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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9680776" data-attributes="member: 28003">From what I saw, Lorraine and the parts of TSR upper management who had come into the company from "the business world" didn't understand the customer base. Some showed disdain, some confusion, many condescension. I disagree on a core philosophical/ethical level with the destructive way Lorraine and her management team treated creators, including me, so I know that colors things. Setting that aside, I mostly got the impression Lorraine did not understand the gamer community, including the staff, and her baseline way of interacting with people could easily be read as disdainful. But it would be a mistake to assume that is actual disdain. They are not the same things.The folks I knew who had the best interactions with her, like Bill Conners over his family crisis or the staffers who played cards (bridge?) with her at lunch sometimes, were dealing with her outside the game/gamer context. It seemed to me she was most comfortable there, and I take those accounts from Bill and others seriously, as that was never the context in which I dealt with her. I was never going to see that.Lorraine was not divorced from the day to day operations. She was, however, inconsistent about what projects she was going to take an interest in and how she was going to show her interest. Sometimes her interest meant you got extra resources and more time. Sometimes it meant she swooped in to micromanage details on a level that would grind a project to a halt. (Like obsessing over the color blue to be used on the Dark Sun maps, for example, for which I ended up a prop because I happened to be walking in the hallway at the wrong time.) None of that is unusual with game publishing management, though, or even other management of other types of companies.Running a successful creator-reliant company is incredibly difficult, a hobby-focused company doubly so, with being a woman and being from outside the hobby community all multipliers for difficulty too. The toxic public and media attitudes still swirling around TTRPGs in the 1980s and early 1990s made it even tougher. As I said, I could not disagree more strongly with how she ran the company, but the original post was spot on in identifying many of the things for which she should get credit and many of the ways cultural attitides (then and now) color the way she is discussed in the TTRPG community.</blockquote>

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