 Alright, so when we last left off Lorraine Williams, the manager of TSR, had just been made majority shareholder, and the sharemass of bad vibes that she gave off caused the old guy to do a backflip right out of the company. Funnily enough, he was actually the one who hired her in the first place, because the Bloombrothers were business savants. If by savant you mean idiot savant, and if by idiot savant you mean idiot. They were business idiots. And their business idiocy allowed Lorraine Williams to rise up to the top of the company, where she now ruled with an iron fist. Her first order of business, get money. The Bloombrothers may have gotten her into her seat, but they still left the company $1.5 million dollars in debt, and that needed to be taken care of first. Luckily, she'd been the general manager of the company before her knee-jerk promotion, so she was less business idiot and more straight business. Under her leadership, TSR expanded from just selling board games into selling comic books and magazines, similar to the ones that featured beloved and culturally relevant character Buck Rogers, whom Lorraine personally owned and gained a rudimentary understanding of pop culture from. The ultimate goal of expansion also led to the creation of dozens of new settings, such as Darksun, Alkdeem, Ravenloft, and 5e's future favorite fantasy land, The Forgotten Realms. The basic business model looked like this, release a setting, all the fans will lose their shit and buy it, make a bunch of additional material for that setting, get more money, and then drop it and make a different setting that all the fans will lose their shit over. In the short term, this worked, as the sheer overload of settings meant that if fans liked something, it could be capitalized on, but if it sucked, then they could just sweep it onto the rug and pretend it never happened. Through these tactics, TSR managed to recoup its losses and stay at the tabletop of the industry through the rest of the 80s. The second prong of her strategy could affectionately be referred to as fuck gygax, with a cactus, preferably. It started with the fact that as long as Ernest was considered the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, TSR would never be able to get rid of him. So Lorraine decided to create her own Dungeons & Dragons, with Blackjack and Hookers, as a way of divorcing Ernest from his legacy. This is how AD&D's second edition came along, and you'll find that new editions of D&D usually coincide with somebody getting fucked over. So don't expect 5th edition to end until Hasbro gets eaten by the big mouse, but I'm getting ahead of myself. TSR released 2nd edition as a complete overhaul of the original game, and suddenly Ernest got the same treatment that he had given Dave years earlier. But without the backing of hyper-aggressive lawyers like Lorraine had, Ernest didn't get any percentage of the royalties. But he didn't take this defeat lying down, and after sailing off into the sunset when he left TSR, he came sailing right back with a new company, Games Designers Workshop, and a new fantasy role-playing game called Dangerous Journeys, which Lorraine immediately recognized as a threat, both because of Ernest's reputation as the creator of D&D, and because she didn't actually know how these games worked. So maybe this was going to be better than what she had, and that couldn't be allowed. So she sacked her lawyers on Ernest once again and destroyed his new game before it could start, cutting the legs off of GDW and finally removing Ernest as a threat for good. Despite these good developments, Lorraine was still having a problem that couldn't be fixed with bureaucracy. Making a million supplements and settings meant that quality control was of no consequence, except that it was a consequence to the players of the game. Crazy broken shit came out and fans just had to roll with it, which is where our cultural acceptance of lopsided power differences comes from. It didn't help that in addition to the short and strict schedules, Lorraine was unwilling to let the developers of her own game playtest the material that they were putting out, because she saw it as an excuse to, quote, sit around and play games. And if there's one thing a games distribution company wants to avoid more than anything, it's people playing games. Also, since she was a Christian in the late 80s, she outright banned any material that would be seen as anti-God, including demons and devils, letting players play as evil people, anything involving the sex and a bunch of other nebulous concepts. It's commonly accepted that the image of TSR profited in spite of her, thriving off of the goodwill that the brand had built up, as well as the actually talented people working under her who created massively popular settings that are still being reprinted today in novels. Of course, no amount of luck could save her forever, and as the 1990s rolled around, Lorraine was met with the bane of all bad business owners, competition. While TSR cornered the role-playing game market, two new challengers entered the ring and started taking pieces of the gaming pie for themselves. Games Workshop showed up with two fistfuls of war games, Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Rogue Trader, which would soon be retitled as Warhammer 40k, a badass macho spaceman romp that was meant to lampoon the ridiculous and overly edgy mindset of the 80s attitude era, but would eventually go on to slam face first into Poe's Law and become the very thing it swore to destroy. Meanwhile, a completely new and innovative game was sweeping the nerd scene named Magic the Gathering, the intensely rewarding and rules-heavy Magic Battle Card game created and owned by none other than Wizards of the Coast. Between these two rising titans, Lorraine felt the pressure and knew that TSR would have to innovate if it wanted to stay in the ring. She knew that she was basically already competing directly with GW in the Miniatures game, but thought that the power of TSR could crush Wizards of the Coast if they rolled out their own version of the world's first collectible card game, so she took a look at what D&D had to offer and honed in on the most iconic parts, Dragons and Dice. The resulting product was a collectible dice game where players would buy packs of colored math rocks that corresponded to different elements and had symbols on them that allowed for various powers to be used, with the ultimate goal of taking terrain from the other player or otherwise killing all their units. You could buy a pack of Dragon Dice with a random assortment of colors and symbols, and whoever had the best collection would win, as long as the dice gods allowed it. The game was actually pretty good in that sort of novelty way, and as an avid board game junkie, if I saw a Dragon Dice sitting on a shelf somewhere, I'd consider buying it if I could get enough of the pieces together. Financially, it sold well, too, with TSR shelling out more money to exponentially increase the amount of Dragon Dice packs in game stores, as well as releasing new types of dice that actually represented dragons. Unfortunately, what Lorraine expected to be a knockout punch against Wizards turned into an uno-reverse card. As where she saw immense staying power, the reality was a passing if quirky fad, and once that fad was over, Toy Store owners were left with racks of useless dice that they didn't want, so they exercised their right to return products to the manufacturer, and soon enough, TSR was choking on the plastic that was meant to save them. Full trucks of Dragon Dice, costing millions of dollars would just roll back into the company warehouses with a sticky note that said return to sender. This miscalculation spelled financial disaster for TSR, and in 1997 Wizards of the Coast, the very company that they were trying to compete with bought out TSR and all of its products, including the much-beloved Dungeons and Dragons. TSR would officially be dissolved three years later, and over the years, the brand name would be picked up by a new team, since at the time that Wizards got it, its reputation was so beaten down that they decided it wasn't even worth keeping. Currently, TSR is owned by a crusty old transphobe named Ernie Gygax, the son of our late hero, Ernest, and at the time of this writing, his current business model seems to be destroying his father's legacy so hard that people won't stop talking about it, and then coasting on the small but consistent revenue of edgy reactionaries whose parents never hugged them because that would be gay. As for Lorraine Williams, she left the nerd scene completely because she never wanted to be there in the first place, and she spent her last few years trying to get people to care about Buck Rogers again, to a resounding who? Moving back to the present day of 1997, Wizards of the Coast had just acquired TSR, and in a show of good faith, offered to relocate all the TSR employees so that they could keep their jobs. At this point, Wizards of the Coast was still owned by its original founder, Peter Adzkson, who was a pretty nice dude that put stock in the value of human life. In fact, the name, Wizards of the Coast, came from a cabal of mages that he had in his own personal D&D setting. So it's safe to say that he was a fan, and he intended on treating the D&D IP with care and respect. He even spent three years fixing D&D's public image by making reparations with people like Ernest, David Arnson, third-party creators like R.A. Salvatore, and especially the Homebrew community, to elation and applause from the greater D&D fan base. Truly, P.D. was the man that the game desperately needed. It is such a shame then that, at the turn of the millennium, Wizards got noticed by a bigger fish and the long shadow of the oligarchy swooped in and devoured it, sending Peter Packing, although he bought Gen Con two years later, so he sure landed on his feet, and leaving D&D in the hands of the soulless one. In the same way that Ernie had screwed over David and Lorraine had screwed over Ernie in turn, the soulless one could not stand idly by as someone else made money off of Dungeons & Dragons, so a new product quickly became the main priority, with Wizards of the Coast combining the minds of TSR veterans Ralph Williams and Monty Cook, as well as WOTC TTRPG designer Jonathan Tweet in order to brainstorm what would become the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Johnny Johnny had been making smaller RPGs for years, and he wrote the Player's Handbook. Cookie Monster wrote the Dungeon Masters Guide and then later would work on the 2002 edition of Call of Cthulhu. Ralph Williams, on the other hand, had been the most involved with D&D up until now because he went to high school with Ernest's future transfer above the sun, Ernie, which granted him access to the Gygaxian estate, where in his youth he play-tested advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules given to him by Ernest himself. He wrote the Monster Manual. With their powers combined, they managed to create a game system that most modern D&D fans would actually be able to recognize as D&D. Unlike the older editions, whose rules compared to now were like trying to speak old English while only knowing Nihongo. While the rules overhaul simplified the game from the abstract mathematics of second edition, it was still seen as the tabletop equivalent of Spaghetti Code, due in part to their adoption of Lorraine's throw everything out there and see what happens style of content creation. Although actually being allowed to play their game, tighten the quality from, let's hope that this isn't that bad, to, it probably won't be that bad. The unwieldy mess of new rules was handled in part by embracing the mindset of, DMs will ban whatever's overpowered. And so it spawned a renaissance of min-maxing, munchkinizing, home-brewing, power-gaming, number-crunching, mind-numbing fun. For seven years, the game thrived by releasing crazy shit and letting the community decide its fate. For fans, there was wide elation, but this design philosophy was obviously not without its flaws. Despite attempting to curb second editions wildly inconsistent quality, 3e was still a fuster cluck, and every year came dozens of new supplements that only further fustered its cluck. They tried releasing amended versions of the player's handbook, and Ralph even authored the Sage device column to help clarify rules and keep the crunchy ship from sinking. Jackson Hayme, a writer for the unbiased and trustworthy tabloid ScreenRant, made note of the problem as he wrote that Wizard of the Coast printed 12 different core D&D rule books between 2000 and 2007. This quote was so important that it made it into the Wikipedia article, so it has to be true. The first big attempt at getting over the hump of eroding mechanics was in the form of D&D 3.5 edition, released in 2003, three years after 3e came out, and it combined all of the then-current rules changes and updates in much the same way that AD&D was formed. However, the decision to brand this as a direct update to the current edition and not a spin-off like AD&D made it understood that future releases would all be in reference to 3.5 and not base 3e, officially removing the advanced from Dungeons & Dragons and ending the concept of having two D&D brands running at the same time. From now on, the only way was forward, baby, and forward it went. For the seven years that third edition was alive, Wizard of the Coast kept pumping out update after update, spurned on by a fan base happy to spend their money, which put happy dollar signs in the soulless one's eyes. However, the reality of each release putting the game on shakier and shakier ground mechanics-wise was making the fan base uneasy, and an uneasy fan base was making the soulless one sweat. So it imposed upon Wizard of the Coast an idea to rejuvenate the money magnet of D&D, an idea that would lead the game down a polarizing path that had never been before C.E.N. Get it, because that's a word-based pun on 4e. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to share it with all your friends and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can dive deeper into the dungeon of dice. But yeah, Daffy out.