EGG was, that stuff got all kinds of scrubbed beforehand because there
were licenses for computer games, minis, etc., and all of those people
demanded a clear path. What no one anticipated was that the Queen Bitch at
TSR (Lorraine?) had decided that it would be her mission to prevent EGG
from ever publishing anything else for the rest of his life as long as
either of them lived, and that unethical, strictly-speaking illegal
behavior was only unveiled with DJ. EGG was not without fault, his
behavior helped create the morass of bad feelings at TSR, but the due
diligence was done before DJ and the endless lawsuits "should not" have
happened, i.e., TSR didn't have a leg to stand on, it was just 800-pound
gorilla spite.
I don't want to appear to be arguing about use of freelancers, but it was
not as easy as it appears. Certainly with recent technology it would be
easier, and we didn't have that then. But the big thing was that TNE was
new, and we had to establish a lot of things about the feel and atmosphere
of the game, and that's a lot more subtle and fiddly and requires the kind
of intimate, FTF contact you mention. With a mature game you CAN farm out
a lot more stuff, because it is much more clear what is going on and what
"right" looks like, but TNE just wasn't there yet in the first couple of
years.
By the way, somewhere in the last couple of years I sent out a couple of
messages about how I feel bad about how CoE worked out, and I owed you an
apology. I always feared that NO MATTER WHAT you did it would not be
"useable" but it got to the point that I felt so bad fending you off that
I figured, "what the hell, he wants to try this, I feel mean fending him
off, maybe we'll get lucky." And my fears turned out to be borne out, so
then I got to feel bad about that too. I don't know if you ever saw those
posts, but the point is that I'm sorry that happened to you.
You touch on true believers and earlier touched on star generation. I
still believe I don't have to apologize to anyone for how seriously I took
trying to repair that to the extent possible, but I definitely got stuck
between a rock and a hard place between a full fix and pissing off the
true believers and the Sacred Collection of UWPs, and you know what
happens when you compromise. Definitely my fault that I couldn't find a
compromise that worked better, and the data was fussy and fiddly enough
that it was hard for me to properly supervise and proof it, but given the
number of people that didn't want me to mess with it at all, what did get
done was fairly "heroic," if incomplete.
Re: publishing CoE, no hard feelings there, you had a lot invested. The
only twinge I had about it was who you published it with, but I don't
blame you for that, he was probably the only real option.
> I always wondered if EGG was totally upfront with GDW about his legal
> liabilities where TSR was concerned. My sense was that he was not, but
> not because he had evil intentions. It was just that he took a bad beat
> in a bad divorce and DJ was his last, best shot at doing something cool.
>
> Also, it was common knowledge in the gaming industry that TSR was pretty
> litigious (the rumors that circulated around the local game shop were even
> worse). Add in the wacky ex factor and well...
> As for freelancers, we were militia, and much like the militia that
> supported the American Continental Army, some were reliable,
> some...vaporized at the first sight of Redcoats (a deadline). Still,
> Washington and other military commanders had to rely on them and some of
> the best commanders, like Greene and Clark used them accomplish things
> that otherwise would have been impossible relying strictly on Continental
> regiments. Personally I wanted to give you A, but not being in Illinois,
> it made it challenging. The interactions you take for granted batting
> things back and forth around the office simply weren't there
> or...they...took...far...longer.... These days it would be much less
> difficult to get A, since Google Docs/Google Hangouts beats the hell out
> of fax, phone (at long distance rates), message boards, mailing lists, and
> the occasional GEnie live chat session for collaboration.
> As for the balance of your remarks, the real problem are the "true
> believers". They are the ones that decide you have violated the scared
> texts (usually the ones you wrote) or because you wouldn't implement their
> idea, they decide to sabotage yours. I moved forward with getting
> Children of Earth published because well, it was "do now or don't do it",
> because whatever Frank might have had in mind wasn't going to happen, not
> to take a crap on your work, and I had enough ready or nearly so to make
> it a reality. I'd have much preferred it have a GDW logo on the cover,
> but oh well. More on that story later.
> Somewhere on a crashed hard drive lay the TNE rules for creating
> courtesans/prostitutes/and other sex workers. It was well thought out
> and if I ever manage to find a copy saved to a ZIP drive or a floppy disk,
> or hard copy some place, I'll post them here.
>
>
>
were licenses for computer games, minis, etc., and all of those people
demanded a clear path. What no one anticipated was that the Queen Bitch at
TSR (Lorraine?) had decided that it would be her mission to prevent EGG
from ever publishing anything else for the rest of his life as long as
either of them lived, and that unethical, strictly-speaking illegal
behavior was only unveiled with DJ. EGG was not without fault, his
behavior helped create the morass of bad feelings at TSR, but the due
diligence was done before DJ and the endless lawsuits "should not" have
happened, i.e., TSR didn't have a leg to stand on, it was just 800-pound
gorilla spite.
I don't want to appear to be arguing about use of freelancers, but it was
not as easy as it appears. Certainly with recent technology it would be
easier, and we didn't have that then. But the big thing was that TNE was
new, and we had to establish a lot of things about the feel and atmosphere
of the game, and that's a lot more subtle and fiddly and requires the kind
of intimate, FTF contact you mention. With a mature game you CAN farm out
a lot more stuff, because it is much more clear what is going on and what
"right" looks like, but TNE just wasn't there yet in the first couple of
years.
By the way, somewhere in the last couple of years I sent out a couple of
messages about how I feel bad about how CoE worked out, and I owed you an
apology. I always feared that NO MATTER WHAT you did it would not be
"useable" but it got to the point that I felt so bad fending you off that
I figured, "what the hell, he wants to try this, I feel mean fending him
off, maybe we'll get lucky." And my fears turned out to be borne out, so
then I got to feel bad about that too. I don't know if you ever saw those
posts, but the point is that I'm sorry that happened to you.
You touch on true believers and earlier touched on star generation. I
still believe I don't have to apologize to anyone for how seriously I took
trying to repair that to the extent possible, but I definitely got stuck
between a rock and a hard place between a full fix and pissing off the
true believers and the Sacred Collection of UWPs, and you know what
happens when you compromise. Definitely my fault that I couldn't find a
compromise that worked better, and the data was fussy and fiddly enough
that it was hard for me to properly supervise and proof it, but given the
number of people that didn't want me to mess with it at all, what did get
done was fairly "heroic," if incomplete.
Re: publishing CoE, no hard feelings there, you had a lot invested. The
only twinge I had about it was who you published it with, but I don't
blame you for that, he was probably the only real option.
> I always wondered if EGG was totally upfront with GDW about his legal
> liabilities where TSR was concerned. My sense was that he was not, but
> not because he had evil intentions. It was just that he took a bad beat
> in a bad divorce and DJ was his last, best shot at doing something cool.
>
> Also, it was common knowledge in the gaming industry that TSR was pretty
> litigious (the rumors that circulated around the local game shop were even
> worse). Add in the wacky ex factor and well...
> As for freelancers, we were militia, and much like the militia that
> supported the American Continental Army, some were reliable,
> some...vaporized at the first sight of Redcoats (a deadline). Still,
> Washington and other military commanders had to rely on them and some of
> the best commanders, like Greene and Clark used them accomplish things
> that otherwise would have been impossible relying strictly on Continental
> regiments. Personally I wanted to give you A, but not being in Illinois,
> it made it challenging. The interactions you take for granted batting
> things back and forth around the office simply weren't there
> or...they...took...far...longer.... These days it would be much less
> difficult to get A, since Google Docs/Google Hangouts beats the hell out
> of fax, phone (at long distance rates), message boards, mailing lists, and
> the occasional GEnie live chat session for collaboration.
> As for the balance of your remarks, the real problem are the "true
> believers". They are the ones that decide you have violated the scared
> texts (usually the ones you wrote) or because you wouldn't implement their
> idea, they decide to sabotage yours. I moved forward with getting
> Children of Earth published because well, it was "do now or don't do it",
> because whatever Frank might have had in mind wasn't going to happen, not
> to take a crap on your work, and I had enough ready or nearly so to make
> it a reality. I'd have much preferred it have a GDW logo on the cover,
> but oh well. More on that story later.
> Somewhere on a crashed hard drive lay the TNE rules for creating
> courtesans/prostitutes/and other sex workers. It was well thought out
> and if I ever manage to find a copy saved to a ZIP drive or a floppy disk,
> or hard copy some place, I'll post them here.
>
>
>