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

[Meech17]

Huh? My employer hires employee and employee family businesses whenever they can! It helps support the staff and there's usually a discount, so it's win-win. There's nothing remotely unethical about it. It's a very normal practice and perfectly ethical.

There is a very blurry line between networking and nepotism.

 

[mamba]

It sounds a bit like under Gygax, the core business was doing fairly well but the money was being siphoned by various extravagancies, whereas Williams put a stop to most of those extravagancies (even if she did siphon off some money via Buck Rogers) but wasn't so good at managing the core business.

neither were any good at the core business, if anything she was probably better than Gary and the Blumes. Their advantage was that for a few short years they had stumbled across a money printing machine so none of their crap decisions mattered right away. By the time Lorraine came on board those money printing times were definitely in the past however

 

[TiQuinn]

I can't say she did anything illegal or unethical, but I think it does look bad because clearly there's a conflict of interest there. If I had side business catering, my employer wouldn't hire me to cater events because of a clear conflict of interest. But in Williams' defense, Buck Rogers was a known intellectual property, and even though it looks ridiculous in hindsight, maybe it was a good faith effort to create a profitable line of business. It's no less than ridiculous than producing a Space: 1999 game.

So it may seem silly now but there was a point when TSR was seeking to license Lord of the Rings in early 90s and had a deal nearly locked up, but the Tolkien estate wouldn’t allow them to them to create new books. For Williams, it was a non-starter and the deal died.

It seems insane today but consider a time where Buck Rogers versus Lord of the Rings seemed like a trade off on the merits. This does go back to criticism of Williams. Yes, Buck Rogers was self-serving. It also could’ve been cheaper for TSR than something like LotR. What we don’t know is how TSR would’ve actually handled LotR products and if they’d be any good. Williams seemed to just see all of these things as equal properties. Fantasy was fantasy in her mind. Sci-fi was sci-fi.

 

[Clint_L]

So it may seem silly now but there was a point when TSR was seeking to license Lord of the Rings in early 90s and had a deal nearly locked up, but the Tolkien estate wouldn’t allow them to them to create new books. For Williams, it was a non-starter and the deal died.

It seems insane today but consider a time where Buck Rogers versus Lord of the Rings seemed like a trade off on the merits. This does go back to criticism of Williams. Yes, Buck Rogers was self-serving. It also could’ve been cheaper for TSR than something like LotR. What we don’t know is how TSR would’ve actually handled LotR products and if they’d be any good. Williams seemed to just see all of these things as equal properties. Fantasy was fantasy in her mind. Sci-fi was sci-fi.

After the SDI purchase WotC had the rights to make a LotR game, apparently. According to the podcast, they weren’t interested because they felt D&D was already bigger. That was under Gygax and the Blumes.

 

[TiQuinn]

After the SDI purchase WotC had the rights to make a LotR game, apparently. According to the podcast, they weren’t interested because they felt D&D was already bigger. That was under Gygax and the Blumes.

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!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

@humble minion

From the OP's opening-

The recent conclusion of the excellent podcast series, When We Were Wizards (review here) brought up the topic of Lorraine Williams. Much like the book, Game Wizards (review here), the podcast presents Lorraine Williams and the ouster of Gygax from TSR in a very different light than what was commonly received before. For that reason, I am revisiting my earlier thoughts on her, and reworking and expanding on them.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

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!

On this, I don't actually think it's the giant mistake people view it as in hindsight.

There are two three things we have to remember-

1. Yes, Tolkien is always a big deal. But this was after the '60s and '70s massive popularity, and prior to the Jackson movies. So while it's always a big deal, it's wasn't the BIG DEAL then that it seems like now.

2. D&D is a fantasy RPG. LoTR would be a fantasy RPG. It's never been clear that a licensed LoTR game would do anything more than cannibalize from D&D, while costing a lot in licensing. In addition, as we can see from various LoTR games that have been made, they all do fine. But none have ever set the world on fire. As much as people like to say how awesome a D&D/LoTR game would be, I have never understood the financial imperative for it from the D&D rights-holder's side. Licensing, especially Tolkien licensing, costs money.

3. The books would have been major money makers! Maybe it was an ask too far, but it was certainly an ask worth making.


In other words, this is one of those things (that, again, wasn't just a Lorraine thing) that I have trouble seeing as a terrible mistake. Don't get me wrong- TSR made a LOT of terrible mistakes in the '90s. Actually, TSR made a lot of terrible mistakes from the inception of the company. I think it's a testament to how amazing the products were by the creatives that the company kept going despite those mistakes (and with the intervention of Lorraine when Gygax was going to finish it off in the '80s).

I also keep coming back to the fact that RPG publishing, after the initial boom in the late 70s to the early 80s, wasn't a great business to be in.

 

[TiQuinn]

On this, I don't actually think it's the giant mistake people view it as in hindsight.

There are two things we have to remember-

1. Yes, Tolkien is always a big deal. But this was after the '60s and '70s massive popularity, and prior to the Jackson movies. So while it's always a big deal, it's wasn't the BIG DEAL then that it seems like now.

2. D&D is a fantasy RPG. LoTR would be a fantasy RPG. It's never been clear that a licensed LoTR game would do anything more than cannibalize from D&D, while costing a lot in licensing. In addition, as we can see from various LoTR games that have been made, they all do fine. But none have ever set the world on fire. As much as people like to say how awesome a D&D/LoTR game would be, I have never understood the financial imperative for it from the D&D rights-holder's side. Licensing, especially Tolkien licensing, costs money.

3. The books would have been major money makers! Maybe it was an ask too far, but it was certainly an ask worth making.


In other words, this is one of those things (that, again, wasn't just a Lorraine thing) that I have trouble seeing as a terrible mistake. Don't get me wrong- TSR made a LOT of terrible mistakes in the '90s. Actually, TSR made a lot of terrible mistakes from the inception of the company. I think it's a testament to how amazing the products were by the creatives that the company kept going despite those mistakes (and with the intervention of Lorraine when Gygax was going to finish it off in the '80s).

I also keep coming back to the fact that RPG publishing, after the initial boom in the late 70s to the early 80s, wasn't a great business to be in.

I don't necessarily think of it as a terrible mistake, more of a "what could have been." One has to put themselves in the shoes of someone cares about licensing...not someone who cares about the actual stories. To them, whether it's Buck Rogers or Lord of the Rings or something else, there's just a question of what can I do with this material, what products can I create, and what's it gonna cost me for the right to do so. Novels were HUGE for TSR, so having that avenue cut off to them probably was a deal breaker. And like you said...Lord of the Rings was big a decade or so ago at that time. The last animated tv show was I think Return of the King in 1980? Buck Rogers went off of TV in 1981 and was in syndication.

And to be even more fair, it's not like Lord of the Rings RPGs that did get released have set the world aflame, either.

 

[Mannahnin]

The GDW lawsuit was actually mentioned in the podcast. Specifically, that Gygax used D&D spells with just their names removed. I don't recall who was saying it (Steve Winter, I think?) but they seemed to think the lawsuit was justified.

As for Mayfair Games, the first suit brought by TSR against Mayfair Games was in 1984, under the purview of its CEO at the time, one [checks notes] Gary Gygax. When it looked like they might not win, TSR settled for the license agreement that was the subject of the second suit. A license agreement which, it was found, had been breached.

So we have two instances of TSR, under Williams, justifiably pressing their legal rights. But of course, in that grand narrative that's been told over the years, this was just Williams harassing Gygax. Even though he did the same thing when he was in charge of TSR.

Against all that, we have what TSR did to SPI in 1982, under Gygax and the Blumes. With TSR ascendant thanks to the D&D fad, they loaned a struggling SPI $400,000, with SPI's IP as collateral. Two weeks later, they called for the loan to be repaid, and when it naturally could not be, TSR claimed SPI's assets...but not its liabilities. So the readers who had lifetime subscriptions to SPI's Strategy & Tactics were SOL.

But, Gygax has gotten a pass for this, while Williams has been vilified for TSR doing the same thing it had always done.

I was going to mention this too. TSR suing Mayfair predates Williams, TSR acquiring and killing SPI and cheating its customers predates Williams (more on that here).

TSR (and especially Gary) aggressively going after the producers of other games and unlicensed supplements for use with D&D with C&Ds goes back to the 70s with Warlock, Arduin, Tunnels & Trolls, etc.

TSR legal & management deciding they'd rather screw their own customers out of the extra two chapters of material in Deities & Demigods than continue giving a little respectful acknowledgement to Chaosium at the beginning of the book, but continuing to charge the same price....

We could hope that Williams would improve the company's stance toward its customers and competitors, but it appears that at worst under her TSR maintained the status quo.

 

[Clint_L]

Claiming that they owned the concept of an RPG goes right back to the founding of TSR. There are a bazillion quotes of Gygax claiming that everyone else were “hyenas” or “vultures” trying to snatch TSR’s rightful prize.

He both claimed that TSR owned the concept of an RPG and that they were all ultimately derived from his Chainmail supplement. Which was (A) plagiarized, and (B) only became an RPG after the innovation of Arneson’s group to actually add role playing.