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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8434047" data-attributes="member: 58197">[USER=7023840]@Snarf Zagyg[/USER], I pretty much agree with your take (with the caveat that I haven't yet read the book, so going off what I've seen on the subject previously).Viewed purely in their respective capacities as chief executive officer of TSR, Williams was better than Gygax. She wasn't a great CEO by any means, I can make a long list of things she did wrong, but she did manage to pull the company out of a tailspin, and she was able to perform the basic responsibilities of the job. Gygax was incapable of either. He was, as you say, a disaster.That said, Gygax can claim credit for having brought the game to market in the first place. He has his success as an entrepreneur and game developer to set against his abysmal record as executive. Williams has no such fallback: She stands or falls purely on her accomplishments as CEO.It seems like Williams's main failures as CEO stemmed from her well-known distaste for gaming. She was competent to handle the corporate-management part of the job, but she did not really understand her company's audience or its product--basically the mirror image of Gygax. As a result, she succeeded in putting TSR on a sound financial footing, which it desperately needed; but she then pursued strategies that saturated the market* and split the company's product lines, alienated fans with heavy-handed legal tactics, and failed to recognize where the company needed to go, leading to the final collapse in the '90s.Bearing in mind, again, I haven't yet read the book: From what I've read, every leader TSR ever had was kind of terrible. Williams was, too, but no worse than the rest and better than some. But various factors (misogyny, gamer tribalism, and the fact that she pushed out the Heroic Creator Figure) led to her receiving far more than her share of condemnation.*Which, ironically, led to an explosion of creativity, as TSR cranked out massive volumes of material in a hopeless Red Queen's race. The wild abundance of 2E settings is a legacy from which D&D continues to draw, decades later, even as it was a fiscal disaster for the company that created it.</blockquote>

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