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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9679854" data-attributes="member: 28003">In the 80s and 90s there were other companies where you could work full time--West End, GDW, Chaosium, eventually White Wolf, and so on. Those houses were nowhere near as large as TSR, but there were other full-time gigs designing TTRPGs to be had. As the 90s wore on, a lot of those other companies downsized or vanished (TSR hired a wave of ex-GDW folks, an ex-West End wave, etc), but by then TTRPG designers were also regularly jumping to computer game companies, often for much better money.The salaries TSR paid in the late 1980s were not great, but not absurdly bad. I started at $18,000 a year (about $48,000, or $23/hour, in 2025 bucks) as an editorial assistant in the Book Department. I very quickly moved up to full editor and then series editor, with a couple pay bumps along the way. Staff could also freelance for the company. I made several thousand more a year editing or writing RPGs under freelance contracts, along with pitching stuff to Dragon and Polyhedron, but that also meant putting in absurd hours at work and then at home. (Dragon paid real money, Polyhedron store credit for the Mail Order Hobby Shop.)TSR game freelance projects were flat fee deals. Novels paid royalties, not only on the books themselves, but on translations and even direct adaptations (e.g. audiobooks). The fiction contracts were better than the game contracts because TSR was competing in the book publishing market for writers. The Book Department in the late 80s also lobbied, successfully, to improve the contracts, arguing we were just going to lose everyone who had a hit to New York—as TSR had mostly lost Rose, Margaret, and Tracy—if the rates and schedules were not at least close to competitive. Book contracts were worth a lot of money, circa 1990.In 1994, as the company's finances started getting more obviously dire, management cut the rates staff could make from game and magazine freelancing for the company, meaning the highly trained TSR staff would get paid less than freelancers for the same work, even if they did that work off the clock on nights and weekends. I was already on my way out when that edict came down, but it was yet another sign it was time to move on as quickly as possible.[ATTACH=full]407995[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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