Knights & Knaves Alehouse

A kinder, gentler crimson cleric returns.

FWIW, while I find Ska's post states some things that other's might not like to read, and whereas it certainly doesn't bother to spare anyone's feelings, I don't find it overtly rude. Blunt? That it is.

There hasn't been much controversy at K&KA since the release of OSRIC back in '06, so posters that weren't around back then, and even earlier, will be unaccustomed to the lack of spared feelings posting that may at times occur here. Some of it, recently, may have crossed the line, and some of my stuff may have as well. The mods clearly think so, and so I won't dispute that. K&KA is not DF though, and egos may get bruised and feelings may get hurt, and this is not restricted to "new comers". Many, if not most who have been around here long enough, have taken a jab or two in the ribs over one thing or another. I've got a crack or two myself.

Discussions that possess more than passing references to 2e, or any other decidedly non-Gygaxian games, will almost assuredly meet with significant resistance. Likewise, anti-gary-isms in general will also likely do so. Some of that resistance will cross the mods comfort lines, and they'll act (or not) accordingly.

Just because maybe it can't be emphasized strongly enough lately: Make no mistake about it. K&KA is about the preservation of Gygaxian 1e AD&D, and it is abso-effin-lutely a PRO Gygax site.

TheRedPriest wrote:Just because maybe it can't be emphasized strongly enough lately: Make no mistake about it. K&KA is about the preservation of Gygaxian 1e AD&D, and it is abso-effin-lutely a PRO Gygax site.

The rhetoric this topic has conjured reminds me more of Republican scare-tactics than of a pro-anything mission. Former TSR employees may as well be the devil incarnate from what I've heard around here.

Stormcrow wrote:The rhetoric this topic has conjured reminds me more of Republican scare-tactics than of a pro-anything mission.

It wasn't my intent to scare you, Stormcrow. How that could come of out my post, I have no idea.

Also, FWIW, politics are temporarily off-topic at K&KA now as well.

While these threads have improved my opinions of the two particular TSR employees participating in them (not that I had any particular impression attached to either of them specifically before this) and at least one other (Bruce Heard, who comes off as having been pretty much a one-man barricade against crap in the Classic D&D line -- only to see it cancelled out from under him anyway), it does nothing to dispel, and in fact confirms and even strengthens, my negative opinion about post-Gygax TSR as a whole and 2E AD&D in particular -- my claim that it was the intertia edition, driven by no more fully developed artistic vision than "keep doing what's worked up to now." I've got to say I actually prefer the notion of an anti-Gygax cabal out to efface his memory and undermine his efforts to what I'm seeing here -- at least such a cabal would've had some affirmative mission and goal, rather than just being a completely impersonal assembly line, where the people releasing the products knew full well that most of what they were releasing was sub-standard (cf. Rose Estes novels), but kept on doing so anyway because people kept paying for it.

Ska wrote: Zot.---I always wonder about those who appear after someone dies and then talk about how things were with the deceased. Of course the deceased cannot respond.

I came on here to respond to the (IMO) unwarranted Zeb hatred, including from someone who apparently can't be mentioned negatively who claimed to have "been there" when he actually wasn't. Talking to Gary or corresponding with Gary does not equal "I was there" and the poster should have noted all his "knowledge" was hearsay but he didn't and indeed gave just the opposite impression with the "I was there" sorts of statements. I didn't come on here to say anything bad about Gary but to defend Zeb. Because my comments contradicted what some thought they had heard from Gary (or thought they heard from someone who thought they heard), some people jumped on this as me attacking Gary. Not so. I have no interest in attacking Gary, others' fondness for him, etc.

Ska wrote:EGG's kids were not useful? Says who? You? Perhaps we should ask the kids of the games creator how useful they were.

Um, yes, I said it and you seem to know I said it so why are you confused about who said it? I worked directly with two of Gary's kids and in-laws and found them to be not useful. I also found the Blume clan present (excluding Brian and Kevin) to be not useful. This is an opinion and I stated it as such.

Ska wrote:I feel quite certain your "paycheck" was more important to you then the "game". I also feel quite certain you do not get what old style Gygaxian ADD is or was. How can I say this? I simply look at the work you have done and what you were a part of.

Clueless people are certain of many things. Ignorance must be wonderful.

Ska wrote:I know for a fact EGG and Gene knew each other and corresponded. I also corresponded on and off with EGG for a few years. I think your statements about him, his children, and habits are wrong. This comes from years of reading EGGs posts, his e-mails, and seeing some of his kids writings.

That's all fine and dandy. My opinions and what I observed first-hand were stated as such. I didn't have to rely on second- or third-hand information.

Ska wrote:I await a challenge from you as you did Gene asking what I have done.

Not much to challenge. Gene stated he "was there" when I was pretty sure he wasn't. And he used that pretend authority to justify his dislike/hatred for Zeb. When I challenged him on it, asking when he was at TSR, it indeed turned out he wasn't there. I don't see that you've made any such claims.

Ska wrote:Please refer to Monsters of Myth and look at the Sand Giant, Hypno-Spider , etc. I will claim any such creation on my part has more EGG 1e style then found in the entire list of your works.

So what?

Ska wrote:I do though, hope you stick around, but feel quite certain you will fade back from where you came.

Nope, I'll stick around as long as there are topics that interest me.

Ska wrote:Gene----you are a valued long time poster. No way to confirm anything Zot says about the dead, who are no longer around. Ignore the guy. Heck, don't ignore him and study him as to "what went wrong."

Nothing challenging can be said about Gene while he's hiding, so I'll just have to get my hip waders out and wait it out.

TheRedPriest wrote: FWIW, while I find Ska's post states some things that other's might not like to read, and whereas it certainly doesn't bother to spare anyone's feelings, I don't find it overtly rude. Blunt? That it is.

FWIW, I also took no offense from his post. He disagreed with my posts but didn't do so rudely, IMO. I responded in the same tone, I think.

T. Foster wrote:While these threads have improved my opinions of the two particular TSR employees participating in them... it does nothing to dispel, and in fact confirms and even strengthens, my negative opinion about post-Gygax TSR as a whole and 2E AD&D in particular...

OK, well, forgive me because I found most of this thread to be like a car wreck (just gotta stop and look, skimming just to find the details from ex-TSR people and memories from back in the day), but from what I've read, and the conditions that people like Zotster worked under, I'm looking at 2e in a newer, more positive light. I started playing in 1978 and AD&D/Holmes D&D were always 'my' game, but I picked up used copies of the 2e books to play in another guys campaign a few years ago.

I didn't find the 2e books as much fun to read as the Gygaxian prose I had grown up with, but the game played just the same when the dice came out and we rolled up characters. There were also decisions I don't agree with (like the decision to drop words like 'demons' and 'devils' to satisfy the loonies) but I still call halflings "hobbits" and that seems more cosmetic than substantive.

Now that I read about what a poisonous atmosphere they were produced in, I've got to give Mike Breualt & Company credit --- they did produce some very good product under terrible conditions. The 2e PHB is great, the MM is fine, the DMG is OK (although I like all the random wierdness in the 1e DMG). Maybe my taste is just shit, however, but 2e played so much like 1e in my friend's campaign that it didn't make that much difference to me when I sat down to play. He didn't use setting and splat books, so maybe that's part of it.

And I know that many people won't see it this way, but dedicated people OTHER than Gary kept D&D alive despite some pretty serious mismanagement by the people above their paygrade.

If you want to blame somebody for the way that 2e jumped the shark, you also need to blame the gamers who kept buying everything that TSR was pumping out.

gleepwurp wrote:If you want to blame somebody for the way that 2e jumped the shark, you also need to blame the gamers who kept buying everything that TSR was pumping out.

QFT.

Nagora wrote:Any idea what the attitude to Gary's ongoing line of Greyhawk novels was at the time inside TSR?

The book division was certainly aware of them, and we knew that whatever deal Gary had struck on his way from the company allowed him to continue publishing them. No doubt the highest levels of the mgmt. reviewed each book and made certain it did not overstep the exact terms of the agreement. I've always thought that having the books published outside TSR fractured the Greyhawk fiction audience, making the line harder to sustain.

I've always been very pleased for Gary that he managed to keep control of the fiction. In fact, I reprinted "Twistbuck's Game" in the Paizo anthology Worlds of Their Own, which collects creator-owned stories by authors known for game-related fiction.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

T. Foster wrote:While these threads have improved my opinions of the two particular TSR employees participating in them (not that I had any particular impression attached to either of them specifically before this) and at least one other (Bruce Heard, who comes off as having been pretty much a one-man barricade against crap in the Classic D&D line -- only to see it cancelled out from under him anyway), it does nothing to dispel, and in fact confirms and even strengthens, my negative opinion about post-Gygax TSR as a whole and 2E AD&D in particular -- my claim that it was the intertia edition, driven by no more fully developed artistic vision than "keep doing what's worked up to now." I've got to say I actually prefer the notion of an anti-Gygax cabal out to efface his memory and undermine his efforts to what I'm seeing here -- at least such a cabal would've had some affirmative mission and goal, rather than just being a completely impersonal assembly line, where the people releasing the products knew full well that most of what they were releasing was sub-standard (cf. Rose Estes novels), but kept on doing so anyway because people kept paying for it.

If, when Gary was ousted, the execs had a meeting with all employees to outline a new company goal of "produce low-quality, lackluster, inertia-driven products," I think a lot of the employees would have left on principle. You make it seem as if there were an easy-to-identify moment when all that started happening. As happens with many companies (and I've seen it happen in my own), a change of management is not usually an obvious sign of poor quality, even when that eventually happens anyway. It takes time for the employees who really are dedicated to high-quality work to realize that things are going in the wrong direction, time for them to decide what to do about it, and time to secure work elsewhere. Do not forget that most of those people whom you claim were just in it for the money eventually did leave to go on to other things—and you don't know whether it was just because they could get more money.

Given what our recent former-TSR-employee members have told us—and I have no reason to doubt what they say—it's clear to me that the TSR executives drove the company to ruin, not the designers and editors. The worst opinion one can have about the designers and editors is that you don't like their work—you can't say definitively that they didn't care about their work or that they had ulterior motives. That seems to me to be a case of blaming the byline of a book instead of the boss who told him to do it. Or blaming a cashier for a store's lack of inventory.

Zotster wrote:I also found the Blume clan present (excluding Brian and Kevin) to be not useful.

Given the vitriol I've heard about the Blume brothers, I'm curious as to what you think their particular strengths were. I mostly hear about Brian's design-work and how it petered out, and Kevin's financial mismanagement. There's got to be more to their stories than that.

gleepwurp wrote:If you want to blame somebody for the way that 2e jumped the shark, you also need to blame the gamers who kept buying everything that TSR was pumping out.

Oh, I've been blaming them for years; decades even*. It's one of the reasons I have to limit my interaction with "mainstream" rpg society to small doses -- if I hang around too long I'm inevitably going to let slip that I hold the vast majority of them in utter contempt, which tends not to go over too well.

*I bought pretty much everything TSR released, or at least as much as I could afford, up through about 1986 -- by 1987-88 I was starting to realize (even though I was only 12-13 years old!) that a lot of the new stuff wasn't very good compared to the older stuff, despite the pretty graphics, and became a lot more selective about what I did and didn't buy. I became even more selective once 2E was released, and cut TSR off entirely sometime around 1990 or '91 (the Greyhawk Wars set was, IIRC, the straw that broke the camel's back). During all that time, and after -- I was still playing other rpgs so I was still going to the game-shops and to GenCon -- I'd see all the junk TSR was churning out and all the people lapping it up, and it frustrated and mystified me -- couldn't they see that all this stuff was really terrible, and was getting worse and worse?

I kept an eye on new TSR releases that looked or sounded potentially appealing throughout this era (and really right up to the present, pretty much -- I remember quite recently spending time in the game store giving detailed perusals to WotC's Dungeonscape and Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, fully intending to buy if I liked enough of what I saw) and would check them out in the store to see if they were really worth buying, and they were always disappointing, it always seemed like they'd taken a cool idea and failed to implement or develop it in an interesting and useful manner. The lone exception, the only TSR/WotC product I've purchased since 1991 was the Monstrous Manual from 1993 -- because I wanted to "reward" TSR for finally having the good sense to retire that ridiculously ill-conceived binder format, because it fit nicely on the shelf as part of a "core books" collection in case I ever decided I wanted to run 2E AD&D again, and because I liked some of the new art by Tony DiTerlizzi (not the proto-dungeonpunk Planescape stuff, but rather his fairy-tale-looking bugs and humanoids -- the same sort of stuff he later achieved enormous success and acclaim with via The Spiderwick Chronicles).

Thoth Amon wrote:Uhhh, someone loved her books? Really?

Sure. Rose has had a pretty successful writing career. Her prose is clean and direct, and the Mika series appealed to younger readers, particularly the ones who started reading them after TSR's pick-a-path adventure series. That, however, is not the same audience as the one most devoted to the game world. The books did very well with that younger audience for a time. And if there had been a larger Greyhawk fiction line, with several authors participating, the Mika books could have been an even more successful part of the line.

Variety was an important factor in the Realms fiction line's initial success. Greenwood, Salvatore, and Niles were not writing the same sorts of fantasy. Fans of Salvatore's direct, action-oriented prose find Greenwood's ornate prose less interesting, but the alternative is there within the overall line for the broader potential audience. And when the second wave of Realms authors were brought in (Grubb, Novak, Denning, me), there was a purposeful emphasis on adding more alternatives. We purposefully avoided the idea of a firm line style.

Greyhawk never had that advantage as a fiction line. Gary's books were not part of the TSR program and Rose's books appealed to some readers, but not the setting's hardcore fans. And there were no other voices to offer alternatives. Greyhawk fans critical of the Estes books might have been at least a little less adamant about their opposition, had they not been the only Greyhawk novels TSR was releasing.

Before anyone asks, I can't speak to why additional Greyhawk books with other authors were not scheduled before 1988. There might have been discussions or proposals, but they were not very far along by late '87/early '88, when the previous head of the book department left. When I started at TSR in the middle of '88, the only Greyhawk books on the schedule were from Rose and both the Realms and Dragonlance were really starting to take off, so much so that, as I mentioned earlier, it was very difficult to spare schedule slots for a line that was in decline.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

T. Foster wrote:where the people releasing the products knew full well that most of what they were releasing was sub-standard (cf. Rose Estes novels), but kept on doing so anyway because people kept paying for it.

You miss the third alternative. There were people at TSR after Gary left who were passionate about their jobs creating books and games and magazines, products they saw as very much worthwhile. You may not value those products, but lots of other people valued them and continue to value them.

There were individual books and games I worked on that were weaker than others, just as there were weak individual products that Gary worked on from the day TSR started business. On the whole, however, I am very proud of the work I did at TSR; as I noted elsewhere, no one was being paid enough by TSR to stick at the job long if they didn't value games in general and the specific books they were working on. If you are a worthwhile writer or editor, you learn from projects that go bad. You do your best to avoid mistakes made and push the next products up a notch. If you are a smart publisher, you give your staff the room to create great products and improve the creative process over time.

Now, I'm not saying that you can't criticize a product, or make a case why you like 1E over 2E, or even slam TSR or WotC for objective things it has done that make it difficult for individuals to create good products or improve the system. What I will say, however, is that it is a mistake and profoundly unfair on every level for people here to guess motivations. As with the statement quoted above, pretty much every supposition I've seen lobbed here about enmity toward Gary or products done for spite or just conclusions drawn about personal honesty or the reason someone did or did not accept a paycheck from TSR or WotC are flat-out wrong. These conclusions are often being drawn based on third-hand hearsay and without even a moderately careful review of the facts. (ie. Given the objectively established publication history of 2E and the Drizzt novels, Zeb was obviously not lying when he said the ranger design was not connected to Drizzt.) And these are serious accusations being made, published here on an international scale.

I applaud the site and the members for championing a game system you all obviously love. (Hey, I still have all the original books I bought and started playing back in '76 or so.) I applaud you all for your passionate support of Gary and the other founders of the hobby; recognizing individual contributions is incredibly important in game publishing, since individual names are often made subsidiary to brand. But to champion these things by defaming individuals, assigning motivations and malice based primarily on your own like or dislike of a product published a couple decades ago, is harming your causes rather than helping them.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

Stormcrow wrote:...Given what our recent former-TSR-employee members have told us—and I have no reason to doubt what they say—it's clear to me that the TSR executives drove the company to ruin, not the designers and editors. The worst opinion one can have about the designers and editors is that you don't like their work—you can't say definitively that they didn't care about their work or that they had ulterior motives. That seems to me to be a case of blaming the byline of a book instead of the boss who told him to do it. Or blaming a cashier for a store's lack of inventory.

That's pretty close to my opinion as well. About 10 years ago we moved to a new city and I quickly found employment with a company that seemed like great opportunity. The work was related to media production --- so, compared to what most people do, it was artistic and creative. My degree in fine art was actually a selling point rather than a hindrance. I liked my boss. Most of my co-workers seemed nice.

Two years later we had been through three managers, each worse than the last. Some people played 'office politics' much better than I did; I came in on weekends to finish other people's work, stayed late on friday nights, skipped lunches, etc., to meet my deadlines while lazy, backbiting, bitching and lying coworkers (who enjoyed immunity from responsibility) coasted through the week. My reward? More work without more pay or promotions. The co-workers I liked were let go or left and the brown nosers got promoted. My management reviews were always A++. Despite this, I didn't get the "plum" assignments or the promotions --- those went to the brown nosers. I discovered that a coworker had placed MY work in his creative portfolio as his own and when I confronted him over this issue in the prescence of my manager, I was told that I was wrong to do so... There was one employee who actually sabotaged the work of other employees and it took them YEARS to get rid of the guy, even though his sabotage had been brought to management's attention numerous times by me and others. And when he got let go, it was a part of corporate restructuring, so he got unemployment and a line on his resume, rather than FIRED and the boot like he deserved.

One of my co-workers was paranoid and foul mouthed and would accuse anyone who crossed her of all sorts of absurd things. She would shout profanities in meetings and never got written up or disciplined. One day I was working on a ladder and one of the "managers pets" came by and shook the ladder as a "joke." Since I was about 25 feet above the concrete floor, I was scared and angry and I dropped the f-bomb. An assistant who had it in for me (because I told her she had to finish her task before she went to have a smoke since we were on deadline) went to management and got me written up for 'unprofessional behavior.' Nothing happened to the guy who shook the ladder because he denied having done it.

There was a manager who embezzled money from the company. Nothing was done about that. My co-worker who came in late a few times got reamed.

For years I worked my ass off trying to fix everything that was wrong with this company that I had been very happy with previously... that is, when I wasn't on the job market, trying to find somewhere else to go. But Detroit's economy has been in the shitter for almost forever. Finally the place was bought by another company and much of the staff relocated to Chicago. I decided to stay in Detroit for my family and seek other work and I'm glad I did: Six months after having moved to Chicago, almost everyone I knew had been laid off.

Unfortunately, some organizations are 'snake pits.' Only the individuals at the top can change the culture; in many cases they choose not to simply because I think they like things the way they are. Changing the culture is expensive in the short term (for one thing, it means getting rid of the bad people and training and recruiting new people) and most managers are paid bonuses based on the end of the quarter rather than on a 3 year or 5 year or 10 year plan of continuous improvement. In addition, in order for my last boss to 'change the culture,' he would have had to fire most of his friends and promote some of the people he had been shorting on raises and promotions because they were just "workhorses" who went and did the job that needed doing rather than playing politics or kissing up and kicking down.

We weren't making games at that company, but the parallels between my experience and some of the horror stories I heard about late term TSR seem obvious, at least to me.