Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
Brian Blume played games, and even designed Boot Hill. To Kevin TSR was just a widget factory, but ut seems it mattered more thar that to Brian.
D&D General When We Were Wizards: Review of the Completed Podcast!
- Thread starter Snarf Zagyg
- Start date
Mr. Lahey
Explorer
Being someone who works in an office, the idea of a “really great guy” who is just an ineffectual boss really resonates.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Finished it yesterday. A saga, with some great and moving moments and insights.
Pretty much agree with Snarf's review on all counts.
I feel like Stormberg and Turner went pretty gentle on Gygax in the denouement. He was right up there with the Blumes in terms of mismanagement and mistreatment of the other TSR staffers and creatives, albeit they couldn't see it as much because he was so absentee. His cruelty to Rob Kuntz in particular was pretty appalling.
I'm glad Schick has seen such success in his ensuring career, including with Larian and Baldur's Gate 3.
Pretty much agree with Snarf's review on all counts.
I feel like Stormberg and Turner went pretty gentle on Gygax in the denouement. He was right up there with the Blumes in terms of mismanagement and mistreatment of the other TSR staffers and creatives, albeit they couldn't see it as much because he was so absentee. His cruelty to Rob Kuntz in particular was pretty appalling.
Can't blame him after how TSR repeatedly screwed him and Zeb Cook over regarding Star Frontiers. They put what, two years of their lives into making a new game which should have been perfectly positioned to be boosted by the contemporaneous popularity of Star Wars? With the promise of royalties which would likely have enabled them to buy houses and go from poor into at least middle class (like royalties did for Jim Ward)? And then be screwed out of first the royalties, then the creative bonuses which were supposed to replace the royalties, then even out of credit, while the C Suite told an editor to mangle their game to get it out in time for a holiday sales push?
I'm glad Schick has seen such success in his ensuring career, including with Larian and Baldur's Gate 3.
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I knew very little of the history of D&D and TSR and absolutely loved this podcast. From it I learned two big things:
1. The management of TSR was pretty much a disaster from day one. It was always a mess and only the popularity of D&D helped it move forward.
2. Gary Gygax was like quadruple-dipping into the company. He was a shareholder of the company. He got royalties on his own work published through the company. He had TSR paying for his entire crazy lavish Hollywood lifestyle, and he still thought that all the IP was his alone if he walked away. He would often pay back the company's debt to him on his royalties to pay for his own expenses living in Hollywood.
Bananas.
1. The management of TSR was pretty much a disaster from day one. It was always a mess and only the popularity of D&D helped it move forward.
2. Gary Gygax was like quadruple-dipping into the company. He was a shareholder of the company. He got royalties on his own work published through the company. He had TSR paying for his entire crazy lavish Hollywood lifestyle, and he still thought that all the IP was his alone if he walked away. He would often pay back the company's debt to him on his royalties to pay for his own expenses living in Hollywood.
Bananas.
What struck me most about the podcast was not just how terrible TSR management was, but how deplorable they were to their employees. Employees there were exploited, underpaid, and treated with contempt while an incompetent management handed out cushy jobs to friends and family.
And Gygax was totally absent in protecting the creative core for his company. He comes across as selfish, lazy, and indulgent. It's not clear that he ever cares about anyone or anything but himself. Even his design work is all centered on the premise of how he can keep royalties flowing to himself (while the rest of the staff were denied those same royalties largely).
And Gygax was totally absent in protecting the creative core for his company. He comes across as selfish, lazy, and indulgent. It's not clear that he ever cares about anyone or anything but himself. Even his design work is all centered on the premise of how he can keep royalties flowing to himself (while the rest of the staff were denied those same royalties largely).
I'm not sure how much of the history of the podcast is known, but it has its own story which is pretty fascinating and in a way mirrors the story that is being told. It was originally a Kickstarter project and was supposed to be a documentary. The creators have some amazing footage that they took the audio from and I believe they intend to still put together a documentary on the history of wargaming and roleplaying games.
humble minion
Legend
Finished it today. It was an interesting listen. I've read a few of the books about that period - Slaying the Dragon, Game Wizards etc, but there was still a lot here that was new. Rose Estes added a lot to the story I think, and Mary Jo. Those were perspectives I don't think I'd heard before.
Full disclosure - I only discovered the existence of D&D in about 1986/7 as a 10 year old, and only actually got serious about trying to find a game in the mid 90s, so my connection to the events and personalities is perhaps less immediate than some. All the D&D products that were formative for me came out long, long after the legendary Ambush at Sheridan Springs and after Gygax left the company. So for me, it's a bit of a case of academically interesting ancient history rather than personal nostalgia around the products of this time period, or attachment to the people involved. My personal interests in and perspectives on D&D were much better covered by Slaying the Dragon, which covered the entire lifetime of TSR up to the WotC takeover rather than focusing on the rise and fall of Gygax. But this is not that sort of a history and that's ok - I'm certainly not going to complain that this apple is the wrong type of orange.
(As a side note, I'd love to read a serious history of D&D since the WotC years of 2000ish, but without the Greek tragedy of Gygax and his circle I suspect it'd be a harder sell. Besides, I'm more interested about the history of the creative output of that time rather than the financial and corporate maneuverings, but I suspect that'd make a much more niche product. I'd personally LOVE to hear the real story of how the Spellplague came to be and how the brown matter hit the fan after it became clear how loathed it was, for example, but also, a lot of the people involved are still working with WotC or in the industry to some degree and will be wary about ruffling any corporate feathers, so I suspect this is vanishingly unlikely)
Something that really struck me in the early episodes was that Gygax began as a wargamer, and how much that perspective influenced him. I mean, he clearly loved D&D to an enormous degree, but he played loads of other stuff too. He talked about the game in semi-adversarial terms, about how the PCs were put in a scenario and had to try to defeat it. I wonder if that's where his fondness for killer dungeons and inescapable traps and save-or-die poisons on monsters etc came from, the idea that PCs were wargaming out a scenario, and that their survival is of no more real importance than the survival of Twelfth Ork From The Left in a Warhammer tabletop game. My (hindsight-heavy) impression is that is was heavily down to the DL modules and the Dragonlance books in the mid 80s that story really started to trump wargaming simulation/challenge, and the views on PC death became less blase, although I suspect some people had been playing like that for a looong time before that.
Gary seems to have taken the wargaming attitude to his life outside gaming from time to time too. Ruleslawyering, win-at-all-costs, gloating if he beats you, sulking if he doesn't. We've all played with/against that guy.
The time in Hollywood makes me wonder - who was Gary playing games with at that time? It sounds like everything was drinking, shmoozing, networking, dealmaking, hanging around in bars and clubs,and parties round the pool. Was he even playing regularly at all? Ernie was there of course (Ernie doesn't not come off well in the podcast, sadly) and might have played with his dad, but did Gary have a regular game group of actual close friends? The original group of intimates from the old days were gone and mostly thoroughly alienated by then, but there'd have been loads of people who'd have killed to play with Gary and he was clearly a very personable guy who people gravitated to. We hear a lot from Flint Dibble, did he play games with Gary? It almost seems to me like the Hollywood big-spender years were the signs of a man who thought he'd already won the biggest game in the world, and didn't really know what came next.
I can't seem to remember Dibble having much to say on the podcast about Williams's takeover of the company. She was his sister, that must have put him in an awkward position re his friendship with Gary. I wonder how that worked out, especially since Dibble/Williams family made big bucks out of TSR (over the Flash Gordon thing, among others) later on.
One set of missing voices were those of the non-designers from the 'two buildings' era. I mean, we hear from the designers a lot, presumably because they were gamers and they stayed connected with the industry to a degree, and because they still have fans who appreciate their work. And I understand why the Blume's didn't contribute. But the Other Building was full of people who WEREN'T Blumes - marketing people, presumably accountants, secretaries, legal, logistics, etc etc etc. We heard a lot about the divide down the middle of the company between the creatives and the boring suit-wearers (and the contempt and distrust the former had for the latter), it'd have been good to hear a little from the other side, even if it wasn't from a higher-up.
Brian Blume might have been a pleasant guy, but the one thing that really struck me is that he and Kevin flat-out demanded immunity from lawsuits over their misconduct in charge of TSR as part of the price of leaving. That's a VERY big tell for me, considering how many Blumes ended up in well-paid positions, and how many business dealings Blume-owned companies had with TSR (which rarely worked out for TSR). They were shonky and they damn well knew it. Gary may have treated TSR as his personal ATM, but he wasn't alone in that.
The buy-out offer that Williams made to Gary certainly was mind-blowingly enormous. I have to wonder - where did this money come from? We hear a lot about TSRs $5 million rolling credit line - which they continually rode right to the ragged edge - where on earth was TSR going to find over three times that amount to buy Gary out? It sounds a lot like they'd have had to go FURTHER into debt, and expensive leveraged buyouts of profit-marginal businesses rarely go well (see, Toys R Us, Red Lobster). I wonder how much of Williams's vaunted business reputation in turning TSR around was due to her luck in NOT getting on the hook for that deal because Gary said no?
Williams comes across reasonably ok. Very ruthless, sure, but there's some reason to be. The continual financial demands of Gygax on the company and his relative uselessness in addressing the company's real problems at this time, plus his managing to alienate the bank that was the only thing keeping TSR afloat, and threatening her with the sack - it's easy to understand how she could come to the conclusion that it was not just a matter of Gary or her, but Gary or the company. Of course, she is somewhat flattered by the podcast choosing to stop where it did. Her later decisions paint her competence in a much less flattering light. Not so much her ruthlessness in shoving 2e out the door to get Gary's name off the covers of the core books and therefore cut out his royalties, but her decade plus presiding over the antagonistic 'They Sue Regularly' era, and her disastrous management of the Random House contract, and her wilful alienation of talent like Weis/Hickman and Salvatore who were absolutely minting cash for the company, and the way that under her stewardship, the company managed to spend years printing products that lost them money on every sale.
Another perspective I would have loved to hear is one about the actual game. Maybe from a fan who was relatively disconnected from all the inside drama at the time. The podcast hardly mentions any actual products. The red box and the original MM/PHB/DMG get a writeup because of their significance to the history of the company, and to Gary's royalty agreement, rather than because of their place in the history of the game. Endless Quest gets a mention in the context of the book business and the trajectory of Rose Estes's time at TSR. Later, there's some talk about the wild, runaway success of Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures providing a much-needed cash injection when things were looking very bleak. And the timing too is interesting. As Williams springs her coup, Dragonlance is in the process of turning D&D on its head - the Ambush at Sheridan Springs happens one month after Dragons of Spring Dawning is released and Tanis kills Ariakas in the Temple of Takhisis in Neraka. The DL modules aren't even finished yet, but the novels are going gangbusters, and Raistlin hasn't really gotten going yet. Even 8 year old me remembers seeing the DL modules in the toyshop while staring longingly at Lego sets I couldn't afford. It must have, to a player, seemed like something of a second renaissance for the game, mustn't it? But at the exact same time the company is falling apart behind the scenes. It's a bit ironic that the whole podcast is about people getting so distracted by the money that they forgot the game, but it too seems to forget the game.
And of course, creatively, TSR hadn't really gotten started. In 1985, as Gary packed up his desk, Dragonlance was only just getting going. The Forgotten Realms Grey Box only got the greenlight in 1986 because Williams's TSR wanted a campaign world that was more distant from Gygax. The first Drizzt novel was still years away, Ravenloft consisted of exactly one module (how did Weis and Hickman not get a mention in the podcast I want to know? Between Ravenloft and Dragonlance they were era-defining superstars at this time), and Planescape, Dark Sun, Spelljammer etc weren't even on the horizon. For someone like me who came along later, there's a certain blurriness to 'the times before' . For someone who grew up with the B/X and so on, there's probably Before Gygax and After Gygax. I'm a lot closer to 50 than 40 now, but even so, when i was first getting into the game, all this came under the single heading of 'old'. My personal image of 'classic D&D' was firmly rooted in the Williams era - by the time i came along, Gygax was a known name, but one of dubious significance. Sort of the Isaac Newton of gaming - he had some awesome ideas back in the day, and everyone had heard of him, but he's not the one whose stuff is what matters here and now.
But like i said, this was a podcast more about the people than the game, and it's got to be judged as such. And in the end, how I mostly felt was ... sad. So many lives blighted, so many friendships sundered and relationships destroyed, so much potential wasted, so much folly and ego and foolishness. Tragedies are gonna tragedy I guess.
Full disclosure - I only discovered the existence of D&D in about 1986/7 as a 10 year old, and only actually got serious about trying to find a game in the mid 90s, so my connection to the events and personalities is perhaps less immediate than some. All the D&D products that were formative for me came out long, long after the legendary Ambush at Sheridan Springs and after Gygax left the company. So for me, it's a bit of a case of academically interesting ancient history rather than personal nostalgia around the products of this time period, or attachment to the people involved. My personal interests in and perspectives on D&D were much better covered by Slaying the Dragon, which covered the entire lifetime of TSR up to the WotC takeover rather than focusing on the rise and fall of Gygax. But this is not that sort of a history and that's ok - I'm certainly not going to complain that this apple is the wrong type of orange.
(As a side note, I'd love to read a serious history of D&D since the WotC years of 2000ish, but without the Greek tragedy of Gygax and his circle I suspect it'd be a harder sell. Besides, I'm more interested about the history of the creative output of that time rather than the financial and corporate maneuverings, but I suspect that'd make a much more niche product. I'd personally LOVE to hear the real story of how the Spellplague came to be and how the brown matter hit the fan after it became clear how loathed it was, for example, but also, a lot of the people involved are still working with WotC or in the industry to some degree and will be wary about ruffling any corporate feathers, so I suspect this is vanishingly unlikely)
Something that really struck me in the early episodes was that Gygax began as a wargamer, and how much that perspective influenced him. I mean, he clearly loved D&D to an enormous degree, but he played loads of other stuff too. He talked about the game in semi-adversarial terms, about how the PCs were put in a scenario and had to try to defeat it. I wonder if that's where his fondness for killer dungeons and inescapable traps and save-or-die poisons on monsters etc came from, the idea that PCs were wargaming out a scenario, and that their survival is of no more real importance than the survival of Twelfth Ork From The Left in a Warhammer tabletop game. My (hindsight-heavy) impression is that is was heavily down to the DL modules and the Dragonlance books in the mid 80s that story really started to trump wargaming simulation/challenge, and the views on PC death became less blase, although I suspect some people had been playing like that for a looong time before that.
Gary seems to have taken the wargaming attitude to his life outside gaming from time to time too. Ruleslawyering, win-at-all-costs, gloating if he beats you, sulking if he doesn't. We've all played with/against that guy.
The time in Hollywood makes me wonder - who was Gary playing games with at that time? It sounds like everything was drinking, shmoozing, networking, dealmaking, hanging around in bars and clubs,and parties round the pool. Was he even playing regularly at all? Ernie was there of course (Ernie doesn't not come off well in the podcast, sadly) and might have played with his dad, but did Gary have a regular game group of actual close friends? The original group of intimates from the old days were gone and mostly thoroughly alienated by then, but there'd have been loads of people who'd have killed to play with Gary and he was clearly a very personable guy who people gravitated to. We hear a lot from Flint Dibble, did he play games with Gary? It almost seems to me like the Hollywood big-spender years were the signs of a man who thought he'd already won the biggest game in the world, and didn't really know what came next.
I can't seem to remember Dibble having much to say on the podcast about Williams's takeover of the company. She was his sister, that must have put him in an awkward position re his friendship with Gary. I wonder how that worked out, especially since Dibble/Williams family made big bucks out of TSR (over the Flash Gordon thing, among others) later on.
One set of missing voices were those of the non-designers from the 'two buildings' era. I mean, we hear from the designers a lot, presumably because they were gamers and they stayed connected with the industry to a degree, and because they still have fans who appreciate their work. And I understand why the Blume's didn't contribute. But the Other Building was full of people who WEREN'T Blumes - marketing people, presumably accountants, secretaries, legal, logistics, etc etc etc. We heard a lot about the divide down the middle of the company between the creatives and the boring suit-wearers (and the contempt and distrust the former had for the latter), it'd have been good to hear a little from the other side, even if it wasn't from a higher-up.
Brian Blume might have been a pleasant guy, but the one thing that really struck me is that he and Kevin flat-out demanded immunity from lawsuits over their misconduct in charge of TSR as part of the price of leaving. That's a VERY big tell for me, considering how many Blumes ended up in well-paid positions, and how many business dealings Blume-owned companies had with TSR (which rarely worked out for TSR). They were shonky and they damn well knew it. Gary may have treated TSR as his personal ATM, but he wasn't alone in that.
The buy-out offer that Williams made to Gary certainly was mind-blowingly enormous. I have to wonder - where did this money come from? We hear a lot about TSRs $5 million rolling credit line - which they continually rode right to the ragged edge - where on earth was TSR going to find over three times that amount to buy Gary out? It sounds a lot like they'd have had to go FURTHER into debt, and expensive leveraged buyouts of profit-marginal businesses rarely go well (see, Toys R Us, Red Lobster). I wonder how much of Williams's vaunted business reputation in turning TSR around was due to her luck in NOT getting on the hook for that deal because Gary said no?
Williams comes across reasonably ok. Very ruthless, sure, but there's some reason to be. The continual financial demands of Gygax on the company and his relative uselessness in addressing the company's real problems at this time, plus his managing to alienate the bank that was the only thing keeping TSR afloat, and threatening her with the sack - it's easy to understand how she could come to the conclusion that it was not just a matter of Gary or her, but Gary or the company. Of course, she is somewhat flattered by the podcast choosing to stop where it did. Her later decisions paint her competence in a much less flattering light. Not so much her ruthlessness in shoving 2e out the door to get Gary's name off the covers of the core books and therefore cut out his royalties, but her decade plus presiding over the antagonistic 'They Sue Regularly' era, and her disastrous management of the Random House contract, and her wilful alienation of talent like Weis/Hickman and Salvatore who were absolutely minting cash for the company, and the way that under her stewardship, the company managed to spend years printing products that lost them money on every sale.
Another perspective I would have loved to hear is one about the actual game. Maybe from a fan who was relatively disconnected from all the inside drama at the time. The podcast hardly mentions any actual products. The red box and the original MM/PHB/DMG get a writeup because of their significance to the history of the company, and to Gary's royalty agreement, rather than because of their place in the history of the game. Endless Quest gets a mention in the context of the book business and the trajectory of Rose Estes's time at TSR. Later, there's some talk about the wild, runaway success of Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures providing a much-needed cash injection when things were looking very bleak. And the timing too is interesting. As Williams springs her coup, Dragonlance is in the process of turning D&D on its head - the Ambush at Sheridan Springs happens one month after Dragons of Spring Dawning is released and Tanis kills Ariakas in the Temple of Takhisis in Neraka. The DL modules aren't even finished yet, but the novels are going gangbusters, and Raistlin hasn't really gotten going yet. Even 8 year old me remembers seeing the DL modules in the toyshop while staring longingly at Lego sets I couldn't afford. It must have, to a player, seemed like something of a second renaissance for the game, mustn't it? But at the exact same time the company is falling apart behind the scenes. It's a bit ironic that the whole podcast is about people getting so distracted by the money that they forgot the game, but it too seems to forget the game.
And of course, creatively, TSR hadn't really gotten started. In 1985, as Gary packed up his desk, Dragonlance was only just getting going. The Forgotten Realms Grey Box only got the greenlight in 1986 because Williams's TSR wanted a campaign world that was more distant from Gygax. The first Drizzt novel was still years away, Ravenloft consisted of exactly one module (how did Weis and Hickman not get a mention in the podcast I want to know? Between Ravenloft and Dragonlance they were era-defining superstars at this time), and Planescape, Dark Sun, Spelljammer etc weren't even on the horizon. For someone like me who came along later, there's a certain blurriness to 'the times before' . For someone who grew up with the B/X and so on, there's probably Before Gygax and After Gygax. I'm a lot closer to 50 than 40 now, but even so, when i was first getting into the game, all this came under the single heading of 'old'. My personal image of 'classic D&D' was firmly rooted in the Williams era - by the time i came along, Gygax was a known name, but one of dubious significance. Sort of the Isaac Newton of gaming - he had some awesome ideas back in the day, and everyone had heard of him, but he's not the one whose stuff is what matters here and now.
But like i said, this was a podcast more about the people than the game, and it's got to be judged as such. And in the end, how I mostly felt was ... sad. So many lives blighted, so many friendships sundered and relationships destroyed, so much potential wasted, so much folly and ego and foolishness. Tragedies are gonna tragedy I guess.
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