a net positive. Even though she ended up taking TSR into another fiery screaming dive, she kept it flying long enough for Peter Adkison to come to the rescue with his cardboard crack millions*. The only ways I can see to make her out a net negative are a) to argue that D&D would have somehow survived without her intervention, or b) to argue that the hobby as a whole would actually have been better off if D&D had collapsed in the early '80s.

*At which point Ryan Dancey wisely took out some fiery screaming dive insurance in the form of the OGL.

 

[Divine2021]

There’s a remarkable amount of apologetics being spouted here about an objectively terrible businessperson. The lawsuits against GDW and Mayfair Games was an act of a monopoly attempting to strangle smaller competitors—a move which had lasting, consequentially terrible impact upon the entire hobby. This alone makes any attempt to rehabilitate Williams a stark example of historical revisionism.

 

[MGibster]

I'll say again that I do understand, I just disagree about what's salient. From a legal and economic standpoint, I'm sure you're correct, and I readily acknowledge that this isn't at all uncommon. I simply find it, personally, to be ethically dubious at best; it is, to my mind, one of the failures of our current economic system (or at least, one of the areas where things need to be improved).

I can't say she did anything illegal or unethical, but I think it does look bad because clearly there's a conflict of interest there. If I had side business catering, my employer wouldn't hire me to cater events because of a clear conflict of interest. But in Williams' defense, Buck Rogers was a known intellectual property, and even though it looks ridiculous in hindsight, maybe it was a good faith effort to create a profitable line of business. It's no less than ridiculous than producing a Space: 1999 game.

 

[MGibster]

There’s a remarkable amount of apologetics being spouted here about an objectively terrible businessperson. The lawsuits against GDW and Mayfair Games was an act of a monopoly attempting to strangle smaller competitors—a move which had lasting, consequentially terrible impact upon the entire hobby. This alone makes any attempt to rehabilitate Williams a stark example of historical revisionism.

When I was a kid, my father and I were watching a movie, I don't remember which, but one of the characters was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. My father said something along the lines of, "I remember when he was still a 'hero.'" And the thing is, Custer was a hero for most of the 19th century and well in the 20th century. The official Court of Inquiry looking into the circumstances surrounding Custer's death wasn't even released until 1951, when my father was five. By the time I was a kid, Custer was a villain. What changed? Historical interpreation was revised.

History is a process where we interpet and reinterpret the past. It's never done, which is why people keep writing history books about the same subject. Without historical revisionism, the Lost Cause Narrative would still dominate interpretation of the American Civil War. Without historical revisionism, Wat's Rebellion would still be looked at through the interpretation of Jean Froissart who presented the peasants as an unruly mob rather than a sophisticated effort by people who understood what they were doing.

 

[Divine2021]

Very strange to turn a post about Lorraine Williams to a commentary on genocide of indigenous Americans. That’s an outrageous move and a frankly offensive non sequitur. It isn’t worth continuing this conversation—you didn’t engage with a single thing I said, you just took a single phrase and made a really uncomfortable comparison. I’m legitimately uncomfortable with what you did here.

 

[Iosue]

There’s a remarkable amount of apologetics being spouted here about an objectively terrible businessperson. The lawsuits against GDW and Mayfair Games was an act of a monopoly attempting to strangle smaller competitors—a move which had lasting, consequentially terrible impact upon the entire hobby. This alone makes any attempt to rehabilitate Williams a stark example of historical revisionism.

The GDW lawsuit was actually mentioned in the podcast. Specifically, that Gygax used D&D spells with just their names removed. I don't recall who was saying it (Steve Winter, I think?) but they seemed to think the lawsuit was justified.

As for Mayfair Games, the first suit brought by TSR against Mayfair Games was in 1984, under the purview of its CEO at the time, one [checks notes] Gary Gygax. When it looked like they might not win, TSR settled for the license agreement that was the subject of the second suit. A license agreement which, it was found, had been breached.

So we have two instances of TSR, under Williams, justifiably pressing their legal rights. But of course, in that grand narrative that's been told over the years, this was just Williams harassing Gygax. Even though he did the same thing when he was in charge of TSR.

Against all that, we have what TSR did to SPI in 1982, under Gygax and the Blumes. With TSR ascendant thanks to the D&D fad, they loaned a struggling SPI $400,000, with SPI's IP as collateral. Two weeks later, they called for the loan to be repaid, and when it naturally could not be, TSR claimed SPI's assets...but not its liabilities. So the readers who had lifetime subscriptions to SPI's Strategy & Tactics were SOL.

But, Gygax has gotten a pass for this, while Williams has been vilified for TSR doing the same thing it had always done.

 

[TiQuinn]

It's especially frustrating in that so much that she gets the blame for started before she got there. They Sue Regularly has been brought up, but this was not just a Lorraine thing. TSR under Gary and the Blumes was just as litigious and happy to send C&D letters. The Williams TSR's treatment of Weis and Hickman was in the company tradition of Gygax/Blume TSR's treatment of Rose Estes. While I can certainly see assigning her some blame for not changing these policies, I don't know why she gets more blame than the originators. This was the culture of TSR, and not even CEOs can change culture by themselves.

TSR had gone through a number of layoffs and I think was down to less than 100 employees around the time she took over based on the podcast (though that could be incorrect), but my point is it doesn’t fly that culture kept the management style the same from the Gygax years. She was the CEO and responsible for the culture she wanted to create going forward and could’ve changed it. I don’t believe she carried on either the Blumes’ or Gygax’s ideas around management. Hers just happened to be just as bad.

Again, just a long winded way of saying both sides could be just as wrong for their own reasons.