D&D General Not the Wicked Witch: Revisiting the Legacy of Lorraine Williams

[PHATsakk43]

Looking back, it really seems that TSR didn’t realize what it had.

These days, IP is king. Lorraine (I’m assuming it was her) put Zeb Cook in charge of the 2E game—which is still my personal favorite iteration with 5E a close second. They had extremely good fiction—Ben Riggs stated it being 50% of company revenue in the early 90s. Two magazines which were also extremely good.

Then the IP itself. Video games really should have been the focus. It’s all licensing. Other media should have been looked into as well.

Look, I’m happy to have shelves of 2E boxed sets in my basement, but they made no sense given the market. Honestly, if they had TSR consolidated, cut staff, and focused more on non-TTRPG products, they likely could have weathered the storm.

 

[Staffan]

These days, IP is king. Lorraine (I’m assuming it was her) put Zeb Cook in charge of the 2E game—which is still my personal favorite iteration with 5E a close second. They had extremely good fiction—Ben Riggs stated it being 50% of company revenue in the early 90s. Two magazines which were also extremely good.

Huh. Was that actual profit/revenue, or was it getting advances from their distributor that would then have to be paid back when the books didn't sell? Because my recollection is that book "returns" (not actually returns, book stores just send them off to be pulped minus the cover) was the killing blow for TSR.

Then the IP itself. Video games really should have been the focus. It’s all licensing. Other media should have been looked into as well.

Video games in the early 90s weren't anywhere near the big business they are today. And still, I remember there being quite a few of them. Most used the engine from Pools of Darkness, but you also had the real-time proto-3D Eye of the Beholder series, the more action-adventure-y Al-Qadim game I can't recall the name of, and the two Dark Sun games. Oh, and Hillsfar, but I never got my head around that.

But the game that really got D&D computer games going was Baldur's Gate. It was released in 1998 (post-WOTC), but development started in 1995 (pre-WOTC).

Look, I’m happy to have shelves of 2E boxed sets in my basement, but they made no sense given the market. Honestly, if they had TSR consolidated, cut staff, and focused more on non-TTRPG products, they likely could have weathered the storm.

Ryan Dancey's post-mortem of TSR indicated that (at least in his eyes) while there were many direct causes of TSR's near-bankruptcy, pretty much all of them could be traced to the lack of market research. TSR had no idea what the market wanted, so they made a huge number of books and boxed sets that didn't sell, and just took up space in a warehouse somewhere.

 

[MoonSong]

Ryan Dancey's post-mortem of TSR indicated that (at least in his eyes) while there were many direct causes of TSR's near-bankruptcy, pretty much all of them could be traced to the lack of market research. TSR had no idea what the market wanted, so they made a huge number of books and boxed sets that didn't sell, and just took up space in a warehouse somewhere.

It is quite cool to have so much lore and material to enjoy. But in hindsight, it wasn't close to being profitable. Nowadays WotC can earn a pretty penny with ebooks and the occasoonal reprint because they got them for a pittance. But losing TSR is the price we as a community had to pay. A TSR that was responsible enough to survive to this day wouldn't have produced so many beloved products, and would possibly get all of the scorn and criticism that WotC/Hasbro draws today.

 

[PHATsakk43]

Video games in the early 90s weren't anywhere near the big business they are today. And still, I remember there being quite a few of them. Most used the engine from Pools of Darkness, but you also had the real-time proto-3D Eye of the Beholder series, the more action-adventure-y Al-Qadim game I can't recall the name of, and the two Dark Sun games. Oh, and Hillsfar, but I never got my head around that.

But the game that really got D&D computer games going was Baldur's Gate. It was released in 1998 (post-WOTC), but development started in 1995 (pre-WOTC).

Yeah, I know they weren’t making the money they do today, but the possibility was there. The digital team at TSR really did great work. The Core Rule CD-ROMs are still the best digital assistant for any TTRPG to date, even if they are dated.

I guess my main point was, they probably should have fired basically all the staff, pared down the catalog to something manageable, think the 5E rollout but with 2E as basis. One or two products a year. The Zeb rework was a far better game than 1E AD&D ever wanted to be.

The magazines were great likely easy to make. That should have been their core revenue. It was all freelance writers, so little staff overhead beyond the production and editing team.

There isn’t any reason the 2014 5E model couldn’t have worked in 1989.

 

[michaeljpastor]

Looking back, it really seems that TSR didn’t realize what it had.

These days, IP is king. Lorraine (I’m assuming it was her) put Zeb Cook in charge of the 2E game—which is still my personal favorite iteration with 5E a close second. They had extremely good fiction—Ben Riggs stated it being 50% of company revenue in the early 90s. Two magazines which were also extremely good.

Then the IP itself. Video games really should have been the focus. It’s all licensing. Other media should have been looked into as well.

Look, I’m happy to have shelves of 2E boxed sets in my basement, but they made no sense given the market. Honestly, if they had TSR consolidated, cut staff, and focused more on non-TTRPG products, they likely could have weathered the storm.

They never have. They still don't. At least in the C-Suite.

And it was 100% the fiction (well, maybe 80%) - that's what Zeb was so genius at producing, despite being saddled with a revised 1e engine, again by C-suite fiat. The fiction produced in the campaign settings alongside the books was just as rich. The whole R&D team was the little IP engine that could, despite the Sisyphean boulder it constantly had to push uphill.

 

[PHATsakk43]

The fiction produced in the campaign settings alongside the books was just as rich. The whole R&D team was the little IP engine that could, despite the Sisyphean boulder it constantly had to push uphill.

It would be interesting to see what the cost breakdown was of this stuff.

Like, how much was development, how much was art & layout, and how much was production.

I wonder if Ben Riggs or someone has enough data to delve this deeply into the company finances. From my understanding, a lot of the stuff was being done by freelancers at this point and only development and editing was in-house.

Like, there could be a world where all this stuff was done, it just wasn’t published in boxed sets that were more expensive than the sale price.

In a way, TSR had sorta worked in this model. UA was, in a lot of ways the first example where mostly pre-published articles in TSR periodicals were compiled and published in a single text. Several 2E publications were similar—especially in the Forgotten Realms line, where books and boxed sets were edited compilations of Greenwood articles in Dragon and Polyhedron. Even in 5E the bulk of stuff in the core game expansions are from online UA or pulled from various adventures.

Again, I’m just playing the “what if” game of could TSR held out with a leaner team and far smaller publication schedule.