A brief history of the legendary dumpster fire called TSR | RPG book recap
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Published 2024-01-10
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All Comments (21)
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ERRATA: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman were not married to each other. TSR was incorporated in 1975. Support the channel by joining my Patreon! www.patreon.com/thaumavore Sign up for my newsletter! bit.ly/ThaumavoreNewsletter
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Every time I hear about TSR,I just think "Poor Arneson. They did him dirty." Now I'm like "Wow! They did everyone dirty!" Now WotC is trying their damnedest to recreate this bs. I guess it's cyclical.
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This is just tragic. It's literally a miracle that DnD is even as big as it is today.
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Yeah, it sounds like TSR didn't support their star employees and failed to pivot when a strategy was failing.
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Interesting how history repeats itself with the recent Hasbro/WOTC Christmas firings.
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Lorraine Williams was a disaster for D&D and now Cynthia Williams does all her best to live up to that name.
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And the fact that Williams' family owned Buck Rogers and was paid a royalty UP FRONT for each unit printed (NOT sold, PRINTED) had nothing to do with the overprinting through RH...nope, nothing to see there, citizne...
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On bit that wasn't covered is that Lorraine also got a license fee for the Buck Rogers' products. With her CEO salary, she was double dipping and adding to TSR's debt. In that way, she was ahead of her time in trying to find ways to squeeze as much out of a company before selling it off as a debt-ridden wreck.
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Gary was clearly Chaotic Neutral when it came to business. Lorraine was Chaotic Evil.
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TSR had a LOTR rpg on the table and they ignored that?! Oh my god that is... so dumb.
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The moral of the story: you can only treat your employees, creatives, customers, vendors, publisher and sales channel like shit for decades before selling out to a like-minded company. 😕
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Planescape would never have seen the light of day if TSR was competent. And we would never have gotten the amazing high quality boxed sets of Planescape Dark Sun and Birthright. The financial blunder was a creative golden age for D&D.
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Nice to see WotC continue the tradition of oversaturating the market with mediocre products. They keep the spirit alive!
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Now they should write a book about the acquisition onward. Including the more recent drama regarding WotC
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I knew there was a problem when I got ALL the Dark Sun stuff at a salvage store for maybe ten bucks. I thought it was a great game. In the mid-90's, you could look at all these settings for sale and think "who the hell is playing all of this?!". Maybe the most painful thing for me was watching Ravenloft go from an amazingly detailed set of products, with great art, to one hardback book with about half the effort put into it.
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You left a detail out of the Buck Rogers discount. The acquisition was just about done, so Atkinson was considering what to do with TSR's product lines and one of the first things was to kill the Buck Rogers lines because they didn't sell. And then what you said happened.
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Williams may have overseen the company that made all of those classic d&d settings and products that we know and love today, but that doesn't mean she gets credit for it. The writers, artists, editors, game testers, marketers, and hell, even the janitors of their office buildings are the ones responsible for creating the brand through their own hard work and imagination--all of these being people Williams and other heads of TSR mistreated and cheated at every turn so make an extra dime for themselves.
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What's truly amazing is over 50 million co-adventures world wide still venture (shoulder to shoulder) into the dark dangerous dungeons of the collective imagination opened by Gary and Dave! RIP you 2 geniuses. Two legged hyenas viciously battling over piles of money will never erase that gift.
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The Buck Rogers deal was questionable. Basically Williams family(The Dills) owned the property so TSR licensed it from them. Every product they made, they also had to pay the Dills to publish. So Williams drove TSR into the ground but still profited from the royalty payments. It also came out that TSR prioritized paying royalty payments out first before paying suppliers or employees. Which seems rather telling.
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It's hard to hear of so many bad decisions, so much wasted potential in just one video. Also, I got the feeling Hasbro is trying to recreate the TSR success story.
