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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MGibster" data-source="post: 8434467" data-attributes="member: 4534">She should.  I've heard her described as "the adult in the room" in regards to TSR in the mid 80s.  She knew how to run a business and was able to use her contacts and experience to leverage TSR's assets and make it profitable.  A lot of people don't appreciate that a business can fail because of mismanagement even when they're making money hand over fist.  And Gygax just wasn't prepared to run business the size of TSR (most of us probably aren't ready to run a business like that).  Lorraine doesn't get the credit she deserves for saving the company but the blame assigned to her for TSR failing is totally fair.  Lorraine made several bad decisions that rendered TSR incapable of adapting to a changing market or 1.  Unrealistic sales expectations.  TSR's fiction was doing great and they assumed it would always do great.  Dragon Dice, if you remember that, actually sold fairly well.  But Lorraine insisted on over-producing the game which led to a lot of unsold merchandise.  2.  Weird arrangement with Random House.  TSR shipped material to RH and would receive payment within 30 days.  The payment was for shipped books not sold books.  So when RH had unsold goods they returned them to TSR as asked for a refund along with a restocking fee.  This presented a cash flow problem when TSR's books stopped selling as well as they did.  3.  TSR alienated some of their most popular authors such as Hickman, Weis, and Salvatore as well as other companies including DC Comics and Random House.  4.  They had some weird arrangement where TSR would receive a loan at the beginning of the year that would be paid off by the end of the fiscal year.  This made it impossible for their to alter production in order to meet the demands of a changing market.  I don't think that's unfair at all.</blockquote>

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