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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8854806" data-attributes="member: 7035894">Building on my last post: the good news is that we know all this because Wizards did a lot of forensic accounting work after they bought TSR and were very public in their findings. So they are well aware of what went wrong. They are also much more professionally managed than TSR ever was (Lorraine Williams was the most capable executive that TSR had, and that's saying something).Edit: Random House didn't carry TSR for 30 years; TSR only existed for around 25 years, and the Random House deal was struck around 1980. But the deal was actually supporting TSR from about 1984 on. The novels were not the primary problem, and in fact helped save TSR for awhile, though that had started to fade by the mid-90s. The main problem were the various settings that TSR was printing in huge quantities - Dark Sun, Planescape, etc. - that could never be profitable and just got them further and further in hock to RH.But the Random House deal did, in fact, carry TSR for most of its existence as a company. The reasons while all this happened are complicated and tied up in the shift from hobby stores to regular book stores as the primary vendors for D&D, further tied up with 1980s competition between the major book publishing corporations and all kinds of stuff that go way beyond the scope of TSR and D&D. Suffice to say that Random House essentially gambled on this exploding D&D phenomenon and cut it a deal that Gygax and the Blumes, who didn't know what they were doing, took short term advantage of without foreseeing the long term consequences. Lorraine Williams did know what she was doing, a little bit, and managed to use the arrangement with RH to keep kicking the financial can down the road for about as long as possible, but she was in over her head.Edit 2: Ultimately: TSR's demise happened because Gygax caught lightning in a bottle with D&D and he and the Blumes built TSR around that early, staggering success but never really understood business and so TSR never had a realistic strategy to shift towards normal, managed growth. Once its exponential growth years of the early 80s ended, it was already probably doomed because it was built on a shoddy foundation.The reason this is relevant today is that we have just seen a second period of exponential growth for the game, and Hasbro/Wizards are now trying to figure out how to land that ship without crashing it. That's what OneD&D is: an attempt to change the game's sales paradigm away from the "editions" model that TSR used, which was always a stop-gap strategy that created continuous boom/bust cycles, into a model of gradual sustained growth and diversification. That is why they are absolutely militant that they are keeping the 5e chassis and just calling the game "Dungeons and Dragons" going forward: they want to stop splitting up their brand.This is why I think the insistence by so many folks on this board that OneD&D is a new edition is so wrong. Not only is it not a new edition (in the sense that the word "edition" has previously been used by TSR/WotC), it is a complete rejection of the whole editions paradigm. Hasbro/WotC want brand unity.</blockquote>

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