TSR D&D

Can someone explain why old D&D had so many stupid polearms?

And? They weren't a huge thing until D&D and then they lost it all between like 1990-1995.

omg the binders! Our main GM had a big ass one. In our big multi year game, by the end he had to pour through it to find things to challenge us.

Aren't box sets better than a bunch of DLC books you have to buy?

Why didn't GMs just houserule the bad rules?

Because they all do slightly different things.

She's the former CEO of TSR.

But yes, fat, ugly...and bad at running games companies.

But didn't you get those same effects with skills and feats?

Back then we had both box set the DLC books. It was a treadmill.

Gm's did do a lot of house ruling. Then again. 80% of the rules had the title of "optional"

TSR's story is actually pretty similar to what happen to a lot of small businesses that gain unexpected success.
TSR was started by creative folks who didn't really have a solid grip on the business side of things, so there were a lot of inefficiencies that resulted.
When they grew to a point where their success required them to bring in outside assistance, the company failed to really form a cohesive plan other than "sell more shit!" and they faltered because they lacked management that really understood how to form a long-term stable business rather than trying to ride trends or even create trends.
Add to this the friction between the "financial types" and "creative types" and you get a toxic and adversarial culture festering because of a lack of unified leadership.
The crash of TSR came about because it lacked leadership able to create a sense of cohesion and sense of direction. Instead, they were putting out a setting a week, diversifying into uncharted territories, and simply throwing new ideas against the wall to see what would stick.
Sometimes growth is not what a company needs. Even in times of plenty it pays to re-evaluate your position and look 5-10 years ahead, form a plan how to get there, and get everyone pointed in the same direction.

Not a game designer, though. A business person wholly out of depth with the product, and even worse, the market for it. Role playing is about quality. Not like the over-saturated b-movie market, which she seemed to be trying approach it as.

>Implying Williams spent even one minute designing anything
The only product she was personally invested in was Buck Rodgers related, and that was because she was set to inherit the rights to it when her dad or uncle or whoever croaked. She actively impeded the ability of the designers to work on their projects. Playtesting was strictly prohibited, for example, which meant literally every product had to be eyeballed.

I haven't heard of how she got the CEO job. Did TSR have a Board of Directors that hired her, or was it the person or persons who were the majority shareholders bring her in because they had enough pull to make unilateral decisions, or did they just post a "help wanted" ad and get her?

Someone sold some shares to her, and then, supposedly, Gygax pissed off someone else enough that *they* sold their shares to her too, and that gave her majority control.
Or so I've heard, anyway.

I read the story but once. It sounds like these anons are more up to speed on it.

I seem to vaguely recall there being something about asstons of drug use in the equation too, but this sounds roughly on par with what I heard that wasn't "It's all Proto-Hamburger's Fault".

People complain about the assload of TSR settings but for the most part they actually were fairly well received? In the very least I recall people preferring Arthas, Eberron, Planescape, Ravenloft, and Zakhara solidly over the vanilla Forgotten Realms setting, and Mystara / Maztica / Dragonlance getting on passably either commercially (in the case of DL and My) or thematically (Maztica still being rifled for ideas from Wizards to this day). There was a shitton of material released for these settings, but most of it was also conveniently wrapped up in Campaign Boxes (versus the FR stuff which just seemed to be shat out in enormous volumes as books or Dragon articles).

The Box Sets really weren't that bad, or at least the ones I'm looking at (Darksun, Ravenloft, Al-Qadim settings). They could have been compiled into a single hard-copy book like modern D&D books, but I'm not going to hold it against them when half the books published (regardless of edition) have shitty bindings and the twenty pages held together by two staples last longer than the $50 RPG books.

Not until 3e. And not really even then, given it was shit like 'does extra damage when set to receive a charge'.

The ownership of the company is indeed the key. Business decisions were made by people who owned the majority of shares in the company.
The trail of ownership goes:
1) Gygax and Don Kaye form company in 1973
2)Gygax and Kaye bring in Brian Blume as equal partner
3) Kaye dies in 1975, and Blume's father Melvin invests in company (thereby getting a "share" as an investor)
4) Melvin Blume gives his "share" to his other son Kevin Blume. Owners are now Gygax, Brian Blume and Kevin Blume
5) 1983, game at peak of popularity, but company is underperforming shitshow due to lack of experience and trouble adapting to growth and success and Blume bros. ineptitude and bad business decisions (LET'S SELL LATCHHOOK RUG KITS, KIDS LOVE THOSE, RIGHT?). Blume brothers sell shares to VP Lorraine Williams who ousts Gygax (who only owned 30% of the shares at the time) from leadership and takes over as CEO in 1985.

Here's an article from a dude who actually researched all this stuff:
medium.com/@increment/the-ambush-at-sheridan-springs-3a29d07f6836#.lz6inw3vn

Oh, I should add that Williams had no experience running a company or being an entrepreneur.
She had a BA in history from UC Berkeley, and previously worked low-level office jobs. The reason why she was even brought on board was because she had family connections that Gygax thought would prove useful in getting new investment in TSR.
I don't think anyone ever said Gygax was a business genius.

It's unlikely even he thought that

>People complain about the assload of TSR settings but for the most part they actually were fairly well received?
I think the issue is that it fractured the playerbase. If you have 100 players in a community, and 100 of them are playing the only edition that there is, great. If suddenly you have 12 settings and people really want to play two or three of them and only a few people want to play the others but they don't want to play an alternative, you start running out of people to play with. And you're not growing the market with new settings because it's the fact that it's an RPG that limits your market.

As I recall from Empire of Imagination, TSR was owned by the Blume Brothers, Gygax, and a bundle of small shareholders. Gygax issued extra shares via an option that, along with other shareholders, enabled him to take majority control after the Blumes were ousted from the board. Then he told the board they were fucked, and called up a Hollywood acquiantance/business partner/friend to find someone business-minded to run TSR while he went back to being creative. That person was Lorraine Williams.

The board exercised their own stock options and got shares, and they and the Blumes plotted to screw Gygax over. They made up a secret contract to sell Williams their collective shares once she was hired by TSR. She became the majority owner, Gygax tried to fire her but lawyers told him he couldn't, and Gygax lost the lawsuit against the stock sale. He gave up and sold Williams the rest of his shares and left.

Part of the reason why Gygax failed to counter Williams was that he wanted to have his wife serve as CEO.
If he had any business sense he'd see how massive a conflict of interest this was, but he was the kind of guy who thought in terms of family and friends types of relationships which may work in a small mom & pop operation, but not in a multi-million dollar (1980's dollars even) company.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have family serving in senior positions in the company though. Look at Trump.

is paying a 2300% markup for jewelry wise?
is paying an 1100% markup for designer clothing wise?
Is paying 50% dealer markup on a 30,000 dollar automobile for the first 2 years it would have sat on the lot wise?

Isn't he famous for going bankrupt over and over?