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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9670025" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Gary wasn't "long gone" in '82.  He was still one of the guys in charge, even while he was abdicating most of the management responsibilities to the Blumes while he was in Hollywood.  That was by his choice, and he repeatedly approved and agreed with decisions they made which hurt the company. Though he disagreed with others, it was still his choice to have the Blumes make those decisions.  One of the recurring themes we see in When We Were Wizards was how a lot of the creative staff thought of Gary as one of their own and expected that if he knew what the Blumes were doing he would help them out, while behind the scenes he was indeed aware of the Blumes' decisions and giving them tacit or explicit approval.  And he was already making terrible decisions well before deciding to focus on media and movie deal- like when Dave Megarry tried to share a book with him on corporate management and stages of development, and tried to get the company to hire someone with actual management experience to head off problems, and was treated with contempt.Yes, we all know about the Random House deal.  You're late to the discussion and preaching to the choir on that.  If you want to call Williams worse because as a manager she kept the company operating two years longer than Gygax and the Blumes... That doesn't seem to add up.  We also have the fact that virtually every TSR employee who worked under both the Gygax/Blume regime and the Williams regime has said they preferred working for Williams.  Williams seems to have been unpleasant in some regards, and definitely made some bad decisions, but the company wasn't a massive mess of nepotism, over-expansion and years of mass firings like it was under Gary and the Blumes.  The "Comic Book Modules" idea and screwing up with licensing deal with DC was indeed dumb.  But it wasn't "buy needlepoint company Greenfield Needlewomen because my cousin owns it" dumb, or "hire my brother in law to run procurement and purchasing and swallow hundreds of thousands in losses when he mass-orders mismatched board game board and box sizes" dumb. Or "dump the Grenadier and Ral Partha licensing to try to bring miniature production in-house, overpay Duke Seyfriend to run it, then throw good money after bad to buy him out when it fails completely" dumb. Or "stop ordering dice before in-house molds are actually anywhere near ready, and be forced to sell Basic sets with cardboard chits for several months" dumb.Nah.  She contributed more competent management, as attested by TSR employees who worked under both.  She kept it alive at least long enough to and finally did sell to WotC, allowing the game to continue to exist.  Gary and the Blumes in 1985 were in the same kind of financial position in terms of debt and failure.  The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and being lost to the bank before Gygax recruited Williams and she gave it another 12 years.And we credit him for his creative and promotional achievements!  Gary pretty much founded the TTRPG hobby at the overlap point between the wargaming and sci-fi fandoms.  But we don't need to keep repeating lies he told about all TSR mismanagement being other people's fault.  And we don't need to keep repeating the canard that Williams never did anything for the hobby, when a ton of books millions of people love came out under her watch, including all of 2E, Dark Sun, Planescape, and the vast majority of the fiction.  And when she's the one who made the WotC deal and enabled Peter Adkison to save D&D.  If she really didn't give a damn she could have walked away and let it sink.</blockquote>

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