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

We Were Wizards left out the part where Lorraine ordered a gazillion campaign settings that split the player base and fatigued the market. I remember being in college, and just going vanilla D&D because I had product overload. Ironically, I used that money to buy MTG cards, and WotC would later buy TSR. I digress. Lorraine probably saved the company from immediate ruin, only to steer it towards new troubled waters.
I think the general consensus now is that Williams saved the company and a few years down the road her decisions led to the demise of TSR. It's just that over the years she's been vilified as the woman who stole TSR from Gygax and was rarely given credit for saving the company he almost ruined in the 1980s.
 

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I think the general consensus now is that Williams saved the company and a few years down the road her decisions led to the demise of TSR. It's just that over the years she's been vilified as the woman who stole TSR from Gygax and was rarely given credit for saving the company he almost ruined in the 1980s.

This. Never been a problem for me because I liked her reigns products more than Gary's.

Dungeon magazine alone for example.
 

I think the general consensus now is that Williams saved the company and a few years down the road her decisions led to the demise of TSR. It's just that over the years she's been vilified as the woman who stole TSR from Gygax and was rarely given credit for saving the company he almost ruined in the 1980s.
Yeah, both the Blumes and Williams dug the company out of holes Gary had dug for them and were vilified for "stealing" the company from him when, frankly, any board would have done the same to a comparable CEO. It's something we routinely see today.
 

If there's one thing I've learned from reading the histories, listening to the podcast, and observing all of the RPG companies I knew in the 1990s crash and burn to various degrees, it's that from 1975 to roughly 2010, it was very, very hard, nigh impossible to run a successful RPG company. You'd have your big-selling game. There's demand for additional material, be that supplements or adventures, but every release that is not your game gets diminishing returns. You can get an influx of revenue from a new edition, but really it's just kicking the can down the road. Ideally, you'd like to have a wide variety of products, but RPGs are not mainstream enough for a company to support multiple games indefinitely. Then you overestimate the demand for a product and order too big a print run, and then you're in a hole you have to dig yourself out of. Then video games come out and reduce your market. Then CCGs come out and destroy your market. Then MMORPGs come out and dance on the ashes that are left.

Set aside TSR for the moment. Look at the other major publishers in the 1990s.
White Wolf - Merged with CCP in 2006, hasn't been independent since.
Iron Crown Enterprises - Filed bankruptcy in 2000.
Mayfair Games - Shut down in 1997.
FASA - Ceased operations in 2001.

Steve Jackson Games and Palladium Games seem to be the only ones still active from that era, in their original incarnation, and it seems like they did so by shrinking the RPG product lines to the bare minimum and relying on direct sales of print-on-demand and PDFs, as well as Kickstarter.

And I think both the move to PDF/Print-on-Demand products and Kickstarter are the reason we even still have an RPG industry today. The ability to a) identify exactly how big the market is for a product, and b) reduce printing costs is exactly what an RPG company needs to do to survive. But nobody had these in the 80s and 90s.

In retrospect, the 1980-81 fad was the worst thing to happen to TSR. It let them grow too big, too fast, and when the bubble popped, there was no way for them to recover. At least, no painless way. Gygax's LA profligancy and royalties absolutely did not help, nor was Williams' use of the Random House contract in anyway a solution. But, I think the bigger problem was that after about 1983, TSR was simply bigger than the RPG market could accomodate. Their only way out was eventual acquisition by a bigger company.
 

White Wolf had some very big self-owns that weren't just about typical RPG industry challenges, though.

They very consciously shifted to focusing on readers rather than players, with a dramatic drop in the quality of their games as a result. Then, wedded to the metaplot they were sure their readers were demanding, they decided to have an end of the world storyline across most of their lines and killed off all their most profitable game lines all at once, trusting that, after that break, fans would come back for new-but-different game lines and rules systems. The new lines were better, IMO, but when you give players/readers a chance at a clean break, a lot of them are going to take it, either to switch to something else or to play the books you sold them before you set the whole game universe on fire.

That they ended up collapsing a few years later is hardly a big shock.

If they hadn't decided to do all that, we don't really know what would have happened with them, unless someone with a lot of insider knowledge wants to spill the beans on their financial picture in the late 1990s.
 

Steve Jackson Games and Palladium Games seem to be the only ones still active from that era, in their original incarnation, and it seems like they did so by shrinking the RPG product lines to the bare minimum and relying on direct sales of print-on-demand and PDFs, as well as Kickstarter.
From what i heard on rpg.net ages ago, I was under the impression that for SJG it's sales of Munchkin that pay the bills, and the RPG game line is strictly a hobby-scale operation by comparison. But I don't know to what extent that's still true.

White Wolf had some very big self-owns that weren't just about typical RPG industry challenges, though.

Yeah, White Wolf's death was (if not entirely, then certainly majority) self-inflicted. While there was a lot of editorial and strategic choices that contributed to it (WoD2.0 and the OWoD metaplot-heaviness among them), at the end of the day, they decided to sell themselves to a booming video game company because they figured that as part of a larger organisation they 'd be better able to survive heavy weather, only to be all [surprised Pikachu face] when the first storm rolled in and the corporate beancounters casually threw them overboard. They did have long-term challenges in that their core product lines like VtM were so tightly coupled to a very specific 90s zeitgeist and even in the mid-2000s were starting to look a little dated, but that was the decision that ended them. Ironic given the editorial/political/economic stance of basically every single one of their products re big corporations, of course.
 
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If there's one thing I've learned from reading the histories, listening to the podcast, and observing all of the RPG companies I knew in the 1990s crash and burn to various degrees, it's that from 1975 to roughly 2010, it was very, very hard, nigh impossible to run a successful RPG company.

Steve Jackson Games and Palladium Games seem to be the only ones still active from that era, in their original incarnation, and it seems like they did so by shrinking the RPG product lines to the bare minimum and relying on direct sales of print-on-demand and PDFs, as well as Kickstarter.

And I think both the move to PDF/Print-on-Demand products and Kickstarter are the reason we even still have an RPG industry today. The ability to a) identify exactly how big the market is for a product, and b) reduce printing costs is exactly what an RPG company needs to do to survive. But nobody had these in the 80s and 90s.

your point b) is perhaps the most important question to answer for the future, especially given our recent (and possible more) troubles with international printing and shipping for tangible books. We also need a solution for keeping the gaming stores alive.

For me, the answer seems obvious but I haven't seen anyone posit it yet - local print and distribution shops, softcover and B&W books, are the way to go (better for the environment too). I'd need a letter-sized tablet to fully convert to e-book format, but that is prohibitive. I don't need overproduced 4 color art, and I miss the kind of paper that you could write on with pencil. Gaming stores need a reason to exist outside of book and merch sales in this era of e-distribution. Many have turned to 'experiential' hosting of game nights, which is great, but labor intensive if you include things such as food service. Having a Print-On-Demand license for a local/regional shop could be another alternative income stream. No tariff problem if you're just emailing print-ready files.
 

TSR got about as big as it could feasibly get being, essentially, a niche book publisher, and post-1983 they milked that with a variety of strategies that were all essentially kicking the can down the road until their eventual collapse.

To this day, Hasbro is trying to figure out how to leverage D&D's brand recognition to turn them into more than a glorified book shop.
 

From what i heard on rpg.net ages ago, I was under the impression that for SJG it's sales of Munchkin that pay the bills, and the RPG game line is strictly a hobby-scale operation by comparison. But I don't know to what extent that's still true.
From as far back as I can remember, Steve Jackson Games always produced a variety of games. i.e. They've had a diverse product range over the years with non-RPGs including Car Wars, Ogre, Illuminati, and others. When Munchkin proved to be such a hit in 2001, it wasn't difficult for SJG to read the writing on the wall and see supporting it was more lucrative than investing in GURPS. Though they did invest in GURPS with a 4th edition 3-4 years later. I think SJG made a wise decision. I don't believe GURPS would be a popular game today even had they did more to support the 4th edition. I just don't think that style of game is what most players want these days. If it comes back into style again, I bet SJG will be able to pivot and start supporting it more.
 

From as far back as I can remember, Steve Jackson Games always produced a variety of games. i.e. They've had a diverse product range over the years with non-RPGs including Car Wars, Ogre, Illuminati, and others. When Munchkin proved to be such a hit in 2001, it wasn't difficult for SJG to read the writing on the wall and see supporting it was more lucrative than investing in GURPS. Though they did invest in GURPS with a 4th edition 3-4 years later. I think SJG made a wise decision. I don't believe GURPS would be a popular game today even had they did more to support the 4th edition. I just don't think that style of game is what most players want these days. If it comes back into style again, I bet SJG will be able to pivot and start supporting it more.
I agree with all you wrote. I still think that SJ Games kind of missed a (possible) chance when they made the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Since the game was self-contained and already had all the "switches and dials" selected for it (GURPS is a toolkit and tuning it for a certain genre or campaign can very intimidating) it had a chance to be appealing for new players. But then they decided to go almost "all-in" with the combat options and this made it daunting. The basic GURPS framework is actually quite simple and with ready-made campaign options and good character templates it can be approachable, IMHO.
 

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