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

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.
Well, a big part of the issue is that TSR got a lot bigger than they could feasibly be.

When they ballooned their payroll to 400+ people and insane liabilities and overhead. A fleet of company cars, contract and stock-option buyouts to executives they pushed out the door, swallowing that giant loss on mis-sized boxes ordered by a nepotism hire for the Fantasy Forest board game, huge amounts of royalties to Gygax, etc.

And after Williams took over they SHOULD have been plenty profitable with the massive success of their fiction publishing side, but they kept shooting themselves in the foot with failures of cost containment (overproduction of boxed sets not priced highly enough) and lack of voice of the customer/production flexibility due to the Factoring Agreement, so they overproduced stuff that didn't sell, and couldn't adjust in time to capitalize on products which were hits. Or sabotaging their lucrative licensing agreement with DC Comics when they tried that silly Comic Modules venture with TSR West. Or how they alienated successful writers like Weis & Hickman, or Salvatore, and drove them out the door.
 

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Where do I hear more about this? (Expecting an answer in the form of "that book you bought the other year but still haven't read, Fish.".)
It's in the 10th or 11th episode of When We Were Wizards. One of the Blume relatives ordered a giant (maybe 200,000 copies) run of their new game without double-checking that the board could fit in the box. And then they decided that it was easier to, you know, toss that whole completed run in the dump and then do a whole new print run of the correct sized box and repack it.

A huge loss on a game they were wildly overproducing to begin with.
 
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Where do I hear more about this? (Expecting an answer in the form of "that book you bought the other year but still haven't read, Fish.".)

It's in the 10th or 11th episode of When We Were Wizards. One of the Blume relatives ordered a giant (maybe 200,000 copies) run of their new game without double-checking that the board could fit in the box. And then they decided that it was easier to, you know, toss that whole completed run in the dump and then do a whole new print run with the correct sized box.

A huge loss on a game they were wildly overproducing to begin with.
I think it may have been touched on in Game Wizards as well.
 



How many details do we have of the ridiculously generous offer that Williams gave Gygax? It seems like that alone would have ended TSR. The money itself, however it was paid out, but also the D&D IP? What was her plan if he accepted that?
 

How many details do we have of the ridiculously generous offer that Williams gave Gygax? It seems like that alone would have ended TSR. The money itself, however it was paid out, but also the D&D IP? What was her plan if he accepted that?
Bot saying this as a joke, she seriously may have believed that much in the brand power of Buck Rodgers.
 

Bot saying this as a joke, she seriously may have believed that much in the brand power of Buck Rodgers.

Yeah I think it just shows how she didn't understand gaming. TSR would have collapsed immediately instead of 10 years later.

Of course D&D wouldn't have had that "golden age" at least of my youth, of later 1st ed and 2nd ed.
 

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