What's the Chris Benoit of tabletop?

Probably this.

Uwe Boll did Dungeon Siege, not D&D

This. Kirby is also up there, but the bitch deserves first place.

Reminds me, how is that weird as fuck kickstarter going for him?

>Kirby is also up there
Jack Kirby?

Tom Kirby (of Games Workshop)

Was the the one who is behind the price jacking starting?

3aboo pls.

>implying anyone likes 3e either

I like 3e
Doesn't mean it's not shit, but still.

Gonna go with this user

^This. Nothing else comes close.

Alternatively that guy working on 4e that murder/suicides his family and destroyed the chances of quality software for 5e.

kirby isn't anywhere near her level

people forget he's been in charge of both good and bad for that company

It still boggles my mind that WotC only had one single person working on everything with zero access to any of his work. It's so stupid that honestly I think they're using the tragedy to cover their asses.

The guy being satirized in

Chronicles.
It nearly killed the granddaddy of western TCGs and with it the randomized booster business model that has supported quite a few card and miniatures games.

I'd never even heard of her but yeah, sounds like a jackass.

Lorraine Williams is the former CEO of TSR, and is accused of being the reason TSR isn't around anymore.

Now whether that's entirely true or not is open for interpretation.

I agree. Chris Benoit is hot

And they wonder why 50% of the CEOs aren't women.
Everytime they get a company they fuck it up.

her or the Blumes

Or the Blume brothers, who gave 79 relatives jobs at TSR and a fleet of company cars, they virtually destroyed the company and when they went into administration, they bought out by Lorraine Williams.

Blume knocked out the supports and Willaims burned what was left.

Details? I had not heard of this, I didn't follow 4e until after it was dead.

There's really not much TO say. There were a lot of app tie ins promised with 4e, everything from constantly updated character builders to 3D virtual table tops where you can customize PC models, almost too good to be true. Obviously, none of it ever happened, we got a character builder that doesn't have all of 4e's material and that's all we got.

Turns out the reason the ball got dropped is because ONE SINGLE PERSON was working on everything, and he went and killed himself (I don't remember there being a murder involved, just the suicide), and apparently NO ONE at WotC had any backups of anything, any access to his work, or apparently even worked with the guy and thus would know how to pick the ball back up. (Which leads me to believe that WotC are using the tragedy to cover their own asses for dropping the ball, but I digress.) So, 4e lost one of its major marketing points and had to scramble to completely change directions, and became one of the reasons 4e's early success started rapidly falling away.

Well, fuck.

4e would have benefitted massively from digital tie ins given how keywordy and machine-readable it was meant to be.

His wife was the designer, he was the programmer, he killed her then himself.

That was the plan

>mfw I played dragon dice

In the sense OP uses, Lorraine Williams is the Chris Benoit of Veeky Forums. In a much more accurate and real sense, though, it's this guy.

>Alternatively that guy working on 4e that murder/suicides his family
This is the most correct answer to who is the VACANT of tabletop.

It was the plan from the outset. Once everyone cried foul on WotC's failure to deliver on any of the electronic content it was only then the story of what happened came out.

What happened was a horrible tragedy, but WotC has no excuse for being so unbelievably incompetent that they left the one thing they were effectively banking the success of the game on to a single person and have no access to any of it themselves.

Sounds like WotC

FATAL

Can't believe no one thought of that though

Veeky Forums

It may very well be that if the guy was in a tumultuous relationship, and obviously not mentally healthy, there might not have been a lot of actual work there.
It seems likely that he was stringing his employers along and unable to concentrate on work.

100% conjecture though.

just checked it today. It's 1k over so it will exist

Are there actually people who don't think he's a hack, or is everyone literally just backing to look at the slow-motion trainwreck that's about to occur?

There are people who legitimately don't think he's a hack.

There are also people who think Uwe Boll movies are good and Tim Buckley isn't a pedophile asshole, so I wouldn't think too much of it.

SHHH! It'll hear you!

To be the Chris Benoit of RPGs, that person must first have been a very talented, hard-working and successful person first.

Hmm, I can't think of one. Maybe Monte Cook, if you think his later work was completely atrocious. Maybe some of the WoD/ Exalted team that started well but made some huge blunders later on in the line?

what'd she all do to bring it down?

Forced them to keep printing the Buck Rogers game, despite it selling like shit, because she was getting royalties off it.

Forbade the 'playing of games on company time' (i.e. playtesting), resulting in the massively variable quality of 2e splat material.

Sank GDW by suing them over Gary Gygax's new game (either Dangerous Journeys or Lejendary Adventure).

I'm sure there's more.

Did somebody say Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand?

Sent people C&Ds for talking about D&D on the internet.

Maze & Monsters

*Mazes

The first character builder was great though. You could program house rules for your own feats, you could change points values, you could design your powercards to a certain extent, you could modify your character sheet, you could add your own content and when it still updated it updated quickly and neatly.
It was fantastic.

Man 2e was in the 90s and such. I forgot how stupid people was about the internet back then.

The evil ghosts from Hell and the Umbral virus that retconned a whole clan into a crumbling mess will hear you if you say it aloud.

Jace Beleren, just give it about 3 years

Though the sense OP is using omits the fact that Benoit was also one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. But I don't know that RPGs have something that was absurdly good and then unexpectedly went so off and wrong that it had to be covered up.

OWOD?

If we take Lorraine Williams to represent, more broadly, 2e era TSR, it still works.

Do you mean the WoD in general?
The WoD started off as edgy tryhard goth marketing, then got some moral depth and actual maturity around Revised Vampire/Mage. There were a few sputters (Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand) later on, but the later Vampire books were more or less all good, Demon was fantastic and Orpheus was what the nWoD should have built off.
Then, the company was reorganized and the leadership centered around Justin Achilli, and all of a sudden the whole editing team was more or less canned, the writing team was changed, the art team was gutted and the books started going right back to pandering. Old White Wolf quit using song lyrics and edgy quotes after 2nd ed, but the nWoD gladly quotes Twilight unironically - and let's really not forget the sociopolitical pandering that came in a little bit after Requiem and has only gotten stronger since.
Granted, old Werewolf was a bit preachy, but the writers disagreed and took the piss out of each other, leading to a game with a lot of possible nuances and without any bias. Reading Beast nowadays makes me wonder why I even keep on living if people actually pay money for this.