Why was TSR such a dumpster fire?
An interview with Slaying the Dragon author Ben Riggs sheds a lot of light on this
NOTE: I have published a video that recaps all of the worst sins of TSR, as described in Ben Riggs’ book!
Hi Ben! Can you introduce yourself and give us links to all your stuff?
I am a writer, teacher, podcaster, historian, and mediocre Mario Kart driver. I wrote Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons which details the fall of TSR, the first company to publish D&D. It was the #8 history of the year according to Goodreads.com, and it just came out in paperback!
You can listen to me talk about RPGs on my podcast, Plot Points:
https://plotpointspod.com/
My Facebook page may be the best thing on the internet: https://www.facebook.com/ben.riggs.writes
And I post on X/Twitter under @BenRiggs_
And on Instagram I’m ben.riggs.writes
And you can buy my book anywhere books are sold, or here: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/slaying-the-dragon/
There have already been so many treatments of the history of TSR. What gave you the confidence and the drive to write one more?
I did not choose to write this book. The book chose me.
It began as a piece for Geek & Sundry, and as I researched that article, I discovered that I in fact had no idea how and why TSR failed, and the facts I leared about its destruction were fascinating and illuminating. Interview led to interview, and soon people were sending me documents that had been sitting in their basements for 25 years, I started receiving sales records, etc! Once someone tells you how the most-storied TTRPG company of the 20th century managed to violate the basic laws of economics in the course of its everyday business, you sit up and pay attention.
So in short, because I was focused on a different era, and had so much information that had not before seen the light of day, I had no hesitation in seeking out a publisher.
You interview a ton of former employees for this book, some of them who have since lived a relatively quiet life and others who have risen to legendary status in the RPG world. How were you able to track down all of these people and get interviews with them?
Hard work, networking, and luck.
Many of the old hands from TSR kept in touch with one another, and I could just chase from friend to friend as I worked.
That said, some people took research to find.
My personal favorite get was Bob Abramowitz. He essentially acted as middleman in the negotiation to buy TSR in 1997. He had never been interviewed about his part in the story, and no one I spoke to had his contact information. So I purchased what I believed to be his phone number from whitepages.com, and called him up during dinner time.
Not only did he answer, he immediately began talking about negotiating with TSR CEO Lorraine Williams and spinning the tale of the sale all these years afterwards. It was as though he had been waiting a quarter of a century for a writer to call him up and ask about buying TSR. I was planning on just confirming that he was the correct Bob Abramowitz getting his email, and skedaddling off the phone, but we talked for half an hour!
Can you describe a particularly challenging aspect of compiling this history?
TSR CEO Lorraine Williams did not speak to me for my book. Also, she was tremendously unpopular with the TSR staff. Therefore, it would have been very easy for my book to become a hit job on Lorraine. I tried my best to be fair to her even thought she was utterly unwilling to speak to me and in our single email exchange, she told me that she had absolutely nothing to say to me.
Joe Manganiello interviewed her for the D&D documentary coming out in 2024, so go see that to finally hear Lorraine talking about her time as Queen of D&D!
I’ve heard you in a previous interview say that you have mixed feelings about Lorraine Williams in terms of her performance and her leadership over her 12 years at the company. You also discuss this a bit at the end of the book. Can you unpack those feelings a bit more here?
No actually. ;)
Joe Manganiello is the only historian (I know he’s famous for other reasons, but to me he’s a historian!) to have interviewed her in years, the only prior person to land her since her departure from a dying TSR was David Ewalt for Of Dice and Men.
Until I see what he managed to get out of her for the D&D documentary coming out next year, I am reserving all further judgment.
(Go see that documentary everybody!)
What was the single most shocking discovery in the course of your investigation of TSR’s rise and fall?
I suppose this answer will reveal me as a forge-hardened and grindstone-sharpened nerd, but…
There was little correlation at TSR between the quality of a product and sales, and there was literally zero correlation between the quality of a product and its profitability.
Planescape, for example, was an outstanding and visionary product. It likely took the second edition of the game as far as it could go. Yet it’s sales were anemic, and because of the production costs involved, it made essentially zero money for the company.
Dark Sun was another fantastic product, but because again the company did not keep close track of its profit and loss projections, each of the first few Dark Sun adventures sold cost the company about $1 per copy.
As a huge nerd, I would have thought both those products would have been sales smashes that brought money pouring into the company. But I was wrong, and that blew my mind.
How did the development of iconic settings like Planescape and Ravenloft even occur amidst the company turmoil?
The company, at ground level, was good at getting out of the way of geniuses. This is something that WotC could learn from.
For much of the Williams era at TSR, creatives would pitch ideas, other creatives would weigh in on them, and primary writer/s would be assigned. Typically there were only a handful of major creative voices at launch. Ravenloft → Two Hickmans, Bruce Nesmith, & Andrea Hayday. Forgotten Realms → Greenwood & Grubb. Planescape → Zeb Coook. Now it seems like we’re getting a dozen voices of varying talent & ability on releases.
Since WotC has come up, what are some of the main ways you think they could make their RPG products more appealing, aside from getting out of the way of geniuses?
The problem is that Wizards doesn’t seem to want to be in the TTRPG business. What they’d like is to make another billion dollars a year, and they are trying to do that with a TTRPG.
To put that goal in line with another sales leak…
In 2003, it looks like the D&D TTRPG grossed about $2 million for Wizards.
They were hoping to make $3.5 million in ‘04, and $3.75 million in ‘05.
Let’s imagine that in the past 20 years, the D&D market has quadrupled in size. (I think it’s doubled, but let’s be generous.) Now, let’s be generous with inflation. Let’s say that the D&D TTRPG is currently bringing in $20 million a year for Wizards. That is amazing and fantastic for the game historically.
But it is 2% of a billion dollars.
WotC/Hasbro needs a creative visionary who can figure out how to make D&D as ubiquitous as the NFL if it wants to achieve that kind of sales goal. In my experience, creative visionaries are not usually discovered at large corporations. Is it something about the lighting? The harsh geometry of the cubicle as habitat? I await the findings of biologists…
Ironically, I do think this theoretical creative visionary- Should I call him the D&D prophet? This visionary would generate exciting new products and bring people into the hobby and make Hasbro money, but that entails a ton of risk, and corporations abhor risk. (The OGL was such a risk, and look at how that’s going…)
It’s why the most exciting trends in TTRPGs are originating outside of WotC. Really, the two best things WotC has done in the past 9 years were releasing 5th edition and giving it an OGL. The rest has been them riding the wave of Stranger Things, Critical Role, and pandemic.
So I am, I suppose, a WotC pessimist, and I am not hopeful about 6th edition. But hopefully, I am wrong on both counts.
Were there any misconceptions about TSR that your research corrected?
Lots. Briefly:
AD&D 2nd ed sold worse than 1st ed and Basic.
CEO Lorraine Williams almost killed D&D, but she also saved it. Arguably twice.
The story of D&D is one of betrayal, loss, failure, and sadness.
Wizard of the Coast saved D&D from a fate worse than bankruptcy.
Gary Gygax was a man and not a saint. ;)
The best paid creative at TSR when it was sold was no writer or game designer, but artist Jeff Easley.
What’s next Mr. Wonder-Eater?
There were so, so many missed opportunities and mistakes throughout TSR’s history. That’s more or less the theme of your book, at least to me. What do you believe was TSR's biggest missed opportunity?
One thing that has become clear to me over the course of my research is that as a fan, I did not fully appreciate how brutal the TTRPG industry is. The quality of a product is totally unmoored from its sales. Even with a successful product, no one is getting rich. To give one example, last night I interviewed a WotC product manager from the 3.5 era. He told me that once you crunched the numbers, publishing 3.5 likely had no financial benefit for Wizards. They could have carried on with 3.0, and their bottom line would have been identical. 3.5 of course is now a legendary edition of the game, one that was a pillar of the success of Paizo.
In other words, I don’t know if there is something TSR could have done or produced that was a missed opportunity. I think what they needed to do was lower their costs.
I keep seeing TSR’s peak as being in the early 1980s when the Satanic Panic spiked sales and made D&D an illicit, sought-after cultural treasure. How do you think the company would have performed through the 80s if the Panic had never happened?
D&D and AD&D core sales dropped by 1 million units between 1983 and 1984.
The question is, why?
I believe the Satanic Panic was a cause of the drop, though it may not have been the only cause.
It’s also possible that by that time, D&D had simply saturated its market, and that all the people inclined to purchase a copy and get in the hobby had done so by that time.
Instructive in this case may be White Wolf. Vampire was an amazing game, but it also marketed to demographics that had heretofore not been targeted by TTRPG companies. They grew exponentially as a result.
Or perhaps the two are entwined. Perhaps the Satanic Panic made D&D unpalatable to large swathes of customers, and that led to the sales plunge.
In sum, it’s never great when a group decides they can make money by demonizing your product. Perhaps if it never happened, D&D would have continued its ascendance unbroken, and Critical Role would now be bigger than the NFL.
One of the biggest boons for TSR was the Dragonlance novel series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I’ve been reading them recently and they’re… okay, I guess. They kind of feel like reading an epic recap of a D&D campaign (and yes, I know the legend is that Weis and Hickman based some of these books on actual campaigns but they have denied that repeatedly). What specifically made those books so appealing to mass audiences do you think?
I have no idea. I tried reading them when I was younger and I couldn’t get into them. I tried re-reading them recently, and I bounced off them again. I will certainly acknowledge the power and grip they have over their fanbase.
I will say that the first series of Dragonlance adventures was simply incredible. I cannot too highly recommend going and checking them out. Dragons of Despair changed TTRPGs for decades.
Another one of TSR’s golden geese was R.A. Salvatore, who created the beloved drow character Drizzt Do’Urden. I actually haven’t read any Drizzt novels but he’s clearly one of the most famous and beloved characters in official D&D fiction. What, in your opinion, did Salvatore do to make Drizzt so appealing to readers?
I think it was Drizzt’s reputation as a classically romantic hero. He was a drow, but good, and people spat on him, but he was a hero anyway. People like that.
You note in your book that TSR’s novels were selling like crazy for a long time. Why do you think TSR didn’t just look at the numbers, specifically the cost of producing a novel versus that of an RPG module, and just lean in on selling more novels?
They did. They went from producing a bare handful of novels in a year to dozens. It’s that novel sales did not keep pace with their releases. They overwhelmed their audience. It reminds me of the deluge of Marvel on Disney+. How can you watch it all?
Funny story: I’ve just recently given up on Marvel completely. You note in your book that leadership managed to degrade and drive away a lot of the talent in the Book Department, including editors Mary Kirchoff and Jim Lowder, and authors Salvatore, Weis and Hickman. How much of their dip in novel sales do you think was due to THAT rather than market saturation?
Impossible to say. A depressing truth I am still struggling to accept in my 40s is how little artistic quality has to do with success, so it may well be that sales would have still slumped, as the problem was consumer time, not the quality of the product.
I feel like your book was really comprehensive in terms of documenting the major strokes in the history of TSR. Do you think there are aspects of the company’s story that still remain untold or underexplored?
Not that I can think of. Jon Peterson et al are doing fantastic work with the early years. I could of course go on forever into the tales of TSR. I could have interviewed more Dark Sun people. There are authors I did not speak to. And I have no doubt there are epics that still wait to come to light. But I set out to figure out why TSR failed, and I think I answered that question to my own satisfaction.
Do you think it’s ever possible that you’ll write a history of D&D starting from where you left off in 1997 with the acquisition of TSR by Wizards of the Coast? What are some of your all-time favorite TSR products and why?
Oh yes, there will be another book. Oh yes.
My favorite TSR product was the AD&D 2nd edition Player’s Handbook. I bought it when I was 12 at a used book store, and it taught me so much more than how to play a game. It really was a doorway to another world, and the experience of reading it was much like reading a good fantasy novel. It transported me to the land of D&D.
What is the deal with TSR currently? Do you know anything about that?
Which TSR do you mean?
If by TSR you mean by the fraternity of alumni who once worked at the old factory on Sheridan Springs Road within walking distance of the holy waters of Geneva Lake, they seem to be maturing like a fine wine. The old hands of TSR still get together, they talk, they have secret groups on Facebook, and they hold court on the Saturday night of Gary Con in a hidden keep to dream together of what was and what could have been. And as more shed their mortal husks for the realm of light beyond this crude world, we will be left with the TSR of the mind, the dream factory where ideas could be made into money enough to keep a creative employed and insured, along with their family.
And where in Wisconsin is that happening these days? And where in America, for that matter?
I was fishing for gossip about that scandalous resurrected corpse of a publisher that was using the TSR name recently, but you gave me a much more poetic and beautiful answer. What do you primarily play these days?
The One Ring 2nd edition from Free League.
Can you tell us more about your podcast as well as what projects you have on the horizon?
My podcast, Plot Points, takes TTRPGs seriously. We do deep reviews and I am also reading the 1st edition DMG aloud (very slowly) with an RPG academic, Scott Bruner.
I would again direct people to my Facebook page. I post things, and you would not believe the quality of the commentary I get from industry luminaries there. It’s so good it justifies the existence of the internet: https://www.facebook.com/ben.riggs.writes
As for the rest, it’s research, writing, and so on.
Plot Points is great. You and Scott are a lot of fun to listen to and do some great interviews with really interesting RPG folks, among other things. For newcomers to the pod, the first thing they might notice is that the episode list is dominated by DMG read-aloud episodes. What have you discovered or accomplished in that endeavor?
There is an audience that vocally enjoys reading the DMG aloud, so we keep doing it. It’s really 75% deep thoughts on TTRPGs at this point, so people really can jump into that anywhere.
I suppose I would point newcomers to our Candela Obscura episode as an entry point as well: https://plotpointspod.com/candela-obscura-review-ep-252/ (also on Spotify)