NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 9427217" data-attributes="member: 6680772">I agree with pretty much all of Snarf's post.The matter is made difficult because Lorraine has never provided her side of the story. Virtually everything we have heard from her has come from Gary, Gary's friends and admirers, and the creatives who worked for her. Though the last, we should note, disliked everyone in management, since the early days of TSR.It's especially frustrating in that so much that she gets the blame for started before she got there. They Sue Regularly has been brought up, but this was not just a Lorraine thing. TSR under Gary and the Blumes was just as litigious and happy to send C&D letters. The Williams TSR's  treatment of Weis and Hickman was in the company tradition of Gygax/Blume TSR's treatment of Rose Estes. While I can certainly see assigning her some blame for not changing these policies, I don't know why she gets more blame than the originators. This was the culture of TSR, and not even CEOs can change culture by themselves.(And while I don't agree with TSR's going after fansites in the 90s, but at the same time, I understand that the Internet was new and poorly understood at the time, so I can understand the reasoning: it looked like simply an alternative publishing medium.)I think also that it's clearer now that Lorraine didn't run TSR into the ground. That was already done before she got there. She kept it afloat for another 12 years, but it never got out from under the crippling debt it incurred during the Gygax/Blume years. This is also mitigated, in my view, by the fact that the RPG publishing business was simply not viable at that time. None of the major companies of the 90s has survived intact. (With the exception of Steve Jackson Games, but even that's involved a pivot from GURPS to the Munchkin card game.) In fact, it may have become viable only in the last decade, as subscription services have allowed for an alternative revenue stream, and Kickstarter has reduced uncertainty in print-runs and distribution.I don't think Lorraine needs to be lauded. Not even for keeping TSR going after taking over, since this basically involved putting out a new edition for a quick infusion of revenue, and then leveraging the Random House contract (signed in 1979) as an off-the-books credit line.But, I do think she's been unfairly vilified over the past few years. Beyond the second guessing of every decision that wasn't an unqualified success, there's long been this narrative that TSR was run by Gary and the Gamers, and everything was great except for a few bad business decisions by the Blumes. Then Gary brought Lorraine in to help right the ship and she stabbed him in the back and kicked him out of the company. Then, not being a gamer, and not liking gamers, she ran the company into the ground. Oh, if only Gary hadn't been deceived by her! TSR and D&D under Gary might have continued into a golden age!The reality is that TSR was run into the ground as much by Gary as the Blumes. Lorraine did betray Gary, but only after he belittled her and demonstrated that he had no intention of tightening his belt* for the good of the company. Her tenure has CEO was mixed at best, but there's little to no evidence it would have been any better under Gary, and some to suggest it would have been a lot worse.***In this case, giving up the lease on his expensive Hollywood mansion and company Cadillac.**My takeaway from When We Were Wizards is that the likely result of Gary continuing as CEO is that he would have bled the company dry enriching himself, before abandoning it to become a Hollywood producer.</blockquote>

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