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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Riggs
Read between
May 14 - July 30, 2024
My experience growing up as a nerd was that role-playing games were an outsider hobby played by dorks, dweebs, freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked geeks.
The AD&D rules reflect the beautiful, noble, if impossible nerd urge to codify and systematize all. The rules bring order. Order brings meaning. That can be a comfort in a real world all too often absent both.
The building made an immediate impression on the company’s new hires. It was, they said, a complete pit, the cheapest possible business accommodation, a building waiting to be condemned, one so old and tired, it couldn’t even find the strength to fall down.
“editors are just readers with opinions. Developing those opinions is partly instinctive and partly it’s practice.”
good editing was not about getting an author to write the book that she wanted them to write but rather to help and encourage the author to produce the best version of the book that they wanted to write.
Perhaps the core sickness had been diagnosed by Jim Lowder: the company valued brand above all.
“Things have changed, and Marquette is very proud of having the Tolkien collection now. It fascinates me how things change over time. Like D&D. D&D used to be a fringe hobby, but now it’s become a mainstream hobby. But D&D hasn’t changed that much. The people in the world around it changed.”
Like an engineer sadistically tasked with making a flashlight for the blind, he would make D&D for eight-year-olds.
“TSR managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again and again.”
Astonishingly, this means that TSR put out a new introduction to D&D every year from 1991 to 1996, which sounds like an inefficient use of resources and might be an early foreshadowing of problems in the time period. It also suggests that TSR was growing increasingly desperate to bring new role-players into the hobby.
Brom’s work since leaving proved he is a virtuoso in the field of fantasy art. Yet when he arrived at the company, he didn’t even know how to gesso a canvas. The company clearly helped make him into the artist he is today. And yet due to its policies, which he goes out of his way to point out he felt were legal, ethical, and fair, he left.
This is something I think about a lot as a manager who focuses on employee growth.
After all, Salvatore was a Massachusetts man. Rightness had meaning. Rectitude was important. And these values were worth living.
No one lives their life thinking they are a villain.
“You can only make so many bad decisions before they overwhelm you.”
He didn’t like having to “scramble to account for managerial decisions.”
There are worse things than being laid off from your job. You might find yourself on fire.
An enormous number of TSR setting products would NEVER BE PROFITABLE. The price the company sold them for meant they’d never recoup the sunk costs. Then we realized that there were entire campaign settings that had never been profitable.
The multitudinous settings, no matter how ineffable and luminescent and masterly, were a direct cause of the company’s downfall.
