On Thu, 31 Mar 2022 12:12:29 -0700 (PDT), "
dawn.murin@wizards.com" <
dawn.murin@wizards.com> wrote:
On Friday, December 3, 1999 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-8, Alan Kellogg wrote:
Right, TSR was a company in good financial health when Williams sold it to >> Wizards of the Coast for a bargain basement price, just so a true gamer
would be running it.
TSR was not in good financial health. The company was in terrible dept. As a matter of fact, the printer was holding files hostage as collateral until they got
paid for yet unsettled accounts.
She was also reputedly awful about paying and retaining staff, and had
little appreciation for the product she was selling; her primary
method seemed to be to flood the market with goods, regardless of
quality. Reports are she gave no time for playtesting the material,
and a lot of stuff got shoved out the door long before it should have
been released.
That said, her reign also coincided with some of TSRs most productive
years, and many beloved product-lines - Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Forgotten
Realms - either got their start or flourished while she was in charge
(others, such as Spelljammer and Birthright were also born). The
quality of all these books were very mixed and many of them seemed
nothing more than cash grabs (the endless string of 2nd Ed player
handbooks) or an attempt to cash-in on some recent trend (the Dragon
Dice game) but the sheer volume of content meant that there was also a
lot of good stuff in there too. For a gamer during that time period,
it wasn't the best method - you often paid good money for poorly
designed material - but now, with the benefit of hindsight and reviews
that let us filter out the chaff, it can be seen as a golden age.
Which, again, isn't to defend Lorraine Williams tenure; I might not
like everything Wizards of the Coast has done with the brand, but
they've proven far better custodians than Williams. She lacked the
charisma, acumen and talent to guide a company like TSR, and under her leadership the company floundered badly. But its understandable why
many people of the time felt she was the lesser of the two evils,
especially since Wizards of the Coast was largely known at the time
for its "gotta buy 'em all" Magic the Gathering card game.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)