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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sanguinemetaldawn" data-source="post: 3971053" data-attributes="member: 23390">I guess this question is aimed in my general direction, so I'll give my take...First, I don't hate SKR or anything like that.  From what I remember, he was their "web rep" type guy...sort of a proto admin in some cases, IIRC.  It was sort of an intern-like position I think, and basically he was doing internet POC stuff during the TSR IP lockdown.  I suspect he was employed as a sort of PR person to try to improve relations with the online community, which was basically impossible, and as such was almost certainly exposed to a tremendous amount of abuse.  So IIRC, he was the lowest man on the totem-pole, so to speak, and almost certainly not directly involved in the lawsuit proper.He also struck me as bit of a pro-TSR partisan, during TSR's ugliest era, which made it rather difficult to like him.  Usurprisingly, I disagree with a quite a few of his views.Personally, I just remember vividly having some guy called Sean "Veggie Boy" Reynolds respond to the listserv I subscribed to, and finding out from him that anyone who paid for the subscription was straight up ripped off.They couldn't even give a free one year subscription to Dragon or something to the hundred or so subscribers to make up for it.  That sort of thing is really stupid when you think about it.  Its almost as if they were deliberately setting out to make people hate them.I suppose that falls under the rubric of overall mismanagement.My understanding of the Mythus lawsuit was that TSR was suing all parties, and Gygax/Tri-Gee/GDW/etc essentially just gave up under the crush of legal bills, and were forced to settle, with bankruptcy as the probable alternative to a settlement/buyout.The situation ended up being a total loss for TSR, because for a) the legal bills TSR was paying for the lawsuit and b) the cash TSR paid out for the settlement, TSR recieved essentially nothing.  Yeah, they got the properties (and they sometimes pop-up in various WotC books), but financially it just wasn't worth it.  The only conceivable benefit would be the elimination of a competitor, but focusing on Mythus and ignoring the then growing White Wolf and WotC's Magic was obviously extremely stupid in retrospect.What interests me about all this is that it seems like lawyers were running the show at TSR.  The only people who really won as a result of the lawsuit against Mythus were the lawyers.  Combined with the net-policy, the mid-90s can probably be thought of as the dominion of the TSR lawyer.On a personal note, I submitted some material and sent a letter to Gygax for the Mythus game, and Gary responded both with a several page sort-of form letter that he evidently sent to several people, and a single hand written page to me.  In the "form-letter" part he detailed his fight against TSR to keep his game, which he eventually lost.  Even then, the "old gnome", as Dave Newton called him, responded to the community and to individuals.And I am still trying to find some version of Unhallowed, Gary's horror RPG that was the rules foundation for Mythus, also buried by TSR.</blockquote>

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