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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 7833160" data-attributes="member: 32740">Again, she didn't turn it around.  The company simply staved off collapse.  For four years after she took over it the game was still all 1E.  Even after 2E was released and made money the company financial structure didn't really improve.  It was still deep in debt and cash-strapped, and even became so desperate in releasing more material to get more cash while blind to the fact that such action only made them LESS cash.Burned up with her inability to run a company that improved financially with all those great products.  And credit for those products being great or poor really belongs to the people that WROTE them, not the CEO of the company they worked at.I would agree.  But Gygax wouldn't have deliberately schemed to drive others out just to be vengeful.  Williams did.  1E was becoming crushed under its own bloat by the time Gygax was forced out.  However, it is sheer fanciful speculation what Gygax's version of 2E would have really looked like.  His next RPG was Dangerous Journeys (?), which was rules-lite and thus more like original D&D, but also skills-heavy which was what late 1E and then 2E was becoming even though skills were optional.  How would any of that have been translated into a stronger company if NOT run by Williams?  Impossible to say.As I understand it, Kevin Blume was asked to step down as President/CEO by the three outsiders insisted on by TSR's creditors.  It would have technically been at the request of the entire board, which was those three (Huber, Kiden, and Sommers), along with the two Blumes and Gygax.  Not sure how Gygax was "trying to wrest control" from the Blumes with that.  Gygax didn't want Huber, Kiden, and Sommers involved in the first place because he didn't want the company controlled by outsiders.  Brian Blume on the other hand, was not an outsider and had provided the money needed to publish original D&D on its own rather than getting another game company to buy it.Well, score one for you. If you can get forums to enable readers to hear emphasis by some other means you'll be rich.  Meanwhile you'll just have to burn your eyes on italics.I'm not saying I'm unquestionably wrong, but accusations aren't proof.  For example, HOW did Gygax try to wrest control from the Blumes?  Really, all he'd need to do is buy more shares than they had and he'd have HAD control and could have kicked them all out - which is what Blume did.  If you want to simply say that Gygax was too stupid to realize that's what he'd need to do, maybe you're right.  But what I've read has only ever suggested a slight change of perspective - that he was just too naive to believe that people that close to him could be such creeps.Again, there is blame to share in Gygax being ousted, but little of it was because Gygax was a scheming, ruthless jerk who had it coming.  He was a fair-to-poor businessman and too naive to realize he needed to protect himself and the company he co-founded against vengeful business associates.There is blame to share in the demise of TSR as a company.  Gygax, however, shares virtually none of it.  He'd been gone 10 years, and Williams - who was also only fair-to-poor at business (having no interest in playing or tolerance for the game her company produced and the players who DID play it) - had been in full charge during that decade.  The blame there is hers.</blockquote>

Verification