TSR's Amazing Accounting Department

[Ubiquitous]

by James Ward

: This is the fifth of Jim Ward's series of articles here on EN World!
: Upcoming articles include SSI and AD&D Computer Games, and The Origin
: of Monty Haul! Please let us know in the comments about topics you'd
: like to hear, and don't forget to check out Jonathan Tweet's new
: column!

The time is 1987 and I was the Vice President of the design and
editors. It was a great job because TSR had amazing people doing the
design and editing of product. I wasn't liked much by upper management
at TSR after Gary left the company. I don't do well with authority
figures that I do not believe know what they are doing. So I was fairly
sure I didn't have long to work at TSR. However, I didn't count on the
product schedule keeping me there for as long as it did.

We, and I mean the company, got further and further behind in our
release schedule because a great many of the managers and all of the
upper management didn't know anything about roleplaying product and
could care less. I was in the middle of things as Director of Product.
The head of the company actually wanted TSR to do other things besides
role-playing games that didn't include gaming at all. She had us doing
things like Hollywood comic books and audio CDs instead of role-playing
products.

Jack Morrisey was the head of sales and he was sharp. There wasn't
anything about sales he didn't know. He always maintained that we
needed to have covers and back cover text six months before the product
released. This concept was because we needed retail stores and
distributors to schedule our products in their monthly sales budget. At
the time that type of TSR schedule wasn't coming even close to
happening.

Against their better judgment, they made me a vice president of
creative services and the schedule was my primary concern. I'm a goal-
centered type of dude. Give me a goal and I'm on it like white on rice.

On this topic, I would like to give the product managers and Bruce
Heard credit for doing the hardest part of the work. In those days we
had product managers and a group of designers and editors for every one
of the campaign worlds TSR produced. This means there was a Ravenloft
product manager, an Al Qadim Product Manager, a Dragonlance Product
Manager and so on. Most of my people were in at least two groups. They
learned to love the products in their group and have a genuine desire
to make an excellent product. I watched them like hawks, and they did
the lion's share of the work. I did think of a great trick. I had all
of the game designers from all the product groups, and we had a lot of
them, give me their entire weeks worth of design work every Friday in a
printout. I didn't have the time to read all of the material, but I
could spend the weekend and read one of the efforts of a designer.
However, none of them wanted to be judged as coming up short on their
work. I would always hand back a review of that designer's material and
tried hard to always be positive. You would be amazed at the volume of
work that trick produced from the designers.

Eventually, thanks to everyone's efforts in about six months we had
gotten ahead in the schedule and were six months early on the products
and our department was very happy with the effort. Sales was ecstatic
and orders went way up.

Then, horror of horrors, a new head accountant was hired.

At the time I was really happy with all the editors, designers, and
artists at TSR. They are doing a great job in a timely manner. Bruce
Heard was working great with the freelance people and doing a
tremendous job of keeping them on schedule. When nasty events like a
freelance designer falling off the grid; which happened all the time;
Bruce was there with a good replacement. He and I argued a time or two,
but I always respected his talents.

So, it was a happy and very satisfied “experienced and jaded James M.
Ward” that walked into an officer's meeting. Unfortunately for me, Jack
Morrissy wasn't working at TSR any more. We had a new sales guy that
was an expert in mass market sales. Upper management really wanted TSR
to crack the mass market sales area. It was a good idea, but TSR, in my
mind, wasn't positioned with a product that would do that.

The new crazed head of accounting told me that TSR couldn't afford to
be so far ahead in our production schedule. He tried to tell me it was
costing TSR money to have products waiting to be sold for months at a
time. He wanted to have the products finished exactly one month before
the product was released.

People, I really couldn't believe what I was hearing. I appealed to
the sales vice president about the timing of releases. He didn't back
me up at all. I went through the design process and told them how truly
difficult it was to create products with the typesetting, design, and
art necessary in each one. The company was working on large boxed sets
at the time and they took even more time. I talked about bumps in the
schedule from designers and editors getting sick, to wrong estimates on
how long some of the large projects would take.

It was all for nothing. I was sternly ordered to change the schedule
so that releases were closer exactly one month before the due date. I
walked out of the meeting shaking my head at the stupidity of upper
management who knew nothing about the role-playing business and could
care less.

I actually enjoy following orders if they make sense to me. This
direction was totally against everything I had been doing for the last
year and a half. The end result was that I never changed what we were
doing. When asked about it at Vice President meetings I lied like a
rug. The last two years of my stay at TSR the company made the most
money they ever made on product schedules. The other vice presidents
and the president of the company never noticed I didn't do what was
ordered of me.

Although I didn't tell my people of that meeting, word must have
leaked out somehow. I seemed to have earned a reputation as a Ranger
protecting the Hobbits (designers and editors) from the Nazgul (upper
management).

I don't feel bad about ignoring that order to this day.

--
Watching Democrats come up with schemes to "catch Trump" is like
watching Wile E. Coyote trying to catch Road Runner.