What did TSR do wrong?

[francisca]

In general: They ran Gary off. Not only did they chase out a creative entity, they lost a guy who could have righted the ship after their financial troubles. That was a first, big mistake in my opinion.

Secondly, they produced a lot of of sub-par crapola. Granted, this is hindsight, and I pretty much skipped all of 2e, but looking back, there is a lot of plain junk put out after Gary left.

For example: my pet peeve is the treatment of Lankhmar. The 1st and 2nd Ed city sourcebooks are really good, but the follow-on modules and accessories are almost pure garbage, poorly edited, and almost completely devoid of Lankhmar/Newhon/Leiber flavor.

I completely missed out on the internet hostility, thankfully.

 

[pawsplay]

Things I remember:

- Stupid products no one wanted, like the monster Trapper Keeper concept, deluxe "parchment" style character sheets that were unreadable, and so forth
- Really bad products, like Player's Option: Powers & Skills
- Forgotten Realms was the Eberron of its day, very popular, but not what a lot of the older fans wanted.
- Explicitly selling powergaming. Read the Dark Sun back cover, boasting about the most powerful PCs ever, starting at 3rd (gasp!) level with above average abilities and psionics.
- Failure to evolve. THAC0 was a step up from Chart-O, but really, yuck, just yuck. The Rules Cyclopedia version of D&D was superior in this regard, but was intentionally written as a game with training wheels, so what did you do with it?
- Ruthlessly stamping out fan activity in favor of pay-for-play activities, never mind that a lot of them just weren't very profitable endeavors. Fanzines, cons, third party modules, there was not a penny operation that was immune to TSR's financial jealousy. The RPGA took shape. Dragon magazine invited other games on board, then once their zine and magazine presence was gone, dumped them like a rebound relationship.

A lot of this, to me, says "organizational chaos." Everyone was trying to be the biggest part of the company, nobody was really looking at the future, and nothing got tested or analyzed.

 

[RFisher]

Not listening to customers was certainly a serious fault.

The real problem (IMHO) was simply lack of vision. For a company to be successful, it needs to be lead by someone with a passion for its segment (e.g. mainly hobby games for TSR) & a vision for great products within that segment.

The thing is, I often hate talk of "vision". Probably because most of the people who talk about "vision" don't have it. (Including me.) They try to develop it in commitee, but you can't do that. Either someone has it or they don't.

Of course, there are innumerable ways for a company to fail even with a leader with a strong vision. (Although clueless partners cutting the legs out from under the guy with the vision is a pretty common one.) It ain't easy. & a company may be able to get by--for a time--without a leader with a strong vision.

But I think pretty much all of TSR's woes stemmed from not having a vision while all of their success came from the brief moments when a vision was allowed to flourish.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

This I think is the most telling bit from Ryan Dancey's letter (which I see someone else has linked to): "In today's hypercompetitive market, that's an impossible mentality. At Wizards of the Coast, we pay close attention to the voice of the customer. We ask questions. We listen. We react. So, we spent a whole lot of time and money on a variety of surveys and studies to learn about the people who play role playing games."

What happened to this spirit? Why has WotC turned a deaf ear to its fans?

I'm willing to bet that WotC *did* conduct surveys and studies on the online venture, and that we told them we are willing to pay for quality online content. I'm also willing to bet that the surveys and studies did NOT mention that killing the print versions of Dragon and Dungeon would be part of the price paid for the proposed online content. That would have undoubtably changed the survey results!

I don't think very many people are upset that WotC is going to offer for-pay online content. However, people are very upset that WotC felt the need to discontinue the print magazines as part of the arrangement.

 

[S'mon]

For example: my pet peeve is the treatment of Lankhmar. The 1st and 2nd Ed city sourcebooks are really good, but the follow-on modules and accessories are almost pure garbage, poorly edited, and almost completely devoid of Lankhmar/Newhon/Leiber flavor.

Dale "Slade" Henson, *brrr*

I still have nightmares about that guy.

 

[francisca]

Dale "Slade" Henson, *brrr*

I still have nightmares about that guy.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

 

[dcas]

I'd have to agree. TSRs treatment of SSIs customers was also awful after they acquired the company. If I had to use one word describing TSR almost from the get go it would be arrogant.

Do you mean SPI?

Frank Menzter explains why TSR did not honor subscriptions to Strategy & Tactics:

TSR loaned SPI money to try to keep them afloat. They still descended into the abyss, and had no good plan for getting out of the red. Thus, TSR foreclosed to get some properties in exchange for their investment; basic business.

Ref: Dragonsfoot

 

[Storm Raven]

Dungeon and Dragon magazines should have gotten the axe a long time ago really. With the internet, people really don't need flashy mags with pretty artwork, and inflated price tags.

With internet content instead of a magazine, I cannot read the material while riding on the commuter bus to and from work. With internet content instead of a magazine, I can't sit in my backyard and read material in the afternoon. With internet content instead of a magazine, I cannot have the magazine at the gaming table at my friend's house when he hosts a session. And so on. With internet content instead of a magazine, I cannot read through an article when I am not at my computer.

I suppose I could print out the internet content, and keep a physical copy, but that's a headache for me that would have been avoided i I simply got the paper version to begin with. Internet content is, in many ways, and for many people, simply a less convenient delivery system for the material.

 

[diaglo]

I'm willing to bet that WotC *did* conduct surveys and studies on the online venture, and that we told them we are willing to pay for quality online content. I'm also willing to bet that the surveys and studies did NOT mention that killing the print versions of Dragon and Dungeon would be part of the price paid for the proposed online content. That would have undoubtably changed the survey results!

I don't think very many people are upset that WotC is going to offer for-pay online content. However, people are very upset that WotC felt the need to discontinue the print magazines as part of the arrangement.

yes, they did. i filled out the customer cards in my products. and Merric linked us to the surveys too that were on the WotC site.

 

[TerraDave]

So many, many things

Previous posters have touched on a few...but to summarize:

1) Squandered huge amounts of cash: It may be hard in this day and age to comprehend what a phenamonon D&D was in the early 80's and hence how profitable it was. But it was. The results: many freinds and relatives of the Blume brothers (who had taken control of the company for various reasons) on the payroll with company cars. Questionable investments, including in a needle point bussiness (yes really), and a generally lax attitude towards profitability and the realities of the bussiness that would continue for many years.

2) Alienated their best creators: the big, big, example here is Gary Gygax (our own Col Pladoh), but he is not the only one. If you went through a list of people (positively) associated with the game over the years, you may be surprised by how many stopped being employees of TSR (and later Wizards), and when. On the other hand, mediocre talents seemed to always be able to hang around.

3) Poor execution: TSR had huge successes, including releasing AD&D and B/ED&D at just the right time, the early Dragon magazine, and the D&D cartoon (all basically thanks to Col Pladoh). But for a lot of things, they just made strange decisions and couldn't quite get things right. The dragon dice and book trade fiascos touched on above are some examples. This included all sorts of issues with top managment (see 1) that continued through various owners, and a trend towards brining in non-gamers to "fix things", who of course didn't under tand gaming and made things worse.

And they did make questionable decisions regarding the games they developed and supported. E.g. having many, many similar fantasy worlds, and supporting all of them with multiple releases every month. One of my favorites was continuing to release 1st ed rulesbooks after launching 2nd edition. A source of short term profit, but what about those people who bought those books and then realized they where being phased out...

4) Alienated their customers: Dropping devils, demons, and assasins to apease outside critics, starting a suplement "arms race" that ultimately angered many, many DMs (and not just those with bladesingers in their games). Threatning to shut down D&D fan sites while not having their own web presence (they where on AOL). And just releasing so much crap by the end. (Remember poor execution: there solution to falling sales was to actually churn out more stuff even faster to make up the revenue). You think WotC is taking a flak right now (ok, they are), but for T$R in the final years (as it was called), it was like this month after month after month. Until they went bankrupt.

Want to learn more? The Ryan Dancy link above is good. So are the aniversary products (25th anv boxed set and 30th anv book for D&D), so are the Col Pladoh threads, or just ask, and he'll tell you. And there are many more anecdotes. Why I haven't even mentioned Buck Rogers.