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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9429048" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I was a Gygax fan in the way that only a 12 year old kid in 1980 could be, devouring every issue of Dragon magazine and basically memorizing 1e. By the time he lost control of the company I had moved on a bit, but it still upset me and felt like a personal betrayal. I was all too ready to believe every bad thing I heard about Williams and the Blumes. But as I've aged I've come to reevaluate a lot of my assumptions about the world in general, and about my own beliefs in particular. Now I'm pretty skeptical of received wisdom, I understand a lot more about how memory and belief systems work, and am a lot less confident that I know the Truth. The truth almost always turns out to be a lot more complicated than younger Clint thought.Knowing what I know now, I'm not a fan of any of these people on a personal level - none of them sound like someone I would particularly enjoy hanging out with. I am still a massive fan of what Arneson and Gygax brought into the world with RPGs, and I think that contribution is by far their most important contribution to humanity. It's a bigger contribution than most people make, by orders of magnitude, and you can't take that away. But it's hard to learn about how Gygax treated other people, and how he treated TSR as his personal fiefdom.I have respect for Williams for doing her best in a tough situation, especially in such a male-dominated industry, even though she ultimately failed. And even though I think I would have found her personally disagreeable, I don't think she deserves anything like the abuse her reputation has received.My opinion of the Blumes hasn't shifted a whole lot, except for now it seems like Kevin Blume deserves most of the blame between the two of them, while Brian comes across as a genial failure.Ultimately, I now think TSR was a spectacular train wreck of a company under Gygax and the Blumes, and then Williams turned into a more conventional corporate failure.Edit: I'm a big music fan, and I really enjoy reading rock biographies. But you have to know going in that you are VERY likely to come out with a tarnished opinion of your idols as human beings. We tend to put people up on pedestals, but humans are complicated. Learning about what was happening behind the scenes at TSR feels like reading a fascinating rock biography, because to 12 year old Clint, Gary Gygax was absolutely a rock star.</blockquote>

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