# Lorraine Williams did... what?



## GnomeWorks (Mar 15, 2009)

I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...



> Lorraine created the company TSR...




Which made me say, "Um... what?"


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## Shroomy (Mar 15, 2009)

GnomeWorks said:


> I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...
> 
> 
> 
> Which made me say, "Um... what?"




Well, "destroying" a company sounds a lot worse when you're trying to license out a property nobody cares about anymore.


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## Henry (Mar 15, 2009)

GnomeWorks said:


> ...and noticed this interesting tidbit...


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## JustKim (Mar 15, 2009)

Oh wow, I never knew that! I will make room in my brain for this fact.


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## Alzrius (Mar 15, 2009)

All accounts agree that she was a lying, evil witch back in the days of TSR (which she certainly did not create); this just proves the leopards don't change their spots.


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## M.L. Martin (Mar 15, 2009)

Alzrius said:


> All accounts agree that she was a lying, evil witch back in the days of TSR (which she certainly did not create); this just proves the leopards don't change their spots.




  You know, I'm not entirely convinced that she was _quite_ as bad or as hostile to gaming as gaming culture makes her out to be. William W. Connors reported that she was very understanding when he was a new designer and his wife was hospitalized (see here) and the _Thirty Years of Adventure_ book includes an interview in which Troy Denning gives her credit for the idea of the "Dragon Cards" from the 1991 D&D Basic Set. 

  And there's no evidence she's directly responsible for that blurb. Probable, yes, but it could be her brother or an overzealous employee overstating matters.


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## I'm A Banana (Mar 15, 2009)

> You know, I'm not entirely convinced that she was quite as bad or as hostile to gaming as gaming culture makes her out to be. William W. Connors reported that she was very understanding when he was a new designer and his wife was hospitalized (see here) and the Thirty Years of Adventure book includes an interview in which Troy Denning gives her credit for the idea of the "Dragon Cards" from the 1991 D&D Basic Set.




Hey, no one is ALL bad.

But bad blood is easy to earn in the D&D community, and strangling the game isn't going to earn you many brownie points.


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## ProfessorCirno (Mar 15, 2009)

Accounts paint two very different pictures of her depending of who you were.  She was apparently very dismissive and perhaps "haughty" of and towards her customers, yes.  At the same time, she was also apparently very kind and caring towards her employees.  While certainly TSR did not, well, flourish" under her guidance, I can't help but wonder if perhaps tabletop gamers at times deserve the dismissiveness.


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## Mark (Mar 15, 2009)

When she was a baby, she ate my dingo.


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## doctorhook (Mar 15, 2009)

We should email the address listed on the page, politely asking them to voluntarily correct themselves.


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## Sammael (Mar 15, 2009)

Oh wow. I had no idea Flint Dille was Lorraine Williams' brother.


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## wingsandsword (Mar 15, 2009)

Sammael said:


> Oh wow. I had no idea Flint Dille was Lorraine Williams' brother.




Yeah, Ms. Williams being part of the Dille family is why TSR kept trying to push Buck Rogers games on the public back in The Bad Old Days: The family owned the license so it was a dirt-cheap way to make a licensed RPG.

Now, that there is minimal interest in the license (it's a number of decades past it's glory days), and the game itself wasn't exceptional kind of doomed the project though.


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## D'karr (Mar 15, 2009)

wingsandsword said:


> Yeah, Ms. Williams being part of the Dille family is why TSR kept trying to push Buck Rogers games on the public back in The Bad Old Days: The family owned the license so it was a dirt-cheap way to make a licensed RPG.
> 
> Now, that there is minimal interest in the license (it's a number of decades past it's glory days), and the game itself wasn't exceptional kind of doomed the project though.




I think a Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 century would make an excellent game.

Indubidubidubitably Sir!


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 15, 2009)

Actually, there IS renewed interest in the property, since the whole reason that site is up there is because there's a new comic coming out and Frank Miller is doing a Buck Rogers movie.  (Although good luck with that, after the Spirit has flopped I don't believe Miller's take on old properties should be followed, assuming Flint's looking at doing a "Sin City" type file).

However, you are correct about the property's current state.  Buck Rogers is sort of a relic from the past.  Since it came from the pulp-era and also was showing the future as imagined then, it comes off as dated.  Science Fiction from the past tends to not age well.  I think the 1970s series was the last successful attempt at this.  I think the Dille family is pushing it as "retro-future".

I am appalled by that puffing of Lorraine's resume.  TSR was incorporated years before she came on board, and I would be very careful saying that on a public web site, considering enough history has been written about the company so it's an obvious untruth.  

I believe Ryan Dancey said there was tons of the Buck Roger's XXV game in warehouses when he had to inventory the company.  I believe the trust got paid royalties from wholesale print copies.  Whatever else you can say about Ms. William's, I believe that strategy was self-interest and really hurt the company, and if TSR had been a larger company and under public scrutiny she would have been raked over the coals for that.


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## Kristian Serrano (Mar 15, 2009)

Savage Worlds players of the Slipstream RPG might certainly find the Buck Rogers stuff interesting now.


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## DreadPirateMurphy (Mar 15, 2009)

I don't think "lack of interest in the property" matters much.  The '79 TV series followed a decades-long hiatus on film for Buck Rogers, and it was relatively successful for a sci-fi series.  The trigger event was probably the unexpected success of Star Wars, which also led to Battlestar Galactica and a number of other lesser-known "tributes."

Buck Rogers is a known property, like Flash Gordon.  The right treatment could easily turn it into something very cool.  How does a 500-year-old man deal with culture shock and displacement?  What kind of different perspectives does he bring?  Where can he find a Nintendo Wii?


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## Silver Moon (Mar 15, 2009)

*Lorraine created the company TSR... *

Well sure, of course she did, right after she ~edited~


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## Emirikol (Mar 15, 2009)

GnomeWorks said:


> I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...
> Which made me say, "Um... what?"Lorraine is credited here as creating the company TSR





I bet the Gygax family trust would like to review that for "accuracy."

jh
(_mod edit: not appropriate_)


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## Dausuul (Mar 15, 2009)

Hmm. I too have heard conflicting accounts of Lorraine Williams' tenure; although it's pretty clear she was a lousy CEO, since the company went from highly profitable to massive indebtedness and near collapse on her watch.

The fact that this flat-out lie is being posted on a website presumably representing her does not incline me toward the sympathetic view.  Whoever currently owns the rights to the name "TSR" (probably WotC) might want to have a word with that site...


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## Xyxox (Mar 15, 2009)

All I can say is, I'll never have anything to do with anything connected to Buck Rogers.

Buck Rogers is a big part of why TSR went belly up.


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## Dausuul (Mar 16, 2009)

Xyxox said:


> All I can say is, I'll never have anything to do with anything connected to Buck Rogers.
> 
> Buck Rogers is a big part of why TSR went belly up.




I wouldn't go so far as to say a big part. It was certainly a waste of money, but from all I hear, TSR's main problems stemmed from failure to listen to their customers, combined with fragmenting their own fanbase.


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## ProfessorPain (Mar 16, 2009)

I have always been a little skeptical of the narrative of Lorraine Williams in the gaming community. It shouldn't be forgotten that early on, the company did well under her leadership, and that many of the factors (the sudden popularity of collectible card games like Magic-- I lost half my group to Magic) that drove TSR into the ground were possibly beyond her control.


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## M.L. Martin (Mar 16, 2009)

Dausuul said:


> I wouldn't go so far as to say a big part. It was certainly a waste of money, but from all I hear, TSR's main problems stemmed from failure to listen to their customers, combined with fragmenting their own fanbase.




   You know, I was recently struck by a problem with the "fragmenting their own fanbase" part of the narrative. If your problem is that there's so much D&D material on the market that fans aren't able to keep up with all of it and are thus becoming distant from each other . . . 

  . . . then what are you doing creating an Open Game License that is going to absolutely _flood_ the market?

   Now, there are two possible explanations.
   1) The problem wasn't too much product on the market as it was that TSR was generating products that had too small a fanbase and thus too little return for their investment; or 
   2) The persons behind the OGL assumed that Core D&D was so powerful that, if you didn't counter it with the might of 'official D&D' products that took away from it, everything would by nature adhere to the core D&D playstyle.

   I incline towards option 1 with the "fragmenting" bit being an attempt to sell D&D players on "See! All those settings you loved weren't just not worth our while, they were actively hurting the game! You _must_ accept the Great Purge and the narrowing of the vision! One System! One Setting! One Campaign!"


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## ProfessorPain (Mar 16, 2009)

Matthew L. Martin said:


> You know, I was recently struck by a problem with the "fragmenting their own fanbase" part of the narrative. If your problem is that there's so much D&D material on the market that fans aren't able to keep up with all of it and are thus becoming distant from each other . . .
> 
> . . . then what are you doing creating an Open Game License that is going to absolutely _flood_ the market?
> 
> ...




The problem with the fragmentation narrative is the different settings like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun were all wildly succesful. There was no fragmentation going on. It wasn't until the later half of the 90s, when TSR tried to beat out the card companies that they really ran into trouble. Prior to that, TSR was pretty healthy. Especially their fiction division-- which was driven by the campaign setting material. And releasing multiple campaign settings didn't hurt wizards; nor (as you point out) were they harmed by 3pp putting out a bunch of settings (like Midnight).


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## M.L. Martin (Mar 16, 2009)

ProfessorPain said:


> The problem with the fragmentation narrative is the different settings like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun were all wildly succesful. There was no fragmentation going on. It wasn't until the later half of the 90s, when TSR tried to beat out the card companies that they really ran into trouble. Prior to that, TSR was pretty healthy. Especially their fiction division-- which was driven by the campaign setting material. And releasing multiple campaign settings didn't hurt wizards; nor (as you point out) were they harmed by 3pp putting out a bunch of settings (like Midnight).




   Well, _some_ of the campaign settings hurt them--not so much as campaign settings as the fact that TSR was getting bad price quotes, so a lot of items (such as the Birthright box and the Encyclopedia Magica) were overproduced/underpriced and thus losing money regardless of sales. Something similar may have happened in fiction, with massive numbers of hardcovers being produced for lines or authors that probably couldn't support them. And of course, the infamous "Print a Million!" order for DRAGON DICE and the returns from the book trade suggest that there was a lot of stuff that sank TSR that had nothing to do with game design or producing too many settings. 

   (And the bit about TSR not doing market research is either erroneous or uses a misleadingly narrow definition of "market research." They did regular surveys in DRAGON and included feedback cards in products, although those did seem to fall off near the end of TSR's run, IIRC. Then again, I also seem to recall those postcards being postage-paid, which makes eliminating them an obvious cost-cutting measure, especially once they had their AOL area up and had several employees present on Usenet.)


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## Silver Moon (Mar 16, 2009)

Sorry, failed attempt at an analogy earlier.


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## Xyxox (Mar 16, 2009)

Dausuul said:


> I wouldn't go so far as to say a big part. It was certainly a waste of money, but from all I hear, TSR's main problems stemmed from failure to listen to their customers, combined with fragmenting their own fanbase.




Warehouses full of unsold Dragon Dice and Buck Rogers products didn't help the cash position.


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## Odhanan (Mar 16, 2009)

GnomeWorks said:


> I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...
> 
> Which made me say, "Um... what?"




"Created the TSR company"? Right. Riiiiight... 
In her dreams, maybe.


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## Henry (Mar 16, 2009)

ProfessorPain said:


> The problem with the fragmentation narrative is the different settings like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft and Dark Sun were all wildly succesful.




Were any hard figures ever released for "wildly successful?" From what I understood of Ryan Dancey's info, they would have been "wildly successful" for any company that was smaller than TSR's size and expenditures. That might have been 5,000 copies per year of any one line -- and if the line was very expensive (which those boxed sets really were, especially after paper costs skyrocketed in the mid-90's) then whatever they sold might not have covered production run costs. 

That's why if I understand it WotC only supported FR and Eberron, and licensed everything else -- they didn't want to break their market into 10 different sub-genres that only a fraction of their fans would want to buy.

Back to Lorraine Williams: I've heard good stories about her as a boss, but very little good as a manager, or understanding where her sales were really going to or coming from. And Gary's recounting in her or the Blume's roles in his ouster from the company did not paint her in a good light -- this is where most of the animosity I think stemmed from by people who don't even know her.


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## M.L. Martin (Mar 16, 2009)

Henry said:


> Were any hard figures ever released for "wildly successful?" From what I understood of Ryan Dancey's info, they would have been "wildly successful" for any company that was smaller than TSR's size and expenditures. That might have been 5,000 copies per year of any one line -- and if the line was very expensive (which those boxed sets really were, especially after paper costs skyrocketed in the mid-90's) then whatever they sold might not have covered production run costs.
> 
> That's why if I understand it WotC only supported FR and Eberron, and licensed everything else -- they didn't want to break their market into 10 different sub-genres that only a fraction of their fans would want to buy.




   This, I could understand, but I was always under the impression that 'fragmenting the fanbase' was something presented as bad for D&D as a game, not just as bad for TSR/WotC, which is why the OGL, which ran the risk (at least) of creating this same problem over again, seemed to conflict.

  But it's possible I'm putting the worst possible construction on it--I don't particularly trust Ryan Dancey, I don't care for what I perceive as his vision of the D&D game (which sometimes strikes me as an unholy hybrid of the RPGA and the Borg Collective  ), and therefore I may be judging it in the most negative light.


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## Dausuul (Mar 16, 2009)

Matthew L. Martin said:


> This, I could understand, but I was always under the impression that 'fragmenting the fanbase' was something presented as bad for D&D as a game, not just as bad for TSR/WotC, which is why the OGL, which ran the risk (at least) of creating this same problem over again, seemed to conflict.
> 
> But it's possible I'm putting the worst possible construction on it--I don't particularly trust Ryan Dancey, I don't care for what I perceive as his vision of the D&D game (which sometimes strikes me as an unholy hybrid of the RPGA and the Borg Collective  ), and therefore I may be judging it in the most negative light.




I don't recall hearing anyone say fragmenting the fanbase was bad for the game, except indirectly in the sense that TSR going out of business would be bad for the game; all the criticism I've heard has been directed at the business side of it. It's the worst of both worlds, business-wise. You get the overhead of a big company, but not the economies of scale.

And while I'm sure many of the products had respectable sales, gross sales figures are not all there is to success. (Besides, while Dark Sun may have been successful, what about settings like Maztica?)


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## JLowder (Mar 16, 2009)

GnomeWorks said:


> I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...




Actually, the first line on the page is a bit of history bending, too. John F. Dille did not create Buck Rogers. The character originated in a short story by Philip Nowlan, in _Amazing Stories_, and Dille, a newspaper syndicate owner, arranged for the character to become a comic strip. Now, the comic strip was certainly the basis for Buck's popularity, so Dille deserves a prominent place in the history. But while it's fair to say Dille "popularized" Buck, but he did not "create" him.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## Scribble (Mar 16, 2009)

Matthew L. Martin said:


> You know, I was recently struck by a problem with the "fragmenting their own fanbase" part of the narrative. If your problem is that there's so much D&D material on the market that fans aren't able to keep up with all of it and are thus becoming distant from each other . . .
> 
> . . . then what are you doing creating an Open Game License that is going to absolutely _flood_ the market?
> 
> ...




I think what they ran into with the "fragmenting their fanbase" thing wasn't so much that there were different settings, it was that each setting had it's own version of everything.

So you'd have the Forgotten Realms Monstrous Compendium inserts... But then you needed to also do a Dragon Lance Compendium insert (with all new artwork, and new monsters) Same for Dark Sun, and Ravenloft, and one for Spell Jammer can't forget them. Wait lets do one for Planescape too. 

The we do a Deities and Demigods of X world... Oh wait everyone who plays in Y world also needs that, so lets redo it again with new artwork, new layouts, and such...

You have one big fan base (D&D players) but you now need to do like 6 times the work to make products for them.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 16, 2009)

A very good thread with info and history of Lorraine, with input from a number of people who were there (including EGG) cab be found here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/archiv...e-williams-includes-opinions-gygax-et-al.html


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## ProfessorCirno (Mar 16, 2009)

The rash of posts here that've been edited and reading through that thread only cements my position: Quite frankly, gamers deserve to be dismissed at times.  Look at how we react to this, how we rip each other apart in edition wars, or the darkly humerous (VERY darkly) response to the charity fiasco at Gencon, where hundreds and hundreds of gamers sent angry and threatening emails to Gygax's charity of coice because of a stupid misunderstanding.

We aren't saints.  We aren't wonderful golden rainbow people who never argue and never fight with one another.

People are allowed to look down on us just as much as we're allowed to look down on others.  We deserve it.  I'm not saying we're less then human.  I'm saying that _we're human_, and people woh tweak our nose are going to exist.

Lorraine was a bad manager, yes, there's no doubt about that, but was she a bad _person_?  Those two are not connected.  Yet from how people react to the woman they've never met, who never really touched their lives, they make it sound like she abused their goldfish.  You could make arguments she's a bad person.  You could make arguments she's a good person.  There's nothing to back up _either_ save from second hand information.  For every story of this maniacal witch-hag that mistreated her employees and hated the world, there's a story of her employees being treated just fine with animal charities and bring your pet to work days.  Yet so many people choose to side with the worst of the two.


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## Ranger REG (Mar 16, 2009)

Emirikol said:


> I bet the Gygax family trust would like to review that for "accuracy."



So would Dave Arneson, one of the *CO-CREATORS* of _Dungeons & Dragons_ --with E. Gary Gygax -- in case someone would deliberately dismiss/neglect him.


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## Plane Sailing (Mar 16, 2009)

Henry said:


> Were any hard figures ever released for "wildly successful?" From what I understood of Ryan Dancey's info, they would have been "wildly successful" for any company that was smaller than TSR's size and expenditures. That might have been 5,000 copies per year of any one line -- and if the line was very expensive (which those boxed sets really were, especially after paper costs skyrocketed in the mid-90's) then whatever they sold might not have covered production run costs.




Further information from Ryan Dancey relevant to this issue can be found here
Ryan Dancey on the Acquisition of TSR

including things like



> I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products. I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s. I was 10 pages in to a thick green bar report of inventory, calculating the true value of the material in that warehouse when I realized that my last 100 entries had all been "$0"'s.




It makes a very interesting read, and it is genuine first-hand reporting.

Cheers


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 16, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> So would Dave Arneson, one of the *CO-CREATORS* of _Dungeons & Dragons_ --with E. Gary Gygax -- in case someone would deliberately dismiss/neglect him.




That Buck Rogers web site didn't mention D&D, but TSR.  It was Gygax and Kaye who were the original founders.  Dave joined temporarily as did Brian Blume.  When the partnership disbanded the new company was Gygax and Blume.


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 16, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> The rash of posts here that've been edited and reading through that thread only cements my position: Quite frankly, gamers deserve to be dismissed at times.  Look at how we react to this, how we rip each other apart in edition wars, or the darkly humerous (VERY darkly) response to the charity fiasco at Gencon, where hundreds and hundreds of gamers sent angry and threatening emails to Gygax's charity of coice because of a stupid misunderstanding.




Unfortunately, by other points, she went quite beyond just "dismissing gamers".  The best quotes from the other thread were by Jose Feritas, a person who had interacted directly with Lorraine...



> These are my opinions based on stuff I heard from a lot of the insiders, they may not be entirely true and as usual one's perception of reality is skewed by the people we know, those we call friends and so on. To me, Ms. Williams was always unfailingly nice and polite, even though the 2000 or 3000$ royalties per year my company was sending her were probably close to insignificant. But she did despise gamers in general and made no secret of this. I remember her throwing a fit at GenCon (92 or 93, can't remember) because some girls were in a bikini chain mail suit, and she was on a roll and badmouthed and cursed gamers (loudly!) for at least ten minutes....
> 
> She once joked (in front of me) that the gaming industry was actually much worse than the entertainment licensing industry, because in licensing you could always credibly "pretend" that you knew what the fans wanted without ever speaking to one of them, whereas in the gaming industry you actually had to go and actually speak with "the disgusting little idiots". (almost sure these were the actual words)...




It's one thing for a company manager to get upset at so-called "nerd rage", as I know many creative people who lament that, but from all accounts, this woman went beyond that and loathed gamers.  It would be like somebody who hated animation and Disney running Disney.  I don't think you can be a very good company manager and have that attitude.


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## Lord Zardoz (Mar 16, 2009)

I think this is the most informative part of the quote from Jose Freitas from the older thread.



			
				JoseFreitas said:
			
		

> But I am quite convinced that Ms. Williams really ran the company to the best of her abilities, which were very good, but this meant that she ran it to benefit herself to the exclusion of anyone else, employees included. There are some very fine lines re. ethical issues, but one might very well question the continued release and overprinting of a game that was really selling close to zero, while paying yourself royalties advances based on 60% of the printruns. And since I was a partner of a company that distributes RPGs and MtG and WotC products in general in Spain, Portugal and Brasil, and I was there when WotC bought TSR, and talked to pretty much everyone, including Peter Adkinson, I was told there were TONS of unsold Buck Rogers in the 25th Century RPG in the warehouses.... And at the same time that Ms. Williams got paid a really good salary, employees were underpaid, given bad equipment to work on things, etc.... Just read Ryan Dancey's accounts of what he found when he went and audited TSR for WotC before they bought it.




Link to full post:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/archiv...ludes-opinions-gygax-et-al-6.html#post3971894


And just a few posts beneath that:



			
				Col_Pladoh said:
			
		

> To the best of my knowledge and belief Lorraine Williams has no redeeming qualities.
> 
> Here are a few choice examples of her conduct:
> 
> ...




http://www.enworld.org/forum/archiv...ludes-opinions-gygax-et-al-6.html#post3971900

While I am sure that Williams did do a few things that were kind to people, based on that thread it seems to me that she has absolutely no ethics when it comes to running a business.

END COMMUNICATION


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## amethal (Mar 16, 2009)

Xyxox said:


> All I can say is, I'll never have anything to do with anything connected to Buck Rogers.
> 
> Buck Rogers is a big part of why TSR went belly up.



Buck Rogers was part of the reason TSR didn't get the Star Wars license.

Personally, I really liked what West End Games did with Star Wars, and so I'm glad TSR lost out on that one. As a result, I have a soft spot for Buck Rogers.


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## Tewligan (Mar 16, 2009)

Ha, an interesting "mistake"! I just sent an email to the site (flintdille@earthlink.net) pointing out the error. I would suggest others do the same, keeping the courtesy level high and the nerdrage level low in your message. Despite a bit of Googling, I was unable to find exactly what year Ms. Williams joined TSR, beyond joining sometime after Gary went to Hollywood in '82. So, yeah - somehow she started TSR at least 7 years after it was incorporated in 1975.


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## Xyxox (Mar 16, 2009)

amethal said:


> Buck Rogers was part of the reason TSR didn't get the Star Wars license.
> 
> Personally, I really liked what West End Games did with Star Wars, and so I'm glad TSR lost out on that one. As a result, I have a soft spot for Buck Rogers.




Buck Rogers was the vehicle through which Lorraine Williams exported tons of cash from TSR Inc. into her family's personal trust fund, nearly destroying Dungeons and Dragons forever.

I never much cared for MAgic the Gathering as a game, but I love it because it put Peter Adkison into a postion to save the game from ruin. For that reason, I'll always despise Buck Rogers.

Besides, the Flash gordon serials were way better than Buck Rogers any way.


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## jaerdaph (Mar 16, 2009)

I read it teh interwebs so it must be true. 

Like Rev's coma.


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## ProfessorCirno (Mar 16, 2009)

Lord Zardoz said:


> I think this is the most informative part of the quote from Jose Freitas from the older thread.
> 
> Link to full post:
> 
> ...




I'm agreeing that she's a bad manager.  I'm disagreeing that she's a bad person.  She might be a bad person.  She might be a good person.  I don't know.  And neither do you.

For every story of "I hated her that evil witch hag" (of which there was one, from Gygax), there are employees saying they either didn't mind her or that she treated them all very nice.  You've got an interview with Monte Cook flat out stating he liked working with TSR more then with Wizards.

I'm not doubting that she hated the chainmail bikini wearing people at the con, but quite frankly, I tend to have a dislike for them as well.  So uh, yeah, I guess?


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## ProfessorPain (Mar 16, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> I'm agreeing that she's a bad manager. I'm disagreeing that she's a bad person. She might be a bad person. She might be a good person. I don't know. And neither do you.
> 
> For every story of "I hated her that evil witch hag" (of which there was one, from Gygax), there are employees saying they either didn't mind her or that she treated them all very nice. You've got an interview with Monte Cook flat out stating he liked working with TSR more then with Wizards.
> 
> I'm not doubting that she hated the chainmail bikini wearing people at the con, but quite frankly, I tend to have a dislike for them as well. So uh, yeah, I guess?






I got to agree. I don't think you can form a complete picture of a person based on a few accounts from former employees. And something about most of the stories labeling her a witch, don't pass the sniff test.


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 16, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> I'm agreeing that she's a bad manager.  I'm disagreeing that she's a bad person.  She might be a bad person.  She might be a good person.  I don't know.  And neither do you.




Regardless of either Monte or Gary's opinion, you've got her lying on a web site about creating TSR, and using her position as top dog at TSR to funnel money into her own pockets via the Buck Rogers licenses, something that doesn't look good. Lack of ethics doesn't usually make a person that good.  Would you be rushing to criticize the general public for saying that of mangers of AIG who got bonuses?  I doubt it.  

As far as the "chain mail bikini" stuff goes--well, you seem to be judgmental of gaming culture in general.  Like I said, that is not a good attitude to have if you are running a company that supports them.


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## Xyxox (Mar 16, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> I'm agreeing that she's a bad manager.  I'm disagreeing that she's a bad person.  She might be a bad person.  She might be a good person.  I don't know.  And neither do you.




There is one undeniable fact. Her family trust fund benefitted financially from what was at the very least an extremely poor decision, printing vast quantities of Buck Rogers game materials that were never sold.


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## ProfessorPain (Mar 16, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> Regardless of either Monte or Gary's opinion, you've got her lying on a web site about creating TSR, and using her position as top dog at TSR to funnel money into her own pockets via the Buck Rogers licenses, something that doesn't look good. Lack of ethics doesn't usually make a person that good. Would you be rushing to criticize the general public for saying that of mangers of AIG who got bonuses? I doubt it.
> 
> As far as the "chain mail bikini" stuff goes--well, you seem to be judgmental of gaming culture in general. Like I said, that is not a good attitude to have if you are running a company that supports them.




Just because the website contains a false statement, that doesn't mean she deliberately lied about it. This could be a simple error, on the part of the person who wrote the text for the website; someone who may not know much about Lorrain or TSR and didn't get his or her facts straight. If it comes out that she deliberately engineered a lie about her creating TSR so she could look more accomplished, then she deserves to be criticized; but errors like these happen all the time, and they are not always intentional.

As for the Buck Rogers thing; it might be the case. But all we have is a narrative based on a couple of accounts. And something about it sets my antennae off.


----------



## Erik Mona (Mar 16, 2009)

JLowder said:


> Actually, the first line on the page is a bit of history bending, too. John F. Dille did not create Buck Rogers. The character originated in a short story by Philip Nowlan, in _Amazing Stories_, and Dille, a newspaper syndicate owner, arranged for the character to become a comic strip. Now, the comic strip was certainly the basis for Buck's popularity, so Dille deserves a prominent place in the history. But while it's fair to say Dille "popularized" Buck, but he did not "create" him.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jim Lowder




To complicate matters further, the character was not called "Buck" Rogers until the comic strip. I'm not sure that the brand would have the staying power it does if it had been called "Anthony Rogers," which was the character's name in the original Amazing Stories tales.

--Erik


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## Dire Bare (Mar 16, 2009)

Erik Mona said:


> To complicate matters further, the character was not called "Buck" Rogers until the comic strip. I'm not sure that the brand would have the staying power it does if it had been called "Anthony Rogers," which was the character's name in the original Amazing Stories tales.
> 
> --Erik




I am enjoying the Buck history posts from Erik and Jim, but I could care less about all the Williams bashing going on.  Like others, I feel she was a bad CEO for TSR, but I don't believe she wears black dresses with high collars and black pointy hats.  And even if she was, it's all water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned.

Hating the Buck Rodgers property because of someone's possibly shady dealings with one aspect of it is the epitome of silly, IMO.  There may have been warehouses full of Buck unsold Buck products, but there were also warehouses full of unsold DragonDice and D&D products as well.

I personally loved the Buck Rodgers RPG and novels TSR originally put out, but didn't care for the "reboot" they did later with a board game (and maybe other stuff).

I love the property, and I'm crossing my fingers that Dille and Williams succeed in bringing Buck back!

Of course, I would like the history of the Dille Family Trust part of the website to be corrected.  That'd be nice.


----------



## Rolflyn (Mar 16, 2009)

jaerdaph said:


> I read it teh interwebs so it must be true.
> 
> Like Rev's coma.




Too soon!


----------



## Xyxox (Mar 17, 2009)

Dire Bare said:


> IHating the Buck Rodgers property because of someone's possibly shady dealings with one aspect of it is the epitome of silly, IMO.  There may have been warehouses full of Buck unsold Buck products, but there were also warehouses full of unsold DragonDice and D&D products as well.




The unsold DragonDice and D&D products didn't directly contribute to the financial well being of a single family's trust fund.

The unsold Buck Rogers products did, taking cash directly from TSR and putting it into this single family's pockets.

Informed consumers are better consumers. I will not contribute to the financial well being of such a family ever again.


----------



## MrFilthyIke (Mar 17, 2009)

Dire Bare said:


> I personally loved the Buck Rodgers RPG and novels TSR originally put out, but didn't care for the "reboot" they did later with a board game (and maybe other stuff).




Amen.

I loved the RPG and computer games based on it.  I'm the only person I know
who has ebay-ed or bargained hunted for BR RPG goodies.


----------



## ProfessorCirno (Mar 17, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> As far as the "chain mail bikini" stuff goes--well, you seem to be judgmental of gaming culture in general.  Like I said, that is not a good attitude to have if you are running a company that supports them.




Oh please.  I'm judgemental of everything.  That's what it means to be human.  I'm extra judgemental of "gaming culture" because I'm a freaking part of it - why wouldn't I be looking in the mirror to see what I don't like?  I'm not even going to go into detail on chainmail bikinis as, last time that cropped up, the thread devolved into shallow and petty sexism with taunts and insults doled out to those that didn't touch themselves to thoughts of blowup women.  Suffice to say, it is, in the very least, rather stupid to think that someone disliking chainmail bikinis somehow *hates gaming*.


----------



## Orius (Mar 17, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> I'm not doubting that she hated the chainmail bikini wearing people at the con, but quite frankly, I tend to have a dislike for them as well.  So uh, yeah, I guess?




This is one thing I can't really blame her for.  I mean chainmail bikinis aren't exactly known for being...ahem...empowering (to be honest I've never understood the appeal either, I prefer staff chicks to warrior babes myself ).  So yeah, career woman in the early 90's blowing her stack over it, yeah believable.


----------



## JohnRTroy (Mar 17, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> Oh please.  I'm judgemental of everything.  That's what it means to be human.  I'm extra judgemental of "gaming culture" because I'm a freaking part of it - why wouldn't I be looking in the mirror to see what I don't like?  I'm not even going to go into detail on chainmail bikinis as, last time that cropped up, the thread devolved into shallow and petty sexism with taunts and insults doled out to those that didn't touch themselves to thoughts of blowup women.  Suffice to say, it is, in the very least, rather stupid to think that someone disliking chainmail bikinis somehow *hates gaming*.




If you defend being judgemental, why are you attacking the others who are judging Lorraine Williams?  You're the one who started the argument saying our community "deserves to be dismissed".  And with the CB thing, you are overlooking the fact that she ranted about gamers in general for 10 minutes, not just the fashion people, and has called gamers "disgusting little idiots".

And to be fair, only one person in this thread called her a "witch", and from what I saw the "bashing" came mostly from criticism of the claim of creating TSR.  Nobody was attacking her on a personal level from what I've seen.  Most people here were critical of the web site's fib.  And in the other thread, I think Jose's take came from honest opinions of dealing with her as a businesswoman.



> Just because the website contains a false statement, that doesn't mean she deliberately lied about it. This could be a simple error, on the part of the person who wrote the text for the website; someone who may not know much about Lorrain or TSR and didn't get his or her facts straight.




I doubt it.  Usually web sites are commissioned, but the client writes the copy.  Since mistakes to the site are being written to Flint Dille's e-mail address, I'm sure he's at least aware of the error, and likely wrote the copy himself.  (Flint tends to be the Linus to Lorraine's Lucy, from what I've heard.  Nice guy, but I believe Lorraine makes most of the decisions for the family's business).

As far as the Buck Rogers thing goes, I doubt Ryan or Jose were lying about the excessive inventory.  Put it this way, if this happened at a company I had stock in, I'd say there was at minimum a conflict of interest in that relationship.


----------



## BryonD (Mar 17, 2009)

Rolflyn said:


> Too soon!




So this family walks into a talent agency....


----------



## amethal (Mar 17, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> Put it this way, if this happened at a company I had stock in, I'd say there was at minimum a conflict of interest in that relationship.



There's clearly a conflict of interest.

In the UK, at least, directors of private companies are usually allowed to take part in decisions where they have a conflict of interest, so long as they disclose that interest to the rest of the board.

Presumably the other directors agreed with the decision at the time.


----------



## TerraDave (Mar 17, 2009)

The linked thread is really a good one, and was shut down after getting into all this Buck Rogers $ business (but I don't blame myself for that thread being shut down...). In any case, suffice to say that Buck was not good for TSR, and neither was Lorraine Williams. 

Now, as far as fragmentation goes...back in the 2E heyday, they were releasing 4, 5, 6 D&D, products a month, _every_ month, and not just (or hardly) little 64 page adventures. There is no way you don't start canibalizing your own sales at some point, and start to see product quality fall. 

This was also a time when TSR faced a lot of competition, and lots of other mid-sized game companies where also churning out lots of product, using all sorts of disparate mechanics. The Dancy response: pull back what WoTC released (though in hindsight they still released a lot in 3Es early days), use the OGL to bring more unity in mechanics across the market as a whole, and let 3rd parties release all that supporting material and canabilize each other. It seemed to work, at least for a while.


----------



## Xyxox (Mar 17, 2009)

TerraDave said:


> Now, as far as fragmentation goes...back in the 2E heyday, they were releasing 4, 5, 6 D&D, products a month, _every_ month, and not just (or hardly) little 64 page adventures. There is no way you don't start canibalizing your own sales at some point, and start to see product quality fall.
> 
> This was also a time when TSR faced a lot of competition, and lots of other mid-sized game companies where also churning out lots of product, using all sorts of disparate mechanics. The Dancy response: pull back what WoTC released (though in hindsight they still released a lot in 3Es early days), use the OGL to bring more unity in mechanics across the market as a whole, and let 3rd parties release all that supporting material and canabilize each other. It seemed to work, at least for a while.




Yep, in a high competition market TSR needed to drive down the total number of products released and concentrated on core competencies instead of coming out with the campaign setting of the month. My gosh, how many settings did we end up with?

Add on top of that numerous new games and you're setting yourself up for disaster.


----------



## Echohawk (Mar 17, 2009)

Xyxox said:


> My gosh, how many settings did we end up with?



Off the top of my head, the settings which had their own line of support products were:
Greyhawk
Dragonlance
Forgotten Realms
Mystara
Planescape
Dark Sun
Ravenloft
Spelljammer
Al-Qadim
Birthright
Lankhmar
Oriental Adventures/Kara-Tur

There were also a number of minor settings (Jakandor, Dragon Mountain, etc.) with only a few products, and several subsettings of the main settings (Red Steel, Horde, Maztica, etc.)

Or, put another way: "at least twelve".


----------



## ProfessorPain (Mar 17, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> I doubt it. Usually web sites are commissioned, but the client writes the copy. Since mistakes to the site are being written to Flint Dille's e-mail address, I'm sure he's at least aware of the error, and likely wrote the copy himself. (Flint tends to be the Linus to Lorraine's Lucy, from what I've heard. Nice guy, but I believe Lorraine makes most of the decisions for the family's business).
> .




Sure, but just because her name is attached to the site, that doesn't mean she is actively involved. The person who comissioned it, may not have even been a member of the family. For all we know, they are living in semi-retirement and hired someone else to manage the website. I am not saying it isn't suspicious or the information shouldn't be corrected. And I am not saying it is minor. Just that there are other explanations that don't include her being a bad person. At the end of day, her name is attached to this thing, and it is her responsibility to have it corrected. But this isn't 1982, you can't get away with beefing up your credentials by lying. People find out and it comes back to bite you. Everyone knows if you say you created something that you didn't people will find out. So I suspect this was someone they hired, not understanding the history of TSR and Lorraine's role; and Lorraine either taking a hands-off approach to the web site, or not bothering to read the copy.


----------



## kitsune9 (Mar 17, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> Accounts paint two very different pictures of her depending of who you were.  She was apparently very dismissive and perhaps "haughty" of and towards her customers, yes.  At the same time, she was also apparently very kind and caring towards her employees.  While certainly TSR did not, well, flourish" under her guidance, I can't help but wonder if perhaps tabletop gamers at times deserve the dismissiveness.




I agree. Ms Williams may be an overall a good person (I don't know her, so I have nothing to say yay or nay about her). However, the politics of TSR and its eventually downfall has put a bad taste in many gamers for myriads of reasons that all of us know.


----------



## Ranger REG (Mar 18, 2009)

Xyxox said:


> Buck Rogers was the vehicle through which Lorraine Williams exported tons of cash from TSR Inc. into her family's personal trust fund, nearly destroying Dungeons and Dragons forever.
> 
> I never much cared for MAgic the Gathering as a game, but I love it because it put Peter Adkison into a postion to save the game from ruin. For that reason, I'll always despise Buck Rogers.
> 
> Besides, the Flash gordon serials were way better than Buck Rogers any way.



Despite the Maiden of Pain's strong [familial] link to _Buck Rogers,_ I don't despise the IP. I just despise the way it was handled, or rather despise the person currently controlling it. It's the same sentiment I have of Christopher Tolkiens of Tolkien Estate, who controls all of the other JRR Tolkien's works. I mean, the only time we will ever see the _Silmarilion_ adapted to motion picture is when he and his supporters are dead. Not that I want it to come true too soon, it's just wishful thinking.

Sometimes I wonder if the current IP law is beneficial. Sure, Lorraine Williams is just a handful of bad inheritors/trustees of IP being passed on from their parent creators. But not all IP trustees are that bad.


----------



## JohnRTroy (Mar 18, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> It's the same sentiment I have of Christopher Tolkiens of Tolkien Estate, who controls all of the other JRR Tolkien's works. I mean, the only time we will ever see the _Silmarilion_ adapted to motion picture is when he and his supporters are dead. Not that I want it to come true too soon, it's just wishful thinking.




In this particular case, I'd rather have the creator's wishes followed than what the fans might want.  JRRT didn't really want any of his stuff adapted to movies.  And the movie industry has a way of (a) disrespecting the creators and (b) screwing them out of deserved royalties.


----------



## kitsune9 (Mar 18, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> The rash of posts here that've been edited and reading through that thread only cements my position: Quite frankly, gamers deserve to be dismissed at times.  Look at how we react to this, how we rip each other apart in edition wars, or the darkly humerous (VERY darkly) response to the charity fiasco at Gencon, where hundreds and hundreds of gamers sent angry and threatening emails to Gygax's charity of coice because of a stupid misunderstanding.
> 
> We aren't saints.  We aren't wonderful golden rainbow people who never argue and never fight with one another.
> 
> ...




Good post Professor. Society is well-within its rights to look down upon us when we publicly display our fan-boy dork rage either against one another or against less-eccentric people.


----------



## ProfessorCirno (Mar 18, 2009)

kitsune9 said:


> Good post Professor. Society is well-within its rights to look down upon us when we publicly display our fan-boy dork rage either against one another or against less-eccentric people.




Hey, my view is that everyone is well-within their rights to look down on _anyone_ when they go into dork mode ;p.  I have just as much - if not more - irritation towards sports fans, my, ah, _slight_ fan boy-ism for hockey aside 

Fan is the shortened form of fanatic, as the saying goes.


----------



## Wolfspider (Mar 18, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> In this particular case, I'd rather have the creator's wishes followed than what the fans might want.  JRRT didn't really want any of his stuff adapted to movies.




Which is why he sold the film rights for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, no doubt.


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 18, 2009)

Wolfspider said:


> Which is why he sold the film rights for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, no doubt.




No, if you read scholar's and Christopher's own writings, he sold the rights to pay a tax debt, a rather stupid mistake, based on his own wishes and the fact that the family now has limited control over that stuff.

And despite complaints about that, Christopher was named by Tolkien as the sole executor of his rights, so he's left the decision up to his son, who from what I've seen and read respects his father's wishes.

I mean, I'm critical of Lorraine, but I don't think they should lose the rights to Buck Rogers.  Flint's a good guy, and even if the RPG stunk, I believe he tries to work as much as he can on the creation.


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## Ranger REG (Mar 19, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> In this particular case, I'd rather have the creator's wishes followed than what the fans might want.  JRRT didn't really want any of his stuff adapted to movies.  And the movie industry has a way of (a) disrespecting the creators and (b) screwing them out of deserved royalties.



Perhaps, but was he cocky and greedy to have sold the _Hobbit_ and _LOTR_ film rights to Saul Zentz (of Tolkien Enterprise), believing it was "unfilmable" or did he thought it was ... until he have seen the Rankin-Bass animated version?

EDIT: a tax debt? How'd he got into a tax debt when he's reaping profit from all of Tolkien's works, including _Hobbit_ and _LOTR?_


----------



## M.L. Martin (Mar 19, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> Perhaps, but was he cocky and greedy to have sold the _Hobbit_ and _LOTR_ film rights to Saul Zentz (of Tolkien Enterprise), believing it was "unfilmable" or did he thought it was ... until he have seen the Rankin-Bass animated version?
> 
> EDIT: a tax debt? How'd he got into a tax debt when he's reaping profit from all of Tolkien's works, including _Hobbit_ and _LOTR?_




   The rights were sold in 1968/69, so it would have been by JRRT--and while the references in the sources I briefly consulted (Carpenter's biography, Schull & Hammon's _Reader's Guide_) were sketchy, I came away with the impression that it was his publishers, Allen & Unwin, who really pushed the deal. And the rights were sold to United Artists and only later wound up with Zaentz. Tolkien was willing to consider film adaptations, but vetoed several proposals beforehand. (Some of his reasons were unique to those; others are still applicable to the Rankin-Bass and Jackson films.)


----------



## Orius (Mar 19, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> It's the same sentiment I have of Christopher Tolkiens of Tolkien Estate, who controls all of the other JRR Tolkien's works. I mean, the only time we will ever see the _Silmarilion_ adapted to motion picture is when he and his supporters are dead. Not that I want it to come true too soon, it's just wishful thinking.






JohnRTroy said:


> In this particular case, I'd rather have the creator's wishes followed than what the fans might want.  JRRT didn't really want any of his stuff adapted to movies.  And the movie industry has a way of (a) disrespecting the creators and (b) screwing them out of deserved royalties.




I have to agree with Troy here.  Tolkien himself was leery of film adaptations, and I believe he in no way wanted to see Disney do an adaptation of his books.  As for Christopher Tolkien, he has some sentimental feeling for his father's works, and that's why he can be so unbending.

I don't see it as similar to the Dille family trying to milk a fairly dated space opera IP.  Sci-fi doesn't always age well, and Buck Rogers probably hasn't.


----------



## JLowder (Mar 19, 2009)

Erik Mona said:


> To complicate matters further, the character was not called "Buck" Rogers until the comic strip. I'm not sure that the brand would have the staying power it does if it had been called "Anthony Rogers," which was the character's name in the original Amazing Stories tales.




Absolutely. And moving the character from prose to a comic strip, where the art (no matter how crude compared to some of the competing strips) could sell the SF concepts, was vitally important to the success, too. Dille deserves credit for those things. But to say he "created" the character is, at best, a stretch.

Cheers,
Jim


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## AllisterH (Mar 19, 2009)

You know, here's a question....

Why was Buck Rogers unsuccessful?

I mean, the Futurama guys proved that the concept would work in satire and even after Trek and Wars, I thought it was a given that Buck (& Flash) were the main influences on the general population with regard to science fiction.

Yet apparently the RPG was never as successful as even Traveller or Shadowrun much less the Star Wars RPG.

As an aside, it does look like Hollywood and TVland is interested in resurrecting the Buck Rogers franchise. I mean, if Battlestar Galactica can be reimagined into such a great show, who says Buck Rogers cant be?


----------



## wingsandsword (Mar 20, 2009)

AllisterH said:


> You know, here's a question....
> 
> Why was Buck Rogers unsuccessful?
> 
> I mean, the Futurama guys proved that the concept would work in satire and even after Trek and Wars, I thought it was a given that Buck (& Flash) were the main influences on the general population with regard to science fiction.



On an academic level, you could say that the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon stories laid much of the foundation for modern science fiction, building on works of earlier novelists like Jules Verne and Mary Shelley. . .

However, to the general public, Star Trek and Star Wars is Science Fiction.  

Other than a pretty die-hard sci-fi geek, who knows anything about Flash Gordon other than what little they remember from that cheesy old 80's movie?  Does anybody around remember anything about Buck Rogers other than the 70's TV series and Daffy Duck parodying the older serials (the parody is better remembered to many modern audiences).

The names "Flash Gordon" and "Buck Rogers" are about all that is remembered, and that they were some kind of sci-fi spaceman heroes, but that's about it.  

Take Star Trek, Star Wars, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers.  From a perspective of making a licensed RPG look at the fanbase to draw from:

Star Trek: 40+ years, of which the majority of which has had movies or TV series in production, all in one continuity (more or less), and it still plays on TV nightly in one form or another across the world.  Warp drive, transporters, Starfleet, Klingons are all concepts known in fandom and beyond.

Star Wars: 30+ years of being the most famous Space Opera of them all.  Six main movies (and several minor movies like Clone Wars and the Ewok movies), TV series (Clone Wars), novels, comic books, action figures, and a billion-dollar merchandising machine.  Jedi, Sith, Lightsabers, Star Destroyers, Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, everybody knows who they are.

Flash Gordon: Aside from one movie ~25 years ago it's mostly forgotten serial films from a half century ago or more.  Besides the character of Flash Gordon, does the general public know anything about this?

Buck Rogers: The serials of a half-century ago or more are pretty much forgotten, now I'd say the series from the late 70's is remembered more (South Park was able to do a 2-part episode a few years back as a huge parody of it with Cartman frozen for 500 years, right down to the opening theme music and a shot-by-shot redo of the opening).  However, unlike Star Trek or Star Wars it doesn't have those memorable images, characters and concepts that have really stuck into the collective consciousness.


----------



## Orius (Mar 20, 2009)

wingsandsword said:


> However, unlike Star Trek or Star Wars it doesn't have those memorable images, characters and concepts that have really stuck into the collective consciousness.




I'd say that's it and add that Lucas did Star Wars with a certain style that let it become popular.  Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon for whatever reason just weren't able to maintain popularity for some reason.  Also, from what I know of it, some of the elements of the villains of Flash Gordon have elements to them which might very well seem racist to a modern audience and that certainly doesn't help that franchise.


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## Ranger REG (Mar 20, 2009)

AllisterH said:


> You know, here's a question....
> 
> Why was Buck Rogers unsuccessful?
> 
> ...



As a proud owner of _XXVc RPG_, I think it could have been successful. I just didn't like the way it was marketed.

BTW, besides the TSR version, were there any previous _Buck Rogers_ licensed RPG?


----------



## Ranger REG (Mar 20, 2009)

Orius said:


> I'd say that's it and add that Lucas did Star Wars with a certain style that let it become popular.



It is? He borrowed heavily on serial films, of which both _Flash Gordon_ and _Buck Rogers_ were first adapted to motion picture, alongside western serials like _Cisco Kid._


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 20, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> As a proud owner of _XXVc RPG_, I think it could have been successful. I just didn't like the way it was marketed.




One weird thing about it is that the XXVc game was copyright TSR, so it's mechanics, and perhaps some elements of the setting itself, are still owned by WoTC.  The game had the Buck Rogers license, and royalties were using it, but IIRC they always made sure to keep the copyright and trademarks separate.  I'm not sure if TSR owns the so-called "fluff" created for the game, like Black Barney and elements of that particular future.

I have a feeling Buck Rogers might have not been as featured in the game and novels for two reasons.

1)  Learning from the past, having BR in the game can make the other players seem like sidekicks.  It was one of the larger flaws in the Indiana Jones RPG they had released, and the company had also learned the lessons from DragonLance that people want to play their own characters in the shared world, not the "big guys".  I think they were trying to feature the  
setting in the RPG more than the character.

2)  There was an emphasis on it being a "shared world", which I guess means that other creators wanted to put their own stamp on the series, which means "feature the world".  

There's some sketchy information here:

Buck-Rogers.com - Buck Rogers XXVc TSR Games, Books, Etc.

(Not the official site, a fan site really going into detail).


----------



## JohnRTroy (Mar 20, 2009)

Orius said:


> Also, from what I know of it, some of the elements of the villains of Flash Gordon have elements to them which might very well seem racist to a modern audience and that certainly doesn't help that franchise.




Actually, Flash was created as competition to Buck Rogers, much like Captain "Shazam" Marvel was to Superman.  Buck was fighting "Mongols", the warlords who were lead by Killer Kane and Ardala.


----------



## Ranger REG (Mar 20, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> I have a feeling Buck Rogers might have not been as featured in the game and novels for two reasons.
> 
> 1)  Learning from the past, having BR in the game can make the other players seem like sidekicks.  It was one of the larger flaws in the Indiana Jones RPG they had released, and the company had also learned the lessons from DragonLance that people want to play their own characters in the shared world, not the "big guys".  I think they were trying to feature the
> setting in the RPG more than the character.



I don't know if I agree with that. Is it because the whole franchise is centered around the one titular character, of an Earth guy from the 20th Century living in the future? As opposed to franchises that feature a crew, party, or groups, like _Star Trek_ and _Star Wars,_ that provide a social game?

Does that also applies to other title-character franchises like _James Bond 007_ and _Rambo_?




JohnRTroy said:


> 2)  There was an emphasis on it being a "shared world", which I guess means that other creators wanted to put their own stamp on the series, which means "feature the world".



Meh. Didn't WEG feature their own (Lucasfilm-approved) setting within the _Star Wars Universe_?


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## Krensky (Mar 20, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> Meh. Didn't WEG feature their own (Lucasfilm-approved) setting within the _Star Wars Universe_?




WEG more or less invented the expanded universe. Look almost any book from Zahn to WEG lost thew license. There's almost certainly a thank you to WEG in the beginning of it.


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## wingsandsword (Mar 20, 2009)

Krensky said:


> WEG more or less invented the expanded universe. Look almost any book from Zahn to WEG lost thew license. There's almost certainly a thank you to WEG in the beginning of it.




He wrote a very nice preface to the Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook that WEG produced recounting the whole story of how WEG essentially created the heart of the Expanded Universe.

Essentially, Zahn was given the contract for what would become the Thrawn Trilogy, the novel series that kicked off the publishing and merchandising juggernaut that is the Star Wars Expanded Universe.  He was asked by Lucasfilm to coordinate for continuity purposes with the work that WEG had already done, as the only entity to have written officially at any length about the larger Star Wars universe beyond just what happened in the movies and even at that relatively early phase Lucasfilm was fairly concerned about canon/continuity.

Zahn said he was very resentful at the idea at first that he would be hemmed in by what others had written when he thought he would have a nearly blank slate to flesh out what happened beyond the movies.  However, once a big box of WEG sourcebooks arrived and he read through them he discovered he loved them and thought that it was a pretty good foundation to work with and gave them a huge endorsement.  

As he wrote his books WEG started using what he wrote as grist for their own mill and made more material based on his books, and they together really got the ball rolling for what we now know as the Expanded Universe.

As you read his novels, lots and lots of little references here and there were things WEG first came up with, and Zahn himself made his big contributions to the EU (he coined the term Coruscant, replacing Lucas's earlier suggestions of Jhantor and Had Abbadon for the capitol world of the Empire and Republic that preceeded it)


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## JohnRTroy (Mar 21, 2009)

Y'know, maybe James Lowder, who's reading this thread, can provide insight into the strategies regarding Buck Rogers--since I saw him listed as one of the editors on that unofficial Buck Rogers site.


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## JLowder (Mar 21, 2009)

JohnRTroy said:


> Y'know, maybe James Lowder, who's reading this thread, can provide insight into the strategies regarding Buck Rogers--since I saw him listed as one of the editors on that unofficial Buck Rogers site.




I was just starting in TSR's book division when the Buck fiction got underway. One of my early assignments was proofing parts of _Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century_, a very nice hardcover retrospective the company release in late 1988.

As I recall the process, upper management informed the various departments how many Buck products would be on the schedule in a given year and the managers reacted accordingly, trying to put together the best games and books to fill the spots. Approvals for all Buck products went through Flint Dille, who was out on the West Coast, though Lorraine Williams also reviewed everything. Flint generated ideas and suggested directions for the Buck product lines; he was much more active in this than the typical license owner. The licensing approval process--TSR was technically licensing Buck from the Dille Family Trust--was definitely "hands on," meaning a lot of changes were required (from Flint and Lorraine) as the products went through development.

As much as possible, top designers and artists were assigned the work. Everyone understood that Buck was important to management. Certainly some of the products were great. Jeff Grubb's Buck Rogers board game was a lot of fun. (I ran many demos of that game in my first few conventions as a TSR employee.) Some of the RPG material was top notch, too. And the company put a lot of effort into advertising the lines.

I wasn't working on the Buck fiction line formally, but everyone in the department got pulled into a Buck book at one stage or another. The initial idea was to showcase authors with solid SF reputations outside of shared worlds: Robert Sheckley, Jerry Oltion, Martin Caidin. However, TSR was still operating under really short deadlines for fiction at the time. (Most of the books before 1988 had been written by people within, or close to, the company; without everyday use of e-mail and computer files, that proximity shaved at least several weeks off a book's production time.) Couple really short deadlines with a very rigorous licensing review process, where a lot of changes are going to be requested by the IP owner, and problems are all but inevitable.

I can't speak to how this situation impacted the game products, but the short deadlines and intensive IP review process/owner involvement had a profound impact on the fiction. There are seven stories in the first Buck anthology, _Arrival_. Two are written by Flint Dille, three are written by the named authors (with a lot of revision, in at least one case), and two--the ones by "Abigail Irvine" and "Ulrike O'Reilly"--were penned as very hasty group efforts by various people inside, or directly connected to, the book division, to replace stories from "name" authors who quit or were fired during the review process. If a third of your content is generated that way, you have a problem.

The Buck Rogers IP could be successful this time around. Enough time has passed that any new material will not be operating entirely in the shadow of the TV show; I've always felt the TV show's image hampered the TSR releases, since they took the property in a different direction. (_Battlestar Galactica_ has certainly shown that an IP with similar baggage can be revitalized, under the right direction.) The Internet has made more people aware of the older Buck material, too. We'll just have to see how things shape up with the new material.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## Talath (Mar 21, 2009)

GnomeWorks said:


> I'm not exactly sure how relevant or pertinent this is, but I was here and noticed this interesting tidbit...
> 
> Quote:
> Lorraine created the company TSR...
> ...




If by "Lorraine created the company TSR..." one means:

"Lorraine created the horrible pile of bankrupt broken dreams and crushed fantasies situation known as TSR..."

than one would be correct in saying she did create TSR


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## JLowder (Mar 21, 2009)

By the by, if you look around the official Buck Rogers site, the place that started the whole discussion, you'll also find the claim: "Buck Rogers is known as the birthplace rockets, robots, and ray-guns!" (see: http://www.gohero.com/buck_rogers/buck_rogers_influence.htm)

That statement needs a bit of rewording. The Buck strip and serials were incredibly influential, but not the "birthplace."

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## rgard (Mar 21, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> Perhaps, but was he cocky and greedy to have sold the _Hobbit_ and _LOTR_ film rights to Saul Zentz (of Tolkien Enterprise), believing it was "unfilmable" or did he thought it was ... until he have seen the Rankin-Bass animated version?
> 
> EDIT: a tax debt? How'd he got into a tax debt when he's reaping profit from all of Tolkien's works, including _Hobbit_ and _LOTR?_




Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister at the time.  The Labour Party controlled parliament.  Taxes then were worse than punitive.


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## smug (Mar 22, 2009)

I always wondered how close to the truth Gygax's account of the things that happened was; he had a relative monopoly on telling the story over the net, I'd say, and it always seemed to be that Gygax was right, an ace designer and a good businessman and if he had a flaw it was just being too trusting. Which isn't to say that the accusations against Williams aren't substantially true, but I always felt that Gygax's explanations appeared a bit self-serving and were also sometimes rather ungenerous (such as saying that Dave Arneson couldn't design his way out of a paper bag).


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## AllisterH (Mar 23, 2009)

JLowder said:


> By the by, if you look around the official Buck Rogers site, the place that started the whole discussion, you'll also find the claim: "Buck Rogers is known as the birthplace rockets, robots, and ray-guns!" (see: http://www.gohero.com/buck_rogers/buck_rogers_influence.htm)
> 
> Cheers,
> Jim Lowder




Actually, this one I might give Buck Rogers some claim to....For example, the use of ZAP for the sound effect of the ray gun was created by Buck Rogers.

As well, among the older generation (a.k.a anyone pre Wars or Trek), science fiction WAS Buck rogers for the common populace.


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## Beginning of the End (Mar 23, 2009)

Matthew L. Martin said:


> You know, I was recently struck by a problem with the "fragmenting their own fanbase" part of the narrative. If your problem is that there's so much D&D material on the market that fans aren't able to keep up with all of it and are thus becoming distant from each other . . .
> 
> . . . then what are you doing creating an Open Game License that is going to absolutely _flood_ the market?




There was never any mystery here: Those products drove sales of the core D&D rulebooks. The only problem with them was that they were not particularly profitable for a company of TSR's size. Dancey's strategy with the OGL was _always_ to off-load the non-core products and turn WotC into a company that produced evergreen core rulebooks.

Dancey left the company and the strategy died with him. 

In some ways, this is unsurprising. You can't support a design team with an evergreen marketing approach. Hasbro doesn't keep a huge _Stratego_ design team on staff, after all. So it's in the design team's best interests to jump on the supplement bandwagon.

OTOH, the failures of execution in the painfully flawed _Psionics Handbook_ and _Epic Level Handbook_ (which were supposed to be the first evergreen core books) pretty much torpedoed any chance the strategy ever had.

I'm still pretty convinced that this, more than anything, prompted the rapid launch of 3.5: The new edition allowed them to reboot their splatbooks, which had previously been treated as throw-away products under Dancey's business plan, as the core sales vehicles for the company. Around this same time, you saw WotC beginning to publish adventure modules again (which Dancey's plan had specifically eschewed).

From that point forward, WotC's business plans were in direct conflict with the OGL. Their eventual decision to torpedo it with the release of 4th Edition was eminently predictable and perfectly consistent with the post-Dancey business plan.


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## CharlesRyan (Mar 23, 2009)

Beginning of the End said:


> Dancey's strategy with the OGL was _always_ to off-load the non-core products and turn WotC into a company that produced evergreen core rulebooks.
> 
> Dancey left the company and the strategy died with him.




Neither part of this is completely true.

In the first part, you conflate two separate strategies: Driving growth of the D&D player network (and core rolebook sales) through the OGL; and avoiding marketplace fragmentation through a strategy of limiting releases and not supporting a plethora of game worlds.

In the second part, you imply that the strategy was abandoned when Ryan left WotC in 2000/2001. While that might _seem_ true in the context of your assumptions, it's worth noting that the release schedule through 2002 was laid down under Ryan's tenure.

It is certainly true that strategic focus evolved after Ryan left (as it almost certainly would have had he remained--every successful business strategy evolves), but the core of the two strategies remained in place throughout the 3rd-edition period and, as far as I can see, remain in place to this day.




> I'm still pretty convinced that [the failure of early hardcovers], more than anything, prompted the rapid launch of 3.5: The new edition allowed them to reboot their splatbooks, which had previously been treated as throw-away products under Dancey's business plan, as the core sales vehicles for the company.




The reason given at the time was that 3E had a number of relatively small but significant flaws that were detrimental to game play; a lot of lessons had been learned and the only way to implement them cleanly was through a reissue of the core books. I wasn't in Brand at the time, so I can't swear that there weren't also business drivers behind the decision (in fact, I'm pretty confident there were). But I can say that we in R&D were very, very sincere in our belief that the 3.5 edition was necessary and was being done for all the right reasons for the game.



> Around this same time, you saw WotC beginning to publish adventure modules again (which Dancey's plan had specifically eschewed).




Again, a conflation of the facts. First, Ryan's plan did _not_ specifically eschew adventures; at least ten were published on the product schedule he developed. More generally, the strategy _did_ identify adventures as the sort of lower-volume, lower-margin products that were likely to be widely supported by the OGL, and hence less likely to be profitable for WotC.

Secondly, WotC's return to adventures did _not_ occur "around the same time" as 3.5, but about two years later (2005ish), under my watch. The reason had nothing to do with abandoning the precepts of Ryan's strategy, but simply to address a strategic need for a type of product that had all but disappeared from the marketplace. With the OGL failing to produce adventures and little competition in the category, adventures could generate enough profit to make them worthwhile. And, as I said, they were strategically important--all the rules in the world don't matter if there's nothing for people to play.


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## Storm Raven (Mar 23, 2009)

AllisterH said:


> Actually, this one I might give Buck Rogers some claim to....For example, the use of ZAP for the sound effect of the ray gun was created by Buck Rogers.
> 
> As well, among the older generation (a.k.a anyone pre Wars or Trek), science fiction WAS Buck rogers for the common populace.




Well, the origin of robots (the term) probably traces to Kapek's _RUR_, which predated the first published appearance of Buck Rogers by seven years. This doesn't even begin to consider creatures, such a Frankenstein's monster, who could be considered "robots" even if the term wasn't applied to them.

As for rockets, I think some guys with names like Goddard (designed a liquid fueled rocket in 1909, launched one in 1926) and Tsiolkovskii might have some opinions on whether Buck Rogers was their "birthplace".


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## Beginning of the End (Mar 23, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> I just despise the way it was handled, or rather despise the person currently controlling it. It's the same sentiment I have of Christopher Tolkiens of Tolkien Estate, who controls all of the other JRR Tolkien's works. I mean, the only time we will ever see the _Silmarilion_ adapted to motion picture is when he and his supporters are dead. Not that I want it to come true too soon, it's just wishful thinking.




J.R.R. Tolkien was very unhappy with the deal he made regarding the film rights for _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_. There's solid, meaningful written evidence that Christopher Tolkien is simply following his father's wishes in regards to the licensing of his work. Despising him for that seems radically inappropriate.

It's particularly ironic that you should feel that way, given the fact that Christopher's handling of his father's literary legacy has been so completely and utterly exemplary. He was being strongly influenced in the '70s to cash-in on the legacy and allow sharecroppers to root through Tolkien's work. He resisted those influences, and has instead gifted us with one of the most extraordinary presentations of an author's finished and unfinished work in the 20th century. He has made visible literary gems which would have otherwise been completely lost to history. Certainly some of this material is only of scholastic interest, but even that is a remarkable achievement.

Compare this to the treatment of Frank Herbert's legacy by his son, who continues to cash in on the Dune IP with cheap pastiche novels co-written with a tie-in hack. Or the absolutely horrid treatment given to Robert E. Howard by his literary heirs -- L. Sprague de Camp trashed both his personal and literary reputation; rewrote his works; and then kept Howard's own Conan stories out of print for the better part of two decades while continuing to push pastiche novels out the door.



> Sometimes I wonder if the current IP law is beneficial. Sure, Lorraine Williams is just a handful of bad inheritors/trustees of IP being passed on from their parent creators. But not all IP trustees are that bad.




I think the incredibly long term of copyright after the death of its creator often leads to situations in which heirs who the creator never even knew are allowed to wield tremendous influence over the creator's reputation and the legacy of their work.

I think a creator should be capable of leaving a legacy for his family. (If, for no other reason, than to account for tragic circumstances like those around the creation of RENT -- in which the creator dies just before the work is published.) But I think life + 20 years is a more than reasonable term.

Allowing work to flow into the public domain is an absolutely essential part of our cultural history and the process of cultural creation.


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## JLowder (Mar 23, 2009)

AllisterH said:


> Actually, this one I might give Buck Rogers some claim to....For example, the use of ZAP for the sound effect of the ray gun was created by Buck Rogers.
> 
> As well, among the older generation (a.k.a anyone pre Wars or Trek), science fiction WAS Buck rogers for the common populace.




Buck was very influential. It popularized lots of SF tropes and conventions. It was not the birthplace--as in the place where they originated--of rockets or robots or the like.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## Lord Ipplepop (Mar 24, 2009)

I actually wrote Flint Dille a respectful letter informing him of the inaccuracy and got the following letter back:


> Now I know what this is about. I received a bizarre email from some guy last week saying, 'your sister did not create TSR.' I was unaware of any such claim until this moment. It is a mistake. As an attender at GaryCon two weeks ago, and having in fact made the introduction between Lorraine and TSR at an endangered time in the company's history, I'm well aware of TSR's creation story nearly a decade earlier. Its my fault that it is misleading on the site. I had not checked it, and will ask Steve of Go-Hero to fix it.
> It was an honest mistake. Conversely, the record should be set straight about Lorraine on WikiPedia. She wasn't a gamer, but there is no concrete reason to believe that she looked down on gamers. In fact, she granted them more creative freedom than I've ever experienced in Hollywood or anywhere else for that matter. And, it should be noted that she gave the company 15 more years of intact life than it would have had (the WOTC TSR was a very different animal). They were at chapter 10.5 when she entered the scene.  And, anybody who has studied the history of TSR is well aware that Lorraine and I had our fair share of disagreements.
> The strange trivia fact is that Lorraine was the only person with an actual degree in Medieval History (Berkeley, '71 I think).



I also got this one from the webmaster of Go-Hero:


> Please accept my apologies as this WAS my mistake.  I have made the
> appropriate edit to the site.  I did not intentionally misrepresent the
> facts or to rewrite history.  This was a simple mistake of me mishearing an
> interesting factoid that I thought was noteworthy. No harm intended!



Anyhow.. the correction has been made, and the Gygax name is once again in its rightful place.


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## JLowder (Mar 24, 2009)

Lord Ipplepop said:


> I actually wrote Flint Dille a respectful letter informing him of the inaccuracy and got the following letter back: {snip} "In fact, she granted them more creative freedom than I've ever experienced in Hollywood or anywhere else for that matter."




Indeed. One of the things that can be said in Lorraine's favor was the amount of creative freedom the staff had on many, many projects. So long as products made the money they were supposed to make, the staff had a fairly free hand with content. There were individual products that saw too much micromanagement, and, as the 1990s wore on, a management structure that was much more rigid and creator-unfriendly started to take hold. But in the late 80s and early 90s, TSR was a creatively rewarding place to work.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## Ranger REG (Mar 24, 2009)

Beginning of the End said:


> Allowing work to flow into the public domain is an absolutely essential part of our cultural history and the process of cultural creation.



That depends. Trademarks don't have expiration date, so long as the current IP owner can vigilantly protect them.


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## billd91 (Mar 24, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> That depends. Trademarks don't have expiration date, so long as the current IP owner can vigilantly protect them.




True, but trademarks aren't literature either. They're more equivalent to mottos and logos for commerce, useful targets of satire for sure, but of considerably less use in development of culture than copyright-appropriate IP.


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## rogueattorney (Mar 24, 2009)

rgard said:


> Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister at the time.  The Labour Party controlled parliament.  Taxes then were worse than punitive.




Yeah, this was within a year or two of the Beatles "Taxman."  "One for you, nineteen for me," was not a figure of speech, and was the reason many of the British 60's rock stars went into "tax exile" at this time.


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## Ed_Laprade (Mar 24, 2009)

Nice of him to have it corrected. But it still says that his grandfather 'originated' Buck Rogers. Which is still BS.


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## Tinner (Mar 24, 2009)

I liked Buck Rogers best when it was called Farscape.


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## Ranger REG (Mar 25, 2009)

Tinner said:


> I liked Buck Rogers best when it was called Farscape.



*went to get the rotten tomato he saved for just this occasion.*


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## Dire Bare (Mar 25, 2009)

Tinner said:


> I liked Buck Rogers best when it was called Farscape.




Farscape was very much like a modern Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and was a large part of why that show was so freakin' awesome!

I love Buck, I love Flash, and I love John Crichton!!!  Great stuff!


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## Orius (Mar 26, 2009)

Ranger REG said:


> *went to get the rotten tomato he saved for just this occasion.*




Here, take this bushel I got. 



Dire Bare said:


> Farscape was very much like a modern Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and was a large part of why that show was so freakin' awesome!




I saw the show as like the old space operas, but it didn't make it appealing to me.  I never could understand why people thought that show was creative when it was just another space opera after all the weirdness got stripped away.


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## Storm Raven (Mar 26, 2009)

Orius said:


> I saw the show as like the old space operas, but it didn't make it appealing to me.  I never could understand why people thought that show was creative when it was just another space opera after all the weirdness got stripped away.




It was well-executed space opera, with weirdness added. That's what made it great.


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## JLowder (Mar 27, 2009)

Ed_Laprade said:


> Nice of him to have it corrected. But it still says that his grandfather 'originated' Buck Rogers. Which is still BS.




Well, "total BS" is kind of harsh. It's fair to say Dille originated Buck in the form for which the character became most famous. He does deserve a lot of credit, and you could argue that he "originated" the Buck Rogers the public knew and loved. I wouldn't word the description of his role the way it's typically worded, but it's more like shorthand than a fabrication.

And, sure, the claim about the strip being the "birthplace" of robots, etc, is wrong, but it's easily chalked up to over-enthusiastic marketing copy, particularly given how Flint and the site manager reacted to the gaff about Lorraine's role in TSR's creation.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## JLowder (Mar 27, 2009)

AllisterH said:


> among the older generation (a.k.a anyone pre Wars or Trek), science fiction WAS Buck rogers for the common populace.




Absolutely. Buck Rogers did a lot to popularize SF tropes and conventions. Saying "that Buck Rogers stuff" was a way of referencing SF in general for a whole generation of people unfamiliar with the genre. That was a dismissive phrase, but it speaks to the influence of the IP when it comes to represent the whole genre for the public.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder


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## Ed_Laprade (Mar 28, 2009)

JLowder said:


> Well, "total BS" is kind of harsh. It's fair to say Dille originated Buck in the form for which the character became most famous. He does deserve a lot of credit, and you could argue that he "originated" the Buck Rogers the public knew and loved. I wouldn't word the description of his role the way it's typically worded, but it's more like shorthand than a fabrication.
> 
> And, sure, the claim about the strip being the "birthplace" of robots, etc, is wrong, but it's easily chalked up to over-enthusiastic marketing copy, particularly given how Flint and the site manager reacted to the gaff about Lorraine's role in TSR's creation.
> 
> ...



I only said it was BS, not "total" BS.    And yeah, if you read it the right way its not an out-and-out lie. But I still roll my eyes at it. (Not that I think its worth getting all upset over.) As for the phrase "That Buck Rogers stuff," I heard it when I was growing up and it was always dismissive. Mostly the general public was always at least a decade behind what was being written in the magazines at any given time (and often more than one). The gap may have closed some in recent years, but I doubt it.


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## AllisterH (Mar 29, 2009)

Dille, IMO, had as much influences on the Buck Rogers franchise as Roy Thomas and Marvel had on Red Sonja.

I still personally believe that making a Buck Rogers RPG is inherently a SOUND financial business decision (not how much was produced though if the claims of massive overprinting was true).

How many RPG companies back in the mid 80s would've killed to have a well known IP basically free of charge?


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## (un)reason (Mar 29, 2009)

AllisterH said:


> I still personally believe that making a Buck Rogers RPG is inherently a SOUND financial business decision (not how much was produced though if the claims of massive overprinting was true).
> 
> How many RPG companies back in the mid 80s would've killed to have a well known IP basically free of charge?



 That's one of the complaints. They didn't get it for any kind of reduced price, and the money that the Dilles got for licencing was taken based on the number of units printed rather than sold. It meant she got to take large amounts of money from TSR and into their personal trust regardless of the sales. Which is pretty morally equivalent to the modern issue of bankers being paid multimillion pound bonuses regardless of the performance of the company.


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## Ranger REG (Mar 31, 2009)

(un)reason said:


> That's one of the complaints. They didn't get it for any kind of reduced price, and the money that the Dilles got for licencing was taken based on the number of units printed rather than sold. It meant she got to take large amounts of money from TSR and into their personal trust regardless of the sales. Which is pretty morally equivalent to the modern issue of bankers being paid multimillion pound bonuses regardless of the performance of the company.



IOW, there is always a trade-off, sometimes unfair.

Nothing is free.


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## Jib (Apr 15, 2009)

All the credit for the success of TSR Under Lorraine should go to the staff.  She was evil and had no interest or passion in games.  Yes I am serious!


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## ProfessorCirno (Apr 15, 2009)

Jib said:


> All the credit for the success of TSR Under Lorraine should go to the staff.  She was evil and had no interest or passion in games.  Yes I am serious!




...If you say so, random necromancer?


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## rounser (Apr 15, 2009)

> (such as saying that Dave Arneson couldn't design his way out of a paper bag).



I've read (or at least attempted to read) First Fantasy Campaign.  It's like a bunch of whimsical DM's notes, complete with squiggles of dragons attacking castles, and information presented in an ad hoc kind of manner.  

It's not clear if Arneson and Judges Guild just wanted to publish his notes warts and all, wild and woolly with little editing and little attempt at "solid design".  It might have said so in the preface, can't remember.  But for the unprepared the book comes across as rather incoherent, and silly and in-jokey in a way that rarely sees publication (not that that's necessarily a bad thing).  Although Gygax may have a conflict of interest, as you point out, he also may just have been being honest.

That said, I like Blackmoor, and dig Arneson's imagination and ideas (and choices of sources to plunder for derivative purposes) to a large degree.  As a writer, though, if FFC was typical of him, his style was quite chaotic, and his rules design containing a lot of non sequiturs.

It makes me a bit sad to go back to change that last paragraph in past tense, just then.  Thanks, Mr Arneson, for a lot of fun times, and I mean no disrespect.


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## Jib (Apr 16, 2009)

ProfessorCirno said:


> ...If you say so, random necromancer?




Nope, she could not speak to the dead...

I'd say she was LE.

She did often treat the staff like they were a bunch of no-talent hacks...

I believe a certain designer at TSR came up with a collectable card game long before Magic hit the bricks and Lorraine shot the idea down.  Later when Magic was going hog wild she came to the design team and said "So where is OUR collectable card game?"

Lots of great games were born from the creative minds at TSR in the late 80's and 90's.  Lorraine hated the industry and never understood it.  She would have been better off staying out of the mix and leaving the games to the gamers.


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## JustKim (Apr 16, 2009)

Jib said:


> I believe a certain designer at TSR came up with a collectable card game long before Magic hit the bricks and Lorraine shot the idea down.  Later when Magic was going hog wild she came to the design team and said "So where is OUR collectable card game?"



Based on the Spellfire card game that TSR offered in competition to Magic, I think it's safe to say they were completely surprised and not prepared to deal with the card game fad. Spellfire was an extremely crude game that became largely unplayable within the first few expansions as the nature of the basic numbers game really restricted the kind of cards that could be released to just bigger and bigger numbers.

If TSR really had a CCG on the burner, I think their offering would have been a little more impressive. They did release another one, Blood War, which was quite different. But it was just as inelegant as most of the bandwagon CCG fare of the day, if not quite as bad as Spellfire.

So no, I don't believe TSR was working on a CCG, and I don't believe Lorraine was the only one at TSR without a finger on the pulse of the industry. The entire company had stopped paying attention to its customers and the direction of gaming, and ceased to be relevant. That took a united front of ignorance.


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## rounser (Apr 16, 2009)

> So no, I don't believe TSR was working on a CCG



I don't see anywhere in that post where it was suggested they were.  All that was said was that a staff member proposed it and it was dismissed.


> I don't believe Lorraine was the only one at TSR without a finger on the pulse of the industry. The entire company had stopped paying attention to its customers and the direction of gaming, and ceased to be relevant. That took a united front of ignorance.



How do you know?


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## ProfessorCirno (Apr 16, 2009)

Jib said:


> Nope, she could not speak to the dead...
> 
> I'd say she was LE.
> 
> ...




Yeah, I was refering to you.  You're a random schmuck who seems to think we should all immidiately believe everything you say despite being a random schmuck, and you revived this thread when it was more then a week old.


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## JustKim (Apr 16, 2009)

rounser said:


> I don't see anywhere in that post where it was suggested they were.  All that was said was that a staff member proposed it and it was dismissed.



I'm saying that I think it's wrong that the designers had an idea for one, and that is what was implied.



rounser said:


> How do you know?



Based largely on things Ryan Dancey and others have said about the products being moved through TSR in its last days. I can't name the specific products because what I didn't care for personally isn't necessarily what was not selling (I recall a mention of the Completes and Red Steel during the Fear the Boot interview, which I actually liked), but Ryan reported being very underwhelmed by their proposals for 3rd Edition and seeing the signs of a company that was not listening to its customers. This was coming from the design end, which by all accounts of Lorraine, she was not a game designer.


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## Plane Sailing (Apr 16, 2009)

I think this thread has had its day.

Clunk.


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