NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreyLord" data-source="post: 8437217" data-attributes="member: 4348">Though I'm definately Pro-Gary, and one of the few that stand by him on his idea of things, that's not the nail in the coffin.AFTER he was out of the company, he remained trying to make RPGs and do his own thing.  Rather than let him do his own thing, he was pursued relentlessly by the legal arms of TSR, but this isn't really a thread about him...but it wasn't nice or even really needed on that end (IMO).There are two sides to every story, and it seems that the story is trying to say that Gygax was the pure reason that TSR was having financial difficulties (afterall, Coke and Hollywood parties aren't cheap...right)...but there's another side of the story  (Gygax's, which some I think have presented here) which show a different equation to how the money was being spent and lost.  The short end of it though was that TSR came out of that and it had Williams at the helm.  This IS one of the postive things one can say about her is that she expanded TSR far more than it probably would have under Gygax, or at least different directions.  She expanded the fiction line immensely, and under her (though, not due to her directly, more with the managers she had and allowed the freedom to expand the game with) the game expanded in directions which were never really thought of (2e with kits and kits and kits and rules and rule and worlds...etc) and, I don't think with Gygax at the helm, would have taken the risks to expand into.  This increased gross profits (not to be confused with net profits) to heights never even imagined before.  She turned was was probably a decent size company in financial terms into a much larger one that was probably 3x the size of what it was under Gygax.  So, in that sense, she did extremely well...until the same ideas that allowed them to grow so rapidly and strongly backfired and ended up killing it from multiple directions at once...Yes, but I'm not so sure it's relevant to the discussion.  Trying to say someone is not so bad because another person did something similar is not really justifying that someone in my opinion.  There were some VERY nasty things TSR did under Gygax and the Blumes (and the C&D is on the light side...much darker is what happened to SPI), but we aren't examining their reputation here (or at least that's not what I thought this thread was about) but examining Mrs. Williams roles and positions of what she did.</blockquote>

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