What's up with the Zeb Cook hatred?

[JCBoney]

I can never know what was written on the inside of the doors of Moria...

"EXIT"

"PLACE FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY"

DID YOU REMEMBER TO DRESS?

(We'll see if there are any Heinlein fans afoot here.)

[francisca]

Someone could try to convince me that the poor quality of the products made for TSR's flagship game had nothing to do with TSR's going out of business in 1997. But I doubt they'd succeed. It seems to me, a strong output of D&D materials would have allowed TSR to stay afloat through whatever other issues may have been going on at the time.

Well, I think it is a set of expectations gone haywire. I suspect the upper management of TSR (esp. Williams) wanted to be, and tried to act like, hot shots of a Fortune 500 company, but as big as D&D was in the 80s, it was still a small market in the big picture.

Mr. Breault: thanks for your candidness.

Your description of how the product lines were planned is very enlightening, and in step with what I've been told by others. "RPG sweat shop" was the term used by another who worked there at the time. I can't imagine what it was like to have been a fan of the game, get what I would guess is a "dream job", and then actually be confronted by the horseshit behind the veil. Must have been disillusioning, to a degree.

I too have my concerns about you coming along and panning Gary after his death, but I'll accept on face value that "you've just now heard" about the opinion of Zeb Cook for now.

Anyway, welcome to the board.

[Zotster]

Someone could try to convince me that the poor quality of the products made for TSR's flagship game had nothing to do with TSR's going out of business in 1997. But I doubt they'd succeed. It seems to me, a strong output of D&D materials would have allowed TSR to stay afloat through whatever other issues may have been going on at the time.

Well, I think it is a set of expectations gone haywire. I suspect the upper management of TSR (esp. Williams) wanted to be, and tried to act like, hot shots of a Fortune 500 company, but as big as D&D was in the 80s, it was still a small market in the big picture.

Mr. Breault: thanks for your candidness.

Your description of how the product lines were planned is very enlightening, and in step with what I've been told by others. "RPG sweat shop" was the term used by another who worked there at the time. I can't imagine what it was like to have been a fan of the game, get what I would guess is a "dream job", and then actually be confronted by the horseshit behind the veil. Must have been disillusioning, to a degree.

I too have my concerns about you coming along and panning Gary after his death, but I'll accept on face value that "you've just now heard" about the opinion of Zeb Cook for now.

Anyway, welcome to the board.

Thanks for your comments and understanding. I don't know if JamesM can do IP tracking of people who log into his blog, but I did start reading his blog just a month or two ago. A few days ago (some time last week), I followed a link off his blog and eventually ended up here. I saw the "Zeb Cook is a LIAR" thread, read through it, was pretty surprised to still see such bitter feelings, and felt compelled to reply.

The bad timing of my response didn't occur to me, as I didn't intend to slam Gary. It only gradually dawned on me that a lot of the bad feelings would have come from comments Gary made, so my comments were taken as slams against Gary. Surprising as this may sound, I witnessed no bad feelings between Zeb and Gary while I was at TSR and I've kinda lost touch with paper games in the last 15 years or so.

Sorry for the bad timing and the nerves I jangled.

Re your comment about TSR basically being a big frog in a small pond: This was always evident to me, if only by seeing the Milton Bradley booth every year at GenCon during the mid-to-late 80s. It was manned solely (that I saw) by Mike Gray, a former TSR designer and then a director or VP of development for MB. He'd be sitting there alone, cutting out Shogun pieces from their trees. Jim Ward had introduced us early in my TSR stay, so we'd chat for a while. Mike would talk about his herculean struggles to keep the Gamemaster series alive. MB just didn't care about the line, as it sold "only" 500,000-750,000 per product. They'd rather do a Strawberry Shortcake game that sold 5M copies. I worked with him on the HeroQuest series too, until that was shut down. That those sorts of games came out at all was mainly (IMO) due to Mike championing them internally.

Anyway, that always reminded me of what a small pond RPGs were.

[Finarvyn]

I can't imagine what it was like to have been a fan of the game, get what I would guess is a "dream job", and then actually be confronted by the horseshit behind the veil. Must have been disillusioning, to a degree.

I just read Bob & Bill: A Cautionary Tale by Bill Owen, and it's the story of Judges Guild. Bill's experience was pretty much the same as this. The two formed this company to make games and pursue their passion of gaming and eventually Bill had to get the heck out of Judges Guild because it had become too stressful and became just another job.

I think that stories like this just emphasize to me just how small-market the RPG industry really is, and how hard it must be to hire dozens of full-time employees. Imagine for a moment that you want to start up a game company where ten full-time game designers (and editors and layout folks and artist and everything else within those ten people) were going to make about $50K each per year. That's $500,000 worth of profit you need to generate in order to "break even." Not just sales, but profit. I can see why a company would end up having to update and sell new editions to try to create that revenue, and then update a bunch of their modules and setting materials in order to fit the new rules.

As a home-brew guy I can ignore these issues. I have a "real world" job to pay the bills, I can tinker with rules sets and write adventures for my game group at whatever pace I want to in order to keep my game going. As an RPG company I wouldn't have the ability to do this and instead would have to focus on writing X words per day, selling Y number of products per week, paying Z number of employees per month.

Whatever happened to Games Design Workshop (the original Traveller company)? Where is Guardians of Order? What about James Ward's Fast Forward Games company? Gaming history is littered with dead companies who tried to make it and couldn't, as well as lots of OOP game systems that never were able to maintain support enough to stay alive.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but the quote made me think a bit about the industry from the other side a little more.

Rant over.

[francisca]

I worked with him on the HeroQuest series too, until that was shut down.

Well, as a card-carrying member of the "He-Man 2e haters club", you've just redeemed yourself a bit!

I find HQ to be a really fun, and well executed game. Any interesting stories about it?

Yeah, and spill your guts about Williams already, will you?

[Chgowiz]

I worked with him on the HeroQuest series too, until that was shut down.

I find HQ to be a really fun, and well executed game. Any interesting stories about it?

HeroQuest makes me smile and I really regret getting rid of it.

[Chainsaw]

eBay!

That's where I got mine a couple years ago, back when I needed a "gateway game" to introduce my wife to role playing. She'd played HeroQuest as a kid, so starting there made sense -

[T. Foster]

Was away from the computer over the weekend and missed this thread. Just quickly skimmed over it now, and what strikes me is that the facts don't really seem to be that much in dispute, but rather the interpretation and moral judgment of them. That zotster came to work for TSR in 1984, after the character of the company had changed and the environment had already been poisoned against Gary, is surely important here. The implication that Gary was "just another employee" with no more importance or significance than anyone else at TSR, the idea that his hand-chosen collaborators would be dismissed as "cronies" (and his ideas as coke-fueled ramblings), the notion that 100 people's jobs were more important than the legacy of one of the more important artistic innovations of the late 20th century (in some sense the entire entertainment landscape of the 21st century has been shaped by what Gary Gygax and his friends were doing in his basement 40 years ago) -- all of this is symptomatic of the same sort of myopic groupthink we see from every single person who worked at TSR in the mid-late 80s and suggests that in a very real sense they were the worst possible group to be left in charge of D&D's legacy.

I have no doubt these guys believe what they're saying, and think everything they did was morally justified and that had Gary gotten his way they would have lost their jobs and seen all the work they had done be wiped out, and that these would've been bad things. From this disinterested outside observer, though, with a different perspective and not faced with the prospect of telling 100 people they've lost their jobs, it's by no means as clear.

Thanks for coming here, zotster, for sharing your perspective and some additional facts we weren't previously aware of, and for responding to the criticism right here rather than going off to some unrelated site and whining about how mean we all are. That's worthy of respect, at least, even though I still think you and your associates did the wrong thing back in the 80s.

[Lance Hawvermale]

That's worthy of respect, at least, even though I still think you and your associates did the wrong thing back in the 80s.

The "wrong thing" being what? Their jobs? From what I understand, upper management assigned writing projects, and these writers and editors tackled those assignments to the best of their abilities. Maybe we Hindsight Heroes would like to think that, had we been in Mike's position, we could have won back TSR, realigned its course, and steered it in a "better" way, but the truth is, we too would've been paycheck-needing and rather powerless employees who did the best with what we were given.

[geneweigel]

Roleplaying Game Credits:

Book Publisher Credit
AD&D Player's Handbook, 2nd Ed. Revised (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1995) TSR, Inc. Editing
City of Delights (Al-Qadim) (1993) TSR, Inc. Editing
Glory of Rome Campaign Sourcebook, The (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1993) TSR, Inc. Editing
New Tales: The Land Reborn (Dragonlance) (1993) TSR, Inc. Editing
Charlemagne's Paladins Campaign Sourcebook (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1992) TSR, Inc. Editing
Complete Bard's Handbook, The (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1992) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dune Trader (Dark Sun) (1992) TSR, Inc. Editing
Flint's Axe (Dragonlance) (1992) TSR, Inc. Editing
Forbidden Lore (Ravenloft) (1992) TSR, Inc. Editing
Slave Tribes (Dark Sun) (1992) TSR, Inc. Editing
Darklords (Ravenloft) (1991) TSR, Inc. Editing
Gamer's Handbook of the Marvel Universe 1991 Character Updates (Marvel Super Heroes) (1991) TSR, Inc. Editing
Howl From the North (Greyhawk) (1991) TSR, Inc. Editing
Ship of Horror (Ravenloft) (1991) TSR, Inc. Editing
Wild Elves (Dragonlance) (1991) TSR, Inc. Editing
Draconomicon (Forgotten Realms) (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragon Knight (Dragonlance) (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Flames of the Falcon (Greyhawk) (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Greyhawk Ruins (1990) TSR, Inc. Additional Editing
Monstrous Compendium Dragonlance Appendix (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Monstrous Compendium Greyhawk Appendix (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Monstrous Compendium Spelljammer Appendix (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Old Empires (Forgotten Realms) (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Otherlands (Dragonlance) (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
Vecna Lives! (Greyhawk) (1990) TSR, Inc. Editing
AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, 2nd Ed. (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1989) TSR, Inc. Layout and Storyboard
AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, 2nd Ed. (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1989) TSR, Inc. Proofreading
AD&D Player's Handbook, 2nd Ed. (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
Golden Khan of Ethengar, The (Dungeons & Dragons (classic)) (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
In Search of Dragons (Dragonlance) (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
Monstrous Compendium Forgotten Realms Appendix (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
Monstrous Compendium, Volume 2 (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
Time of the Dragon (Dragonlance) (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
Vale of the Mage (Greyhawk) (1989) TSR, Inc. Editing
Castle Greyhawk (1988) TSR, Inc. Editing
Greyhawk Adventures (1988) TSR, Inc. Editing
Mists of Krynn (Dragonlance) (1988) TSR, Inc. Editing
Ruins of Adventure (Forgotten Realms) (1988) TSR, Inc. Author
Throne of Bloodstone, The (Forgotten Realms) (1988) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragonlance Adventures (1987) TSR, Inc. Editing
Manual of the Planes (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1987) TSR, Inc. Editing
Ochimo: The Spirit Warrior (Oriental Adventures) (1987) TSR, Inc. Editing
Wrath of Olympus, The (Dungeons & Dragons (classic)) (1987) TSR, Inc. Editing
Book of Lairs, The (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1986) TSR, Inc. Editing
Book of Lairs, The (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1986) TSR, Inc. Author
Dragons of Triumph (Dragonlance) (1986) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragons of Truth (Dragonlance) (1986) TSR, Inc. Development and Editing
Dungeoneer's Survival Guide (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1986) TSR, Inc. Editing
Mines of Bloodstone, The (Forgotten Realms) (1986) TSR, Inc. Editing
Swords of the Daimyo (Oriental Adventures) (1986) TSR, Inc. Editing
Wilderness Survival Guide (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1986) TSR, Inc. Proofreading
Conan Role-Playing Game (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragons of Deceit (Dragonlance) (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragons of Glory (Dragonlance) (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragons of Ice (Dragonlance) (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragons of Light (Dragonlance) (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Dragons of War (Dragonlance) (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Oriental Adventures (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1985) TSR, Inc. Editing
Oriental Adventures (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) (1985) TSR, Inc. Product Design
Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space (Star Frontiers) (1985) TSR, Inc. Graphic Design

[Zotster]

Was away from the computer over the weekend and missed this thread. Just quickly skimmed over it now, and what strikes me is that the facts don't really seem to be that much in dispute, but rather the interpretation and moral judgment of them. That zotster came to work for TSR in 1984, after the character of the company had changed and the environment had already been poisoned against Gary, is surely important here. The implication that Gary was "just another employee" with no more importance or significance than anyone else at TSR, the idea that his hand-chosen collaborators would be dismissed as "cronies" (and his ideas as coke-fueled ramblings), the notion that 100 people's jobs were more important than the legacy of one of the more important artistic innovations of the late 20th century (in some sense the entire entertainment landscape of the 21st century has been shaped by what Gary Gygax and his friends were doing in his basement 40 years ago) -- all of this is symptomatic of the same sort of myopic groupthink we see from every single person who worked at TSR in the mid-late 80s and suggests that in a very real sense they were the worst possible group to be left in charge of D&D's legacy.

I have no doubt these guys believe what they're saying, and think everything they did was morally justified and that had Gary gotten his way they would have lost their jobs and seen all the work they had done be wiped out, and that these would've been bad things. From this disinterested outside observer, though, with a different perspective and not faced with the prospect of telling 100 people they've lost their jobs, it's by no means as clear.

Thanks for coming here, zotster, for sharing your perspective and some additional facts we weren't previously aware of, and for responding to the criticism right here rather than going off to some unrelated site and whining about how mean we all are. That's worthy of respect, at least, even though I still think you and your associates did the wrong thing back in the 80s.

Please don't append things like "coke-filled ramblings" when summarizing what I said. That's just not called for. I said nothing like that, did I? Of course, I heard rumors about that while Gary was out in CA, but I had no first-hand experience of that and consider it not worthy of repeating. The way you stuck that in there, someone just reading your post would assume I said that and this thread would get a whole lot nastier.

I'd like to further note that I did indeed refer to Gary as just another employee, but you took the comment out of context. I was responding to contentions that Gary actually owned or earned or deserved (or some such) the copyright to AD&D. In that context, Gary was "just another employee" -- the work he did in creating AD&D was done as work for hire, TSR paid his wages and benefits (and those of everyone else who helped create AD&D) while he was working on it, and so that characterization is completely accurate. You took this out of context to read into it that Gary had no more impact on AD&D or TSR than any other employee.

I think if you re-read what I said, there's nowhere that I implied anything of the sort. Read my comments in context and all I was saying was that Gary was an employee of TSR's and legally speaking had no more right to take the copyright than any other employee. Creating something while in the employ of a company transfers all rights to the creation over to the company, unless you have a prior agreement that you retain those rights. That was the condition under which Gary knowingly created AD&D and then he tried to undo that later. I understand others' points about why Gary might have felt a need to do this; please understand my point about why he didn't have that right.

I think the things I've been saying are bothersome enough to some of the members of this board without you trying (deliberately or not) to add in inflammatory remarks that I never said or to take comments I did say out of context and twist them into meanings I didn't intend. Please allow me to burn in my own flames without adding gasoline to the blaze, if you would.

[Zotster]

Roleplaying Game Credits:

Heh. Thanks for that list, Gene. Where did you get that from, if I can ask? There are some missing credits but it's not worth correcting at this time. I think some of the ones missing are wargames (under the SPI brand) and mass market games I worked on. So they wouldn't be on an RPG list anyway.

And yeah, I get the point that a lot of you folks hate everything on that list.

[Zotster]

I worked with him on the HeroQuest series too, until that was shut down.

Well, as a card-carrying member of the "He-Man 2e haters club", you've just redeemed yourself a bit!

I find HQ to be a really fun, and well executed game. Any interesting stories about it?

Yeah, and spill your guts about Williams already, will you?

Well, there is the story about how I edited and developed all four of the character-based box supplements but only two of them were ever released. (I think MB pulled the plug on HQ after the second one was released.) I can't recall which two came out, but I have the only versions of the other two in existence.

They're just pre-production versions -- the rule booklet edited, map sheets, a four-color mockup of what they planned to do for the cardboard sheets, etc. Did you know that Tom Wham did the design for one of the two HQ hero sets that never came out?

Every now and then, I see them sitting in a box in my attic and think about selling them. MB let the trademark expire on HQ a while ago, and when the plug was pulled, I asked what they wanted me to do with the materials and they said keep 'em. So I did.

I will start a Lorraine Williams thread soon. I think I'd like to start it by hearing what everyone already knows about her. Some of the things about her (e.g., the Buck Rogers connection) might already be well-known to everyone and I'd just be wasting folks' time posting it.

[T. Foster]

That's worthy of respect, at least, even though I still think you and your associates did the wrong thing back in the 80s.

The "wrong thing" being what? Their jobs? From what I understand, upper management assigned writing projects, and these writers and editors tackled those assignments to the best of their abilities. Maybe we Hindsight Heroes would like to think that, had we been in Mike's position, we could have won back TSR, realigned its course, and steered it in a "better" way, but the truth is, we too would've been paycheck-needing and rather powerless employees who did the best with what we were given.

Yeah, pretty much. The environment of mid-80s TSR was that the folks working there apparently looked on it as nothing more or less than a way to earn a paycheck -- churning out text to meet deadlines for products pre-sold on the basis of a title and pagecount. The element of "art" or "mission" of the 70s-era had devolved into, essentially, a faceless assembly line and these guys, in order to help guarantee steady positions for themselves on that assembly line, were complicit in removing the one "dangerous" element -- the guy who threatened to overturn the status quo and perhaps get the company back to producing something more like art.

To put it in more concrete terms, if Mike Breault had allowed OA to be released with Gary's copyrght notice, thus throwing ownership of the system into doubt, he probably would have lost his job, and so would most of his friends, but AD&D might have been saved. Is AD&D worth more than those guys' jobs? Not to them, obviously. But armchair-quarterbacking it with 25 years' hindsight I come to a very different conclusion.

To quote Gene from upthread, "these guys should've learned to pump gas." Yeah, TSR was a steady job, but from the sounds of things neither the pay nor the working conditions were that great, and probably every one of those 100 people could've pretty quickly found another job that paid just as well and was just as fulfilling as churning out assembly-line text to meet a pre-defined page-count for a pre-defined title by a pre-defined date. Would the trauma of a couple months' unemployment have been worth it for the "greater good" of "saving" the "soul" of AD&D? (note: scare-quotes to emphasize that I'm speaking in hyperbolic metaphors here, and this shouldn't be taken too literally.) That, apparently, to all of these guys (with the notable exception of Frank Mentzer) was never even a question -- this idea never even occurred to them -- even 25 years later Mike Breault shows no indication of ever for one second having considered siding with Gary over the assembly line. And that, compared to the idealism of the 70s scene, is a little sad.

[Flambeaux]

I will start a Lorraine Williams thread soon. I think I'd like to start it by hearing what everyone already knows about her. Some of the things about her (e.g., the Buck Rogers connection) might already be well-known to everyone and I'd just be wasting folks' time posting it.

I know nothing beyond the name.

And, reading through the list of credits Gene posted, I have to day I still enjoy several of those products.