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

[Count_Zero]

I was going to mention this too. TSR suing Mayfair predates Williams

Well, I thought I was out, but I do have a slight clarification - there were two TSR vs. Mayfair Games cases. The initial one for the Role Aids line, in 1984, was pre-Williams and the settlement from that case set conditions for which Mayfair could state on the packaging that those products were compatible with AD&D.

The 1992 case, which was under Williams tenure, was initiated by the Mayfair Games version of City-State, which has a forward by Gygax, and the cover stated "With a forward by Gary Gygax, Creator of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", but in a way which didn't fit the earlier agreement for the Role-Aids line (possibly due to the different context).

Source: TSR vs Mayfair Games

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Well, I thought I was out, but I do have a slight clarification - there were two TSR vs. Mayfair Games cases. The initial one for the Role Aids line, in 1984, was pre-Williams and the settlement from that case set conditions for which Mayfair could state on the packaging that those products were compatible with AD&D.

The 1992 case, which was under Williams tenure, was initiated by the Mayfair Games version of City-State, which has a forward by Gygax, and the cover stated "With a forward by Gary Gygax, Creator of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", but in a way which didn't fit the earlier agreement for the Role-Aids line (possibly due to the different context).

Source: TSR vs Mayfair Games

@Iosue already covered this, but to reiterate-

The first lawsuit was brought by Gygax (as head of TSR). It was ... dubious ... and resulted in a licensing agreement.

The second lawsuit, brought by TSR (under Williams) was for a breach of the agreement. It was not dubious, as the court found that Mayfair had breached the licensing agreement.


ETA- this is another example of why accurate history is so much more important than received wisdom. Another great example is the actual history of the Arneson/TSR lawsuit. What you think you know is probably not accurate, and I will again recommend Game Wizards if you want to know what actually happened, and what the case was really about. If you haven't read it, your knowledge of that lawsuit is most certainly incorrect.

 

[Dausuul]

Yeah, but then apparently they had a second chance in '92 under Williams, and they came really close to having the deal, even sending out John Rateliff to talk to the Tolkien estate, but they apparently wanted the right to create new novels set in Middle Earth and that was just not gonna happen. But my guess is that the novels were their big cash cow at the time and didn't see the value in just creating games for LotR.

So twice! Twice we nearly saw D&D and LotR under the same company!

From a business point of view, I agree that this was a huge missed opportunity. As a fan of both Tolkien and D&D, however, I'm glad it never happened. D&D was designed to create sword and sorcery adventures in the Robert E. Howard vein, and it does that very well. I already dislike the Tolkien knock-offs shoehorned into the game; the last thing I'd want to see is more of that.

And on the flip side, D&D's mechanics are a terrible fit for the spiritual conflicts that drive LotR. D&D is made to do physical conflicts; its rare attempts to implement spiritual conflicts are generally hamfisted and ill-designed.

 

[Clint_L]

In thinking more about some of the principal players in this drama, it seems to me like you can see some very distinct types of thinkers. Arneson was an innovator. The introduction of role playing to gaming has a convoluted and murky history, but David Wesely has a strong claim, and his buddy Arneson was an early adoptor who combined it with rules for fantasy gaming and added a number of crucial ideas, particularly levelling. Gygax was an iterator. He didn't invent the core ideas, but he was great at seeing potential and refining ideas. He put the work in, for a good decade or so, anyway, something that Arneson was unable to do on any project. Williams strikes me as a more conventional manager type, someone who shows up to work and plugs away at the boring stuff.

Being a manager is not a super exciting role in the history of anything, so I can see why Williams doesn't have a lot of appeal in the legend of TSR. It's pretty hard to romanticize an administrator. But she's not a monster, even if D&D players are inclined to think in terms of heroic narrative. Based on everything I've read, she worked hard, was kind of in over her head in terms of not really understanding the hobby and its culture (as opposed to Gygax and the Blumes being completely in over their heads when it came to business), but stuck with it as long as she could. Some folks found her unpleasant, others found her kind. To a person, the ex-employees that Ben Riggs interviewed for Slaying the Dragon preferred working under her to the Gygax/Blume regime, though after listening to the podcast that seems like a "No, duh," kind of situation.

My takeaway is that she doesn't deserve to be portrayed as a supervillain. Not a hero, either - she demonstrably did save TSR from implosion, but not out of altruism or anything. She saw it as a business that she thought she could better manage (again, no duh) and make profitable, and tried and ultimately failed to make that happen. In doing so, she did give it that extra decade, which I see as a good thing.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

My takeaway is that she doesn't deserve to be portrayed as a supervillain. Not a hero, either - she demonstrably did save TSR from implosion, but not out of altruism or anything. She saw it as a business that she thought she could better manage (again, no duh) and make profitable, and tried and ultimately failed to make that happen. In doing so, she did give it that extra decade, which I see as a good thing.

Good post! I think that all of it (including the part I cut) is worthy of thought and reflection, but I wanted to add and expand on one additional issue.

The real impetus behind why I am resurrecting this issue (covered first when I read Game Wizards and again after listening to When We Were Wizards) is this-

Like a lot of people in the gaming community, I heard all of the received wisdom about Lorraine Williams. The stories. The anecdotes. And I accepted them uncritically!

But after I started getting the real history, and the actual facts, I had to revisit that received wisdom. When viewed with fresh eyes, that received wisdom, those stories ... they don't seem the same. In fact, a lot of it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable.

I think it's important for people to critically examine their beliefs. Which is hard to do! I know that when I am confronted with something, it's a lot easier for me to double down and try to find more stuff to support my position. But I truly hope that at least some people look at the various stories about Lorraine Williams with fresh eyes as well. Because she wasn't a hero, but there is a lot of uncomfortable misogyny in the vilification of her that calcified into received wisdom.

 

[Mannahnin]

Gygax was an interator. He didn't invent the core ideas, but he was great at seeing potential and refining ideas. He put the work in, for a good decade or so, anyway, something that Arneson was unable to do on any project.

I started getting back into the podcast, revisiting ep 3 first before getting into the new stuff, and I recall that Dave Megarry opined that a big part of why Dave didn't get more done at TSR was being exhausted working at shipping all day. That he was really good at the packing and shipping work, and the company desperately needed that done, but it left him with little time or energy to do the other stuff he was actually hired for. Recruiting other designers (especially Twin Cities folks), bringing in new games, and doing design himself.

OTOH, Megarry was Dave's friend, and Arneson's output in the rest of the 70s and 80s continued the same pattern of never actually producing stuff, even once he had promised and committed. So...

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

OTOH, Megarry was Dave's friend, and Arneson's output in the rest of the 70s and 80s continued the same pattern of never actually producing stuff, even once he had promised and committed. So...

This is the issue with oral histories. I think that this is sugarcoating the problems that Arneson had- both in general, and at TSR. Which you would expect Megarry to do. Heck, it might not be intentional; memory has a funny way of conforming to beliefs.

Game Wizards presents a different picture. Arneson just wouldn't work. He wasn't brought in to fail. As repeatedly happened (at least, in terms of RPGs), Arneson was given opportunities, and just wasn't great at ... um ... working.

 

[Mannahnin]

This is the issue with oral histories. I think that this is sugarcoating the problems that Arneson had- both in general, and at TSR. Which you would expect Megarry to do. Heck, it might not be intentional; memory has a funny way of conforming to beliefs.

Game Wizards presents a different picture. Arneson just wouldn't work. He wasn't brought in to fail. As repeatedly happened (at least, in terms of RPGs), Arneson was given opportunities, and just wasn't great at ... um ... working.

I remember that. Megarry's account just had me seeing a potential other side of it. If, as sales took off, they really had Arneson doing eight hours of shipping work a day, I can see why that would impact his other productivity.

Edit 8/12: I had this worrying at the back of my mind, and it occurs to me that Arneson only worked there in '76. The company was doing well and sales were definitely climbing fast, but it's still three years before the real boom. I wonder what the sales charts for '76 look like. I imagine we could check numbers in Game Wizards and get an idea of how plausible Megarry's account is.

 

[David Howery]

I never really regarded her as a villain in the whole thing, and we all owe her our gratitude in selling TSR to WOTC. But. I still will give her grief over the whole Buck Rogers thing. It might 'have been worth a shot', but it was obvious early on that it wasn't doing well, and should have been dropped a lot sooner than it was. I also don't hold to the idea that EGG was some kind of business genius either, it was pretty obvious early on that he wasn't (the craft company screw up you mentioned in your first post is one example)... another bad idea was trying to publish some of SPI's defunct games. I can remember way back in 80 or 81 one of EGGs editorials in Dragon talking about how they looked around and found a way to print modules cheaper than they had been, and wondered why they hadn't before. I always had the idea that neither EGG nor Williams were all that sharp as business leaders....

 

[TiQuinn]

Game Wizards presents a different picture. Arneson just wouldn't work. He wasn't brought in to fail. As repeatedly happened (at least, in terms of RPGs), Arneson was given opportunities, and just wasn't great at ... um ... working.

This has been the impression I’ve gotten. Though by the 80s, Gygax wasn’t into writing either. UA was nowhere near as interesting as his earlier material and much of it was pulled from earlier sources. OA only had his name on it but was largely Zeb Cook’s. Temple of Elemental Evil was a bunch of notes that Frank Mentzer had to decode and rework…