What if. . .WotC never bought TSR?

[jcfiala]

An interesting question on my mind is, how would D&D and gaming be different if Hasbro hadn't bought WotC?

Well, that's an interesting question. 3.5 would probably have been released this year, or maybe next year, as Peter A. would still be in charge of the company and would have waited to release the revision. Various 3rd party publishers might have been warned about the changeover in advance, so that they could sell through old 3rd edition stock and get ready for the 3.5. I don't know if the setting search was something that came about because of Hasbro, but hopefully we'd still have Eberron around. However, we might not have Star Wars d20 - I can't remember, but could swear the RPG license for SW that WotC has is part of the general Toy license that Hasbro has. (Then again, if Hasbro had the license, they might have sub-licensed it out to Wizards just because Wizards is so big. On the other hand, if they didn't have Wizards and did have the license, maybe they would have bought what was left of West End and continued that Star Wars game with a 3rd edition of it's own - it would have been fairly cheap, and there was a lot of experience there in dealing with Lucas.)

Hasbro didn't buy WotC because WotC needed the cash - as I understand it was a move made to give the shareholders in WotC a profit on their purchase.

 

[romp]

To Quote Mythus and others: D&D as a brand would have been sold at auction for pennies on the dollar to pay off debtors. A lot of games and properties would have either been lost in trademark limbo (DragonQuest) or reverted back to the owners (Forgotten Realms).

To speculate: the auction of D&D would have attracted a lot of attention. A lot of geeks who have gone on to found successful companies and remembered D&D. I am sure that SJ Games, WW, and possibly even Palladium would have thrown bids in. Heck, Dave Kenzer is a smart business man and I am sure he would have thrown together credible funding for a bid. But the winner would have been a big wig from the computer industry with a D&D past. Someone flush with cash from a big IPO. That was the dotcom boom era after all. We might very well have gotten 3ed anyway because Dancey would have made his proposal to that person, and someone from the computer biz might have been even more ameanble to the open standards/open source ideas after all was aid and done.

 

[StupidSmurf]

D&D as performed by Walmart. Domination & Demolition. Walmart buys the rights then proceeds to make it the only RPG in the world and put all competition out of business. Headquarters wopuld be moved to Arkansas. Printing will be moved to a 3rd world country but say made in the USA. Due to cost cutting measures the price would NOT be $40 a book but all books would 19.98 and then rolled back to 15.98.

He shoots, he scores!!!!!! Well said.

All I can add is this..."Devils and Demons would be removed from the books because they're contrary to family values. And yet, there would definitely be some rather dubious "cheesecake" stuck in the product.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

Still be playing my Skills and Powers campaign most likely!

 

[seankreynolds]

That's a possibility. Kenzer might have been able to gather the funding to buy at least part of TSR

Oh, please, give me a break.

I think that thisis possible, although TSR was pretty much at the end of its life when WoTC came in -- Dragon Magazine had ceased publishing. I think someone would have bought the Dungeons and Dragons name.

Considering that Lorraine was shopping the company around, including directly to Hasbro, that is almost certain.

Hmmm, I hadn't heard that part. The story, as I had read it (and this was probably from a Ryan Dancey post back on Eric Noah's site) was that Random House (which distributed TSR products to stores like B. Dalton and Waldonbooks) had, every year, agreed to take a big shipment from TSR at the end of the fiscal year, so that TSR could make their financial numbers.
One year ('96, IIRC), Random House refused to do this, and TSR's financial house of cards collapsed.

That and a large shipment of returns (RH's agreement meant they could send back unsold books for a refund) meant TSR had no money -- they didn't have money to refund to RH, they didn't have money to pay to print new Player's Handbooks, they didn't have money to print anything. Lorraine Williams and her family were still involved in the company (FWIH she was paying salaries out of her own pocket for those last few months in order to keep them employees, the company had absolutely no income).

First, a point: pen-and-paper RPGs are at the "low popularity level they had in the mid-1990's" now, Danceyist propaganda aside. They might even be lower, post-bubble.

Not true, at least according to what I was told while I was working there. In 2E in the last days of TSR (1996), a "good-selling" new book was selling 5,000 copies. With 3E, a "good-selling" new book (and I'm not even talking the big hits like the 3 core books, the FRCS, and so on) was selling almost ten times that much. Clearly, that's better sales than before.

 

[mythusmage]

... FWIW she was paying salaries out of her own pocket for those last few months in order to keep them employees, the company had absolutely no income ...

I did not know that. She is to be commended for this action. Shows you that not everyone is entirely without merit.

What if Lorraine Williams had learned how to run a company?

 

[Aeson]

He shoots, he scores!!!!!! Well said.

All I can add is this..."Devils and Demons would be removed from the books because they're contrary to family values. And yet, there would definitely be some rather dubious "cheesecake" stuck in the product.

I think they would have gone back to calling the Baatazu and Tanari.

Oh I forgot. Sam's Club would offer books in bulk. Buy 12 PHBs for the price of 10.

 

[Gundark]

First, a point: pen-and-paper RPGs are at the "low popularity level they had in the mid-1990's" now, Danceyist propaganda aside. They might even be lower, post-bubble. KoOS

I would like something other than hearsay to back this up. Not saying that you are going on hearsay, just so many of the "D&D is on the way out" people don't have figures to back up claims. Normally it's just "I own a store and no-one buys D&D here" or something like that.

the Palladium house system wouldn't look quite so clunky without d20 around to show it up. WW would be the de facto "public face" of gaming (as it arguably was during the height of WoD LARPs, towards the end of TSR's run). KoOS

...not AS clunky

 

[kenobi65]

Oh, please, give me a break. {re: Kenzer and buying D&D from TSR}

Yeah, keep in mind that this is 1996 we're talking about. Even if Kenzer might be big enough to be able to consider something like that today (and I'm not convinced that they are), in 1996, they were publishing a fairly new gaming comic (KotDT) on more-or-less bimonthly basis, and had a small RPG line (the pre-d20 Kalamar products). In other words, they were probably no bigger than a dozen other "running the company out of my garage" RPG companies, and I just can't see them being able to get up the kind of cash that would have been required to pull off something like buying D&D.

Edit: Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten...they also had the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" CCG at about that time...

 

[Warbringer]

Oh, please, give me a break.

Delivered with Sean's usual finesse ...

Sean, glad to see your name back on upcoming projects. UnappEast was my last FR purchase, and undoubtably the best.