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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9426669" data-attributes="member: 8461">I've been making a habit of reading various nonfiction titles about our hobby for several years now, everything from personal anecdotes by people who weren't involved with tabletop RPGs as anything except players (e.g. Mark Barrowcliffe's The Elfish Gene) to industry insider's memoirs (e.g. Bill Slaicsek's Designing a Galaxy) to big collections of anecdotes (e.g. Robin D. Laws' 40 Years of Gen Con) to serious historical analyses (e.g. Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, first edition).In all of these, I have found exactly four instances of people speaking positively about Lorraine Williams' actions during her time at TSR, which I'll recount below:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">She came up with the idea for the format of the 1991 <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/5-fun-facts-about-the-1991-d-d-black-boxed-set.685296/" target="_blank">black boxed set</a> (the execution, I'll note, was carried out by Troy Denning). Specifically, she saw how a group called the Science Research Associates had come up with a way to encourage teaching children to read using lessons that were broken down onto double-sided cards, and thought that would be a good way to teach how to play D&D.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">She was extremely generous in giving William W. Conners flexibility in his hours and his salary while he was taking care of his wife, who was dealing with repressed memories of childhood sexual trauma.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">She personally apologized to an employee (I want to say Ed Stark, but I'm not absolutely certain on that) after calling him back and "un-firing" him after he'd been let go during the mass layoffs at the end of 1996, when TSR was going under (after said employee's boss made a desperate plea to her that the person she'd just let go was someone they absolutely needed to keep).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">She personally participated in, and greatly enjoyed, the brief Gen Con tradition of other companies' staff "assaulting" the TSR castle (i.e. their booth in the middle of the exhibit hall) with nerf weapons the day before the convention opened to the public.</li> </ul>That's it. As far as I've been able to find, that's the sum total of good things that anyway who worked for her has to say about her.Beyond that, I don't think that it's appropriate to give her credit for the good things that happened under her watch. She was the boss, but she didn't participate in any aspect of the creative process that I've been able to find, the above notwithstanding. In fact, she herself gave a quote in David Ewalt's Of Dice and Men about not understanding what TSR did, and that she took the job mostly as a lark:The comparison between this attitude and that of the recently-departed Cynthia Williams paints itself.Throw in her twice attempting to use TSR to increase the value of intellectual property that her family owned (i.e. two attempts at a Buck Rogers RPG), the numerous bad business decisions she made (e.g. refusing to make a Lord of the Rings RPG if she couldn't also secure the rights to make new LotR novels), and throwing her brother Flinte Dille work (he directed the various audio CD products which came out in the mid-90s), and in all honesty even her rosiest portrayal strikes me as being on par with the worst pictures painted about Gary Gygax (particularly since both had twelve years with TSR, his being 1973-1985, and hers being 1985-1997).Now, I'll admit that I'm biased in that regard, simply because I find Gary Gygax to be a much more sympathetic figure compared to Lorraine Williams. The latter was a literal trust-fund kid, whereas Gary had managed to make his hobby into a successful career. Likewise, he truly loved games, both creating them and playing them, whereas Williams seems to have had no interest in them even when they were her business. To that end, I simply can't see Williams as someone who should be looked upon kindly, despite the recent pushes to frame her in a more sympathetic light.</blockquote>

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