Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

[Endless Flight]

That Birthright stuff was high quality. I bet they lost a shitload on that line.

 

[CT_Phipps]

That Birthright stuff was high quality. I bet they lost a shitload on that line.

This part was really good:

Page: 193-194

Worse yet, many of these stunning products actually lost the company money with every copy sold. One example of this was the first Dark Sun adventure. TSR experimented with including flip books in these releases. These colorful, spiral-bound volumes featured maps, stories, and the adventure itself. They were cool, easy to use, and lay flat on the

Problem was, they were expensive, so much so that the company ended up losing money on each flip-book adventure they made. Fallone said, “At the end of the day, I believe we were losing about a buck per adventure.” Between their respective release dates and 1999, the four flip-book Dark Sun adventures sold, in total, 85,980 copies. That’s a lot of design, thought, creativity, and sales to lose money.

It’s also worth mentioning that the company released four of those adventures in just under a year before ceasing production of the profit-killing flip books. In other words, this wasn’t just one product in the line that sneaked out the door to lose money for the company. They produced four before someone realized that given the cost of the components and price point, each item sold actually lost money.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Yeah, the level of mismanagement is astonishing.

 

[Akrasia]

I missed the Planescape setting entirely during the 1990s (but I wasn't really following or playing D&D/AD&D during that decade). However, I did play the CRPG Planescape: Torment around 2000. It blew me away (although, unlike the Baldur's Gate CRPGs, it lacked replayability). It's only because of the CRPG that I decided to later pick up some of the original Planescape materials (the box set and a few follow-up books). Of course, that was years after the TSR era.

 

[finarvyn]

Yeah, the level of mismanagement is astonishing.

The thing is, most of the time the company was being run by a bunch of normal guys and not people trained to run a multimillion dollar corporation. Sure, they sometimes blew money in ways that seem pretty dumb in retrospect, but it's a lot like athletes who suddenly get multimillion dollar contracts and buy huge houses and cars and suddenly have no money left.

Had they realized early on how the product would take off, maybe they would have hired a CEO to manage the money and spent time developing the games.

 

[Fritz]

Probably a mixed bag—there were years TSR would have gotten no money from me if not for Ravenloft and Dragonlance.

Ravenloft was the last product line I was buying into. Up till they stopped using Stephen Fabian as their illustrator.

 

[CT_Phipps]

The thing is, most of the time the company was being run by a bunch of normal guys and not people trained to run a multimillion dollar corporation. Sure, they sometimes blew money in ways that seem pretty dumb in retrospect, but it's a lot like athletes who suddenly get multimillion dollar contracts and buy huge houses and cars and suddenly have no money left.

Had they realized early on how the product would take off, maybe they would have hired a CEO to manage the money and spent time developing the games.

Slaying the Dragon also says they just had THE WORST LUCK. Because whenever they hired a "real" executive, they somehow universally hired a jackasses who didn't realize they couldn't squeeze blood from stones.

Brian Thomsen, for example, was just an ASSHOLE.

Page 143

Kirchoff and Lowder fought for more money and more respect for authors, and they made progress. Yet according to Lowder, Thomsen wanted to take these hard-fought victories and scrap them. He recalled that “Brian’s overall complaint was that the department and the editors treated writers too well and that the department should be harder-nosed and harder-hearted in pretty much every interaction.”

Page 144

Yet here was Thomsen, a blooded veteran of that very New York publishing world, preaching to the rafters in Lake Geneva that the company should treat its writers roughly. He told Lowder that he didn’t like the tiered pay for different formats. He intended to rewrite the contracts using vague language that would allow the company to do what it wanted where tiered royalties were concerned. He said his revision to the contract would be so subtle that the authors would never detect the changes. (At least not until their royalty checks began to arrive, one imagines.) He would fatten the company’s bottom line, and no author would even cotton on enough to complain about it until it was too late. He planned to take the very advances Lowder and Kirchoff had fought for and toss them on the dung pile.

Note, this is the company that paid Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman less than 10K per Dragonlance book. They were already heavily abusing their writers.

And notably, these policies led to Weis, Hickman, and Salvatore leaving.

 

[Voros]

Those Gazeteers had some truly fantastic art and ideas when it was the Known World. I didn't even know they were the same world until the Mr. Welch videos.

But basically, Ravenloft sold 138,000 copies according to Slaying the Dragon in three years and was their best selling campaign setting boxed set.

Planescape sold 61,000 in its entire run.

For example, Dark Sun, by contrast, sold 50K in its first year. Management was so poor, though, that the spiral notebooks they produced for Dark Sun meant they lost a few cents every time they made a boxed set.

Those are more than respectable numbers in publishing but I assume the ROI/breakpoint for expensive-to-produce boxsets may require bigger numbers.

 

[CT_Phipps]

Those are more than respectable numbers in publishing but I assume the ROI/breakpoint for expensive-to-produce boxsets may require bigger numbers.

The issue was more Lorraine Williams was creating new settings out of the belief they wouldn't be bought by existing gamers but new gamers every time.

Later Dragonstrike was her attempt to expand the Hobby.

When in fact it was mostly preexisting gamers who bought the material.

 

[TristramEvans]

There's some interesting MERP information there too, especially since the Tolkien estate HATED IT because it was a loophole created by it being a game licensed from the movie rights (when there was never a movie created).

Anyway, here was what the book said about cannibalizing settings.

PAGE 273-274

What about Planescape, the greatest setting ever produced at the company? “Essentially,” he said, “none of it ever made a profit.” Danovich and Fallone, of course, knew this. They spoke of unprofitable products, maybe even a lot of them. But the scale of the unprofitability outlined here was much larger. Entire lines? Planescape made the company no money? It was flabbergasting.

Stevens then asked the follow-up question: “Why is that happening?” She found that “I could correlate the drop in profitability per product with the proliferation of campaign settings.” She said that the company “wasn’t making D&D customers, they were making campaign setting customers, and that was killing them.” People were identifying as fans of the settings, not fans of the game.

A Dark Sun fan would not purchase a Planescape product. Al-Qadim fans would not purchase adventures for Birthright. Stevens had already seen this phenomenon in the wild. She was a passionate devotee of Gary Gygax’s first D&D setting, Greyhawk. She said, “If there was a cool Forgotten Realms product, Greyhawk fans would say, ‘I can’t use that. Unclean!’ And Forgotten Realms fans would do the same thing for Greyhawk.”

The end result of this was cannibalism. Each new setting release went into competition with TSR products that already existed. A Forgotten Realms fan might fall head over heels for Ravenloft and cease buying Forgotten Realms releases. Literally, the company was stealing customers from itself, forcing it to make two products to keep the same number of customers.

I dunno, the thing is, I wouldn't have been buying Dark Sun or Al-Qadim if Planescape didn't exist.

 

[TJS]

They didn't just make new settings, they made entire new product lines for each setting.

It's worth keeping that in mind. It's not like any of these settings were just one and done products, and a lot of the support for them was of the kind that was only of interest to people who bought into the setting (eg not stuff like monster books).

So it's not just a matter of did they have too many settings? They went a lot further down the rabbit hole than just that - you had things like regional box sets for settings that were only really of use for people who already had the setting box set, and even then, not necessarily of use, eg maybe my Dark Sun campaign is busy dealing with the repercussions of the death of Kalak in the Tyr region and I don't really have any great use for City by the Silt Sea and maybe my campaign is too low level for Dragon Kings or Valley of Dust and Fire to be relevant.

 

[Armchair Gamer]

Ravenloft was the last product line I was buying into. Up till they stopped using Stephen Fabian as their illustrator.

Which was due to their changes in policy from buying first publication rights to buying all rights, I believe, another example of how mismanagement and short-sightedness hurt TSR.

 

[Fritz]

Which was due to their changes in policy from buying first publication rights to buying all rights, I believe, another example of how mismanagement and short-sightedness hurt TSR.

Yeah, "work for hire" arrangement really sucked the life out of TSRs products. But I guess it gave him more time to work on projects he enjoyed more.