A Talk With William W. Connors

A 30th Anniversary Interview

Bill Connors was one of the few people I already knew when I got to TSR in 1994. We had a mutual friend, [former Iron Crown Enterprises editor] Kevin Barrett, and I'd met Bill at a previous Gen Con. (I remember that he was wearing a really cool suit and I was in a T-shirt and shorts. In one brief evening he changed my opinion about the mystique of being a game designer -- that they didn't have to be dorks, they could be really cool -- and I immediately wanted to be him.) He helped me get acquainted, and (on my second day) dragged me out of my cubicle to be subjected to the Mask of Valor, which you've read about in previous interviews.

Bill had this great presence at TSR, one that made everyone around him feel as though he ran the place. He has an extremely quick wit and always seemed to have just the right quip for every situation. But for all his acerbic side, Bill is a really nice guy (deep down -- he probably wouldn't want you to know that). If there was fun to be had, Bill was at the center of it, whether it was keeping track of embarrassing quotes on the quote board, playing games (usually baseball-related ones), organizing trips to see local minor league games, playing on the TSR softball team (sense a theme here?), and any of a number of other fun things.

As a designer, Bill was creative and, taking that one more important step, innovative. He was the lead designer on the (underrated, in my opinion) Saga system (the engine behind Dragonlance: Fifth Age and the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game), and one of the definitive voices behind all things Ravenloft. It's hard for me to think about TSR without thinking about William W. Connors. I'm more than pleased to be able to interview him to commemorate the anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.

Monte Cook: How did you come to start playing D&D?

William W. Connors: The story of my first game was published in Dragon at one point in a series they called "First Quests." After it came out, a lot of people told me they didn't believe it. Still, it was true. I'll try to sum it up in as few words as possible.

I was in my early teens and pretty tired of beating everyone in my family and school game club at Risk. I had heard about something called "war games" and knew there was a hobby store near my home where you could buy them. I went in to check them out and struck up a conversation with one of the clerks. Turns out he and some friends had just started a new Starships & Spacemen game the week before. They invited me to join them and I gladly accepted.

The next weekend, my father dropped me off just before noon. I promised to give him a call when we were done and eagerly started rolling up a character. Well, my first adventure turned into a marathon game in which I fought triffids, stole a starship, explored an abandoned alien base, and otherwise had a great time. When we finally called it a night, it was probably two in the morning. The GM gave me a lift home.

Well, my dad had waited up for me. I had forgotten to call him and tell him I had a lift home. He was about as mad as I've ever seen anyone get. I remember him saying, "You're never doing that again!"
Like many teenage boys, I didn't get along too well with my father. I think he sealed my fate the moment he said that. From that day forward, gaming has been my life and my career. Honest.

Monte: When did you start at TSR? How did you get the job?

Bill: I started writing game material for the now defunct Game Designers Workshop, designing for Traveller. How that came about is also something of a funny story. A friend of mine was doing artwork for GDW and had agreed to write an article detailing the Imperial Palace. Turns out he was a better artist than a writer and asked me to pinch hit for him.

Well, my work on Traveller led me into contact with another freelancer named Gary Thomas, who was also working for TSR. He put me in touch with Karen Boomgarden, who was in charge of the freelance editing pool at the time, and before long I was working for TSR. My first assignments were on the Gamers Handbook for the Marvel Universe and then the first several volumes of the Monstrous Compendiums for 2nd Edition. After a few months of freelancing, TSR contacted me with a very generous job offer and I gladly accepted.

Monte: What were you doing before that? How (if at all) did that help prepare you for working on role playing games?

Bill: Before I started working in the gaming industry, I was working as a freelance journalist for the Nashua Telegraph (in New Hampshire) and working for some defense contractors. I like to say I was building bombs, but in truth I was primarily working on ECM systems. Evenings and weekends were pretty much devoted to my game group, the Nashua Game Snobs. Clearly, the latter gave me a chance to really focus on learning how to judge games and create exciting campaigns. The fact that my group was very enthusiastic and imaginative made every gaming session memorable. If it weren't for them, I might never have developed the skills that led me into professional game design work.

Monte: What was your indoctrination into the company like?

Bill: Actually, the most interesting part of this story occurred before I started working at TSR. I was interviewed for the job along with a good friend of mine, Tim Brown (he'd been my editor at GDW and I put him in touch with TSR). In my interview, I told them they should probably hire Tim if they were only looking for one designer. Apparently, he said the same thing about me. In the end, they decided to hire us both. I guess that worked out okay!

As an aside, the first day I started at TSR, Jim Ward (my boss) handed me an assignment and told me the deadline for it had been last Friday. I was already late! As I have written elsewhere, I don't think I ever caught up.

Monte: Although you worked with TSR/Wizards for a long time, when you think back, what's the most memorable period?

Bill: I think it would be hard to pick a time working for TSR (at least, in its Lake Geneva [Wisconsin] incarnation) that wasn't memorable. That was a top-notch staff of creative, intelligent people with a great attitude and a real affection for each other. If I had to single out a situation that was most exciting, I guess I'd say it was the time I spent working with [editor] Andria Hayday and [designer] Bruce Nesmith in the early days of Ravenloft. The three of us worked well together and I was truly honored to be associated with them. Bruce was very much a mentor to me, sharing his greater experience and really helping me learn how to design better and better games. Andria was amazingly dedicated to the line and worked very hard to make sure every product was as good as it could be. To this day, I think her Ravenloft was the best one published in the line. In the end, I came to be called "Mr. Ravenloft," but it was Bruce and Andria who created all that was special about that setting. I was just lucky enough to go along for the ride.

Monte: What products are you most proud of still today, and what was the process like to work on them?

Bill: I think the two products I had the most fun working on were Masque of the Red Death and Dragonlance: Fifth Age. In both cases, I think this was the result of the people I was fortunate enough to work with on those projects.

On Masque, I worked with the talented and eagle-eyed [editor] Anne Brown to create an AD&D campaign set in the 1890s. It was a direct spin-off of the Ravenloft line (although we never said it in print, the Red Death was one of Ravenloft's Dark Powers -- exiled for violations of their mysterious code of conduct). I put more effort and research into that product than anything else I've ever written -- and loved every minute of it.

On Dragonlance, I was handed the assignment of saving the campaign setting after it was nuked* in Dragons of Summer Flame. I guess it was doomed from the start, because there was no way fans of the traditional Dragonlance campaign would accept it. Still, I love a challenge. I was teamed up with [editor] Sue Weinlein Cook, who was an avid fan of the line and one of the most delightful people I have ever met. I found her enthusiasm for the project impossible to resist and soon found myself swept up in it.

Sadly, both Masque of the Red Death and Dragonlance: Fifth Age met a good deal of critical acclaim and a resounding thud in sales. As I am unable to accept any blame for such things myself, I fault poor marketing at TSR for their failures. Certainly, everything I did on the lines was brilliant. Honest.

Monte: From the perspective of someone who worked with it extensively, what's your overall view of Dungeons & Dragons as a game, particularly as it's transitioned through various editions? And does a game designer look at a game differently than a gamer who's just in it for fun?

Bill: Okay, that's a loaded question. As a game designer, I have a great fondness for the whole notion of roleplaying games. I have a large collection of obscure RPGs from a very long time ago and feel the industry has really fallen on hard times. These days, games seem to thrive on licenses and rehashing of things already done (usually better) long ago. See, don't I sound bitter?

I was fond of 1st Edition and Basic D&D in their day, though hardly an avid fan. In the days before 2nd Edition came out, I was a die-hard Traveller and Villains & Vigilantes fan. In fact, when I took my first assignment with TSR, I had to have the rulebooks in hand throughout to research the game as I was writing, but don't tell anybody that.

When 2nd Edition came out, I was really impressed. Possibly because they let me work on it a little bit (the Monstrous Compendiums) but also because it was an outstanding evolution of the game. [Senior designer] Zeb Cook and the rest of the 2nd Edition team took a game system that had really been bent and twisted in a dozen directions and produced what may very well be the best roleplaying game I have ever played. Sure, it had classes and levels and other throwbacks to the days of miniatures games, but it just felt right. From a design standpoint, the team that developed that game was given a set of goals from many different sources, and they rose to the challenge. As a gamer, there are certainly other games I would rather play. As a designer, however, with an understanding of the scope of the project and the effort involved in it, I can't help but be impressed to this day.

In my mind, 3rd Edition was really a letdown. I could never work up any enthusiasm for it, because it just didn't feel like AD&D anymore. It always felt to me like a house rules game at a convention. That's not to say that some very talented people didn't work on it, but the heart and soul of the game was gone. To me, it wasn't all that much more exciting than playing with an Excel spreadsheet.

Monte: Tell us about the last days of TSR from your perspective.

Bill: For me, the saddest part of TSR's passing was watching the creative team get disassembled. Wizards of the Coast moved almost everyone who wanted to go out to Seattle, but many of the company's most talented people (Zeb Cook, Bruce Nesmith, Jim Ward, and Tim Brown, to name but a few) were long gone by then.

Over the next few months, the powers that be in the new management didn't show a great deal of interest in maintaining the fan base that had been built up over the years. In fact, I heard one member of the Wizards management team respond to a comment that the pending design for 3rd Edition might alienate a lot of fans with words to the effect of: "Screw them, I don't care about them. We'll get new fans." To me, that whole attitude was just very, very sad.

Monte: Please share with us a good story about your time working on D&D.

Bill: I guess I should tell my favorite story about my time at TSR. It's unique, because it makes [CEO] Lorraine Williams (the woman many people -- almost certainly correctly -- blame for running the company into the ground) out to be a hero. Because of that, a lot of people don't believe it. I swear to you, though, it is 100 percent true and also explains why the company never had a more dedicated employee than I. I stayed with that sinking ship to the end and would never have left under Lorraine's watch.

Not too long after I started working at TSR, my wife was hospitalized with a very serious condition. We had two young boys (I think the oldest was three) and were really still getting used to life in the Midwest (we had moved to Lake Geneva from the east coast). It became apparent that Kathy was going to be hospitalized on and off for an extended period of time. In fact, for a good many weeks I would pick the kids up from day care, take them home, put them to bed, and then wait for a phone call telling me that my wife was dead. It was, to say the least, not a good time in my life.

It also became clear that I was not going to be able to continue working full time. Thus, with a very heavy heart, I went in to the office of the vice president and turned in my resignation. "I can't tell you how sorry I am to do this," I said, "because I have never had a job I liked so much or worked with such wonderful people." With tears in my eyes, I went upstairs and started to pack up my office.

A few minutes later, I got a phone call from Mike [Martin] (the aforementioned VP). I went down to his office and was informed that my resignation was not being accepted. He had called Lorraine (she was in Germany at a trade show) and told her what I had said. The long and the short of it was that TSR advanced me as much vacation time as I needed to care for my wife on the condition that I get in to the office as much as I could. Over the course of the next six weeks or so, I was in the office about once or twice a week. During that time, I never missed a paycheck and everyone else on the staff pitched in to keep my projects on schedule. I can't even begin to imagine what would have happened to my family if it were not for the understanding and generosity of Lorraine.

For a company that was so often accused of Satan worshipping, they did okay by me.

Monte: What have you been doing in your post-Wizards life?

Bill: I have come to the conclusion that working in the entertainment / gaming industry must be more of a calling for me than a job. After leaving Wizards/TSR, I returned to school and got a degree in graphic design. I guess I wanted to see how the other half of the publishing industry lived. I started out working freelance, but soon found myself hooked up with longtime friends and fellow TSR veterans Tim Brown, Jim Ward, and Lester Smith at Fast Forward Entertainment. When that went belly up, I decided to give the game industry the boot and move on to a more lucrative field.

Fate, however, had other ideas for me. Answering a generic looking ad in a local paper for a graphic designer, I found myself in an interview where one of the first questions I was asked was -- honestly -- have you had any experience with games? After I stopped laughing, I pulled out my portfolio. Before long, I accepted a position as a graphic designer with an Illinois-based company called Senario. In a matter of weeks, they asked me to accept a promotion to project manager and put me in charge of the Video Entertainment division of the company. Our products are in major stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, available on QVC and the Home Shopping Network, and the company shows no signs of slowing down.

Once again, I am working with some very talented and creative people in a job where my ultimate goal is to make customers happy. The owner of the company is a top-notch guy, and the work is both entertaining and challenging. I look forward to a long career with Senario and hope all of my former mates end up in equally good places.

* At the end of the dynamic novel Dragons of Summer Flame, the world of Krynn was ravaged by a powerful Chaos God and his minions, abandoned by its gods, and left without magic. A bit of a departure from your typical fantasy roleplaying setting!

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