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.

 

[Mannahnin]

Here's an interesting post by Bruce Heard correcting some of Jim's details on a story about management and production scheduling.

OP:

TSR - TSR's Amazing Accounting Department

The time is 1987 and I was the Vice President of the design and editors. It was a great job because TSR had amazing people doing the design and editing of product. I wasn't liked much by upper management at TSR after Gary left the company. I don't do well with authority figures that I do not...

www.enworld.org

Bruce contradicts Jim on a few points and reinforces others:

TSR - TSR's Amazing Accounting Department

I love me some Jim Ward, but it's "I couldn't care less", not "I could care less." Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. Like nails on a chalkboard Perhaps much like it could be someone else's pet peeve to see people being called out for using that phrase in an area devoted to discussion of an...

www.enworld.org

<<The new crazed head of accounting told me that TSR couldn't afford to be so far ahead in our production schedule. He tried to tell me it was costing TSR money to have products waiting to be sold for months at a time. He wanted to have the products finished exactly one month before the product was released. >>

Your story is a bit misleading. I don't ever recall confronting such an absurd order (I agree -- it was patently unworkable). All the work was scheduled according to resources available. Period. That meant a significant number of projects were unavoidably completed well before the one-month deadline. That certainly was the case when I was director of production planning (perhaps this was after your time at TSR). After the nastiness of dealing with Lorraine's buddy, Mary Abel (you might not have had the pleasure of being acquainted with that character), my authority and responsibilities over the game division's scheduling matters remained essentially unchallenged until TSR went under.

By the way, it isn't an accurate statement that freelancers were late all the time. Many were not. Some of those who did blow their deadlines did so because of conflicting directives from in-house staffers. That did happen often. For that matter, there were a number of in-house staffers who missed their own deadlines as well. And yeah, I did have the unenviable job of cracking down on both sides when delays cropped up. Many of those mishaps weren't necessarily anyone's fault, but rather the result of changes in direction dictated by our upper management.

Bruce

Here's another first person report from comments on the same Jim post, from James Lowder:

TSR - TSR's Amazing Accounting Department

At first, TSR was run by gamers who knew very little about business. Later, TSR was run by business people who knew very little about gaming. Neither worked well. Worse, the business people didn't seem to know about business, either.

www.enworld.org

I suspect Jim means the 1980s for getting the catalog material done further in advance. In 1988, when I started with TSR, the company was already working with advance catalog copy and cover art. Editors and line heads had to provide summaries of content for each product, along with cover art orders, months ahead of time, frequently well before the books were written. (That's how you end up with the occasional cover–product mismatches, like Tantras, both novel and module. The Avatar covers were painted long before the novels and the modules.)

RPG Geek has entries for many of the TSR company catalogs from the late 80s and 90s here: TSR Product Catalogues

Between 1988 and early 1994, when I stopped working with TSR, the overall movement had been to complete products earlier, for a variety of reasons (to provide near-finished books to fiction reviewers who wanted galleys six months before publication, to have more time to schedule for the best print costs, to increase overall schedule flexibility, and so on). By the mid-1990s, the company was completing RPG and fiction material further ahead of ship date than they had in the late 1980s. And that meant an increase in the time gap between when the freelancers were being paid for a product and when the company brought in any money from that same product. (Random House typically paid TSR on ship.)

TSR's cash flow problems made themselves known outside the company by 1995 or early 1996, when the company started to pay bills late. By 1996, they had stopped paying me and many of the fiction authors the royalties that were due quarterly. They owed a long list of individual writers tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's just the debt for late/unpaid fiction royalties. Freelancer payments of other sorts had become routinely late, too. As we know now, TSR was in a financial tailspin.

If a dictate on the production schedule--shortening up the time between project completion and ship--came down from upper management, that would have been why. The completion–ship gap was one of the few areas where TSR could control the pace of the cash outlay for products. Shortening the gap to one month is ludicrous, of course, but it would not have been unusual for management to go completely overboard on such a dictate. That's just speculation, though. I was outside the company at that point and did not see that dictate play out firsthand.

--James Lowder

 

[Dausuul]

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.

This is so very true. My old college DM recently became CEO of the company he co-founded. He took the job, under duress, because the previous CEO was steering the company straight into bankruptcy.

He's righting the ship, but it's consuming his life and driving him absolutely bananas. He's made it very clear to the board that this is a temporary state of affairs and he is leaving at the end of it. (Apparently it took him a while to convince them that he was serious and it wasn't just a negotiating ploy for more money.)

It can be a cushy gig in many ways, but it's not an easy gig--not if you take it seriously and try to do a good job.

 

[HammerMan]

This is so very true. My old college DM recently became CEO of the company he co-founded. He took the job, under duress, because the previous CEO was steering the company straight into bankruptcy.

He's righting the ship, but it's consuming his life and driving him absolutely bananas. He's made it very clear to the board that this is a temporary state of affairs and he is leaving at the end of it. (Apparently it took him a while to convince them that he was serious and it wasn't just a negotiating ploy for more money.)

It can be a cushy gig in many ways, but it's not an easy gig--not if you take it seriously and try to do a good job.

exactly (and I feel for your friend) it is like saying "All retail employees are lazy" because you see two Walmart employees horsing around on there phone... for everyone of them there is a guy or gal busting there butt trying to make things right.

 

[loverdrive]

The fact she has remained silent for 20+ years is an interesting point. Perhaps she felt so ashamed about the TSR ship going down on her watch and being forced to sell to TSR's biggest competitor (WoTC) that she wanted to bury everything that happened. The past is too painful to dredge up.

Or maybe she didn't give a $h*t about TSR's destruction. She took her money and ran. I've read about corporate types like that.

Or maybe it isn't that important. I mean, businesses fail all the time, and what is a soulcrushing tragedy for one is just another day in the office for another. It's unfair and, honestly, unsmart to expect a hired manager to care about the product as if it was her baby. Welcome to capitalism, I guess.

 

[Mannahnin]

I've dug these up an an exercise in re-examining some of the stories we've been told, and seeing how credible they look in retrospect.

Overall I will say that Jim's memoirs definitely give interesting details and corroboration to some of what we've heard elsewhere, but Neonchameleon and Snarf are right that while he seems like a better witness than Breault, he's not all that objective.

Of course it's hard for any of us to be very objective about something we were emotionally invested in, especially many years after the fact.

 

[LordEntrails]

Or maybe it isn't that important. I mean, businesses fail all the time, and what is a soulcrushing tragedy for one is just another day in the office for another. It's unfair and, honestly, unsmart to expect a hired manager to care about the product as if it was her baby. Welcome to capitalism, I guess.

Are you implying that Lorraine was a hired manager? Someone the company/Gary brought it to manage the company while he still owned it?

Yea, that may have been how it started (I'm not sure), but soon after coming onboard, she spend her trust fund to buy all the stock. She bought the baby with her own money, it was her's at that point and was pretty no reason to think she was not all in at that point.

 

[Voadam]

View attachment 145734

Neat chart of the TSR revenue and profits. Where is it from?

 

[Mannahnin]

Neat chart of the TSR revenue and profits. Where is it from?

Game Wizards: TSR Financials

Underpinning the business story of Game Wizards is the financial model shown here of TSR as a company, from the founding of TSR Hobbies i...

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

Jon's been putting excerpts from or complementary articles relating to Game Wizards on his blog for the past couple of months.

 

[Mannahnin]

Are you implying that Lorraine was a hired manager? Someone the company/Gary brought it to manage the company while he still owned it?

Yea, that may have been how it started (I'm not sure), but soon after coming onboard, she spend her trust fund to buy all the stock. She bought the baby with her own money, it was her's at that point and was pretty no reason to think she was not all in at that point.

Yes, this is established history, except that he didn't own it. He was only ever majority shareholder for a brief period.

Gygax met her brother Flint in Hollywood. He wanted her both to work as an executive and as an investor. To give them much-needed cash, and to help free him up to work on getting a D&D movie and possibly more TV shows done, and because the Blumes had been trying to get out of the company for a while. He hired her as VP immediately after he became President and CEO again in March 1985, but they apparently had a lot of differences of opinion. When Gygax failed to follow through on his promise to the Blumes to buy them out, she stepped into the gap, bought their shares and assumed control of the company in October 1985.

Given that neither Gygax personally nor TSR could raise the capital to purchase the Blume family stock, how was Williams, a new hire, in a position to do so? The answer is that Williams came from money, and that her hiring was actually contingent on her investment in the company in several respects. Gygax had first met Williams through her brother, Flint Dille, who worked with Gygax on several projects of the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation in Los Angeles; their grandfather John F. Dille published the original Buck Rogers comics, and the Dille family owned the rights to the character and controlled a trust collecting the resulting royalties.

Thus, before Gygax invited Williams to join TSR as a Vice President, he had a number of discussions with her around February 1985 about investing in the company, including a proposal to acquire TSR stock valued at $150,000. Her offer letter, dated April 1, 1985, includes several stipulations relating to investment. For example, Williams’s employment agreement deferred a third of her salary of $90,000 per year into stock purchases. It furthermore required her to immediately purchase $50,000 worth of TSR stock upon accepting the agreement, and to buy a further $100,000 worth of stock in the 1986 calendar year. Given TSR’s precarious financial situation, this represented a significant cash infusion, but also a substantial risk to Williams as an investor. Gygax writes in the offer letter of her “commitment to TSR” as evidenced by her “determination to acquire a substantial holding in the corporation,” though the amount in question fell far short of a controlling interest—Williams, after all, was not a gamer, and Gygax had to be cautious about outsider control.

Gygax made hiring Williams a high priority: consider that the board voted him President and CEO on a Friday afternoon in March 1985, and her offer letter dates to the following Monday. Gygax believed at the time that she would make an excellent addition to the Board of Directors. The board granted her an option to purchase 50 shares at $300—she would quietly exercise those on October 16, a small but crucial addition to her holdings in advance of the October 22 meeting.

Why did Williams seek control of TSR? Shortly after she came on board back in April, the relationship between Gygax and Williams began to sour. The financial situation of the company continued to deteriorate, and Williams did not approve of the company’s handling of the Blumes. If she were going to invest further in TSR, it would have to empower her to make real changes in the way the company was operating. Therefore, in October 1985, she saw no need to give Gygax any advance notice of her deal with the Blumes. “Gygax and I were not talking very much during the time because we had very fundamental differences,” she remarked. Furthermore, informing Gygax that she intended to purchase the Blume family shares would be, as she put it, “an invitation for him to get in and just try to screw it up, and to once again try to thwart the ability of the Blumes to sell their stock and to get out and to go about their lives.”

 

[Umbran]

...it was her's at that point and was pretty no reason to think she was not all in at that point.

Note, though, that "all in" means different things to different people.

All in for an executive or investor does not necessarily mean they have any emotional attachment to what they are working on.