Screwed by the Network/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Tabletop Games that were Screwed by the Network include:

  • At the heyday of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition in the 1990s, TSR had Lorraine Williams as their CEO, who made no secret her disdain both for gamers and the people that worked under her. Among many things that caused Dungeons & Dragons and TSR to be run into the ground before being mercifully bought out by Wizards of the Coast were:
    • Suing people left and right, including people who ran message boards for talking about Dungeons & Dragons on the internet on the basis that it was their intellectual property. This prevented new people from discovering the game through internet word-of-mouth, gave their competitors who were using the new medium to promote their products an edge, and disenchanted fans.
    • Lorraine Williams devoted a great deal of company resources to publishing and promoting the Buck Rogers RPG, as the heiress whose estate owned the rights to the Buck Rogers IP got royalties for every Buck Rogers supplement published and sold. That heiress? Lorraine Williams.
    • TSR's solution to declining sales was to publish new settings. The problem was that the settings, modules, and rules that governed them were so incompatible with each other that the player base became fragmented. For instance, a Planescape fan would have no use for modules meant for the Birthright setting.
    • Licensing terrible games, with Baldur's Gate being a notable exception and becoming the string holding the franchise together. It probably could have gotten more people into the hobby if message boards about the game didn't have to censor comments about the tabletop version for fear of lawsuits.
    • Nepotism ran rampant in the company, which resulted in unqualified managers.
    • Game designers were often forbidden by Williams to use company time to play test products, on the reasoning that playtesting was just an excuse for the peasants to get paid to play games.
    • Executive Meddling was aimed to "coordinate" different lines, which resulted in screwing over most of them. That is, management used gimmick based approach, and had game lines monopolize gimmicks. The result is that after developers put e.g. section on artificial limbs in Drow of the Underdark (the original one), then they were told to not expand on drow biomech, because TSR was planning a robot roleplaying game, Proton Fire. To add insult to injury, the latter appeared only as one preview in Dragon before getting killed by the management. Derp. Likewise, they couldn't use psionics much anywhere because Dark Sun runs on that. And so on.
  • Alternity was a generic RPG produced by TSR in last few years of their operations. When WOTC took over in 2000, they killed the system and cannibalized the settings into their d20 Modern line so that it didn't compete against it.
  • The most common complaints against Games Workshop for their Warhammer 40,000 release schedule is that Space Marine armies always take precedence over non-Marine armies. The main Space Marine book has always been one of the first books updated in every edition change, while other armies have been languishing in Development Hell for almost as long as a decade.
  • The Pokémon Trading Figure game in America. Fans got excited for it in 2006 when Pokémon USA announced it—a collectible figure game with high quality figures produced by noted Japanese company Kaiyodo, and featuring actual trainers from the game as figures—but the release was a disaster. All the strategy of the Japanese counterpart had been stripped, turning it into a strange hybrid of the TCG and the failed collectible coins game (essentially, it was Rock-Paper-Scissors with Pokémon) and even then, the figures were impossible for collectors to find, were often broken IN THE PACKAGING, and hardly advertised. In early 2009, after much delaying of the second expansion's release, it was officially announced as discontinued.
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