Well, Here I Am. And I'm Not Leaving

A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry Through One Designer's Eyes, Part 2

It was the very last day of my summer internship at ICE, and my boss, Coleman, called me into his office. By that time, I was pretty sure I knew what this was going to be about. There had been hints from a few people over the previous week or so, and Coleman had asked me a few questions about what my plans were for the fall and my living arrangements and whatnot.

So when he offered me a full-time position, it wasn't a complete surprise, but it was a moment of real joy. I had had very little idea what I was going to do with my life after the internship was done if I didn't get a full-time job at Iron Crown, so my whole approach had been to make myself as indispensable as I could all summer long. I guess it worked.

Plus, the position was an even better one than I'd hoped for. I was going to be the series editor for Rolemaster. Rolemaster was my game of choice at the time, and had been throughout the preceding four years. "Series Editor" -- or, as it was also called, "Line Editor" -- meant that basically I was in charge of the Rolemaster line of products, which was in full swing at the time. The Rolemaster Companion books were some of ICE's top sellers, and so we were going to continue putting out one of those a year plus other books: NPCs, themed "companions," and so forth. I loved it all because it was about tinkering with the rules and adding new options. It was a real open door of creativity at the time, with an audience very receptive to new ideas and a product line geared to serving them up.

The Harsh Realities

So then, I was a bit disappointed when I really started in on the job and found that not everyone in the office shared my love of new ideas. Oh, I don't mean they opposed new ideas, they had just become jaded after years in the industry. And I can understand that. Still, it was more than a little disheartening. I'd get a proposal in from an author (the vast majority of what ICE published was written by freelancers) and be excited about it, or come up with my own idea that I'd be excited about, and it was impossible to share that excitement with anyone else in the office.

While folks around the office were always telling stories about games run in the past, there were basically no active Rolemaster campaigns going on at this time. So I started one, but it soon folded, mainly because I was discouraged by the players' "been there, done that," attitude.

The other harsh reality that I had to face was ICE's poor financial situation. Now, I knew things were a bit dodgy -- they had been throughout the summer I was there. But everything came crashing down that fall, when things went from bad to worse. A number of people were laid off. The office space was cut in about half to save money on rent. Those of us in the office had to go work in the warehouse now and again when they were understaffed.

The only reason that I, as the newest guy there, got to keep my job was likely because I was the lowest paid person on staff. Even then, paychecks were frequently delayed (and sometimes missed altogether). And my job duties expanded. I became the Series Editor for the Hero Games line, too, so I would spend about half my time on each game's products.

ICE had gained the license to do Hero Games a few years earlier when the owners of Hero Games determined that they couldn't really make a go of it anymore, despite their games' popularity. ICE had good distribution and good printer relationships, so it seemed like a fairly good fit. Although there were various aspects to the Hero line -- Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, etc. -- the flagship of the line was Champions, the super hero game. I'd played Champions before and liked it, but giving me the whole line to manage was a lot to take on at once. In retrospect, too much. But I was overconfident in my abilities at the time and thought I could handle anything (and would have been afraid to complain anyway).

Now, I said it seemed like a fairly good fit, but of course it really wasn't. There was virtually no crossover between the Rolemaster/MERP audience and the Champions audience. ICE tried to do products that had stats for both lines in them, and that only made both audiences unhappy. The ICE office was made up of the old guard, who were all Rolemaster people, and the more recent hires (other than me), who were there because they loved Hero. It was a red state/blue state style dichotomy and suddenly I was put in the position of being both the "Rolemaster guy" and the "Champions guy." I would literally be on the phone listening to some Champions author ridiculing Rolemaster one minute, and then find myself in a conversation with someone on staff bashing Hero. Or vice versa. The audiences were so disparate, in fact, that very few people -- fans and authors alike -- knew that I ran both lines; neither group looked at the other's products.

My work suffered. Things at ICE got financially worse and worse.

The Up Side

But still, you know, I was working on games. I was a part of the game industry. I was the guiding hand of the game that had provided me with lots of fun for years. That kind of thing counts for something -- in fact, it counts for a lot. Despite it all, it was still an exciting time for me.

Plus, I made a lot of great friends. Rob Bell, Kevin Barrett, and Coleman Charlton were fun to work alongside, and I stayed friends with Rob even after he left (in my role as Hero Series Editor, I had "taken his place," but as game industry luminaries like Allen Varney would often remind me, I in no way took his place). In fact, I'm still occasionally in touch with Rob and Kevin today.

Rob taught me the important lesson that RPG supplements aren't created for great GMs, because great GMs don't need them. (Not that great GMs don't use them, they don't need them. So you can't assume that the audience is great GMs. Assume that the audience is made of average GMs.) Kevin and Coleman taught me that in the game industry, despite the way it appeared from the consumer level, there wasn't a lot of actual competition. TSR and D&D certainly weren't the competition. In the late 80s/early 90s, ICE and other "second-tier" companies like GDW, Steve Jackson, and West End fed off the scraps that TSR left behind, and were happy to do so. Almost without exception, every member of our various audiences was a former D&D player. That person left D&D looking for something simpler, something more complicated, or something different, and all the second tier companies offered the customer their various options. But the options were really so different that these game companies didn't have to fight over customers that much. Just as the Rolemaster and Hero audiences didn't have much overlap, neither did the GURPs, the Twilight 2000, or the Star Wars audiences. In other words, Rolemaster didn't really lose sales to Cyberpunk or Twilight 2000, because the people who played those games wouldn't have played Rolemaster, no matter what. And vice versa. Plus, D&D was just in another league.

(I'm oversimplifying and generalizing, of course. There were people who played many different game systems. But such people usually buy enough games that they bought everything that appealed to them, so that's not really a competitive situation either. It's not like Honda versus Toyota, where each car sold is one less car a competitor will sell.)

The Early 1990s

As every codger says, things were different back then. But they really were. This was before collectible card games existed. Before EverQuest or Warcraft. The "game industry" really meant "roleplaying game industry" then. You didn't have to qualify it. Wargames were dying and board games were still a fairly minor blip. Roleplaying games were king.

Still, things had become complacent in the industry. The game companies that had started with great creative fires had become companies that churned out yet another supplement for whatever game they were working on. I suspect that if you looked at the timeline of the industry as a whole, this would be a real low point. So, "hooray," a fine time to join the ranks, right? I was told time and again that RPGs would be dead in five years, replaced by computer games (and yes, it was in 1990 that I first heard this). I'd go to conventions and meet other industry types and find the same jaded sensibilities I saw in some of my coworkers. Most people in the industry didn't actually play the games they were working on, or if they did, it was only rarely. And they would say so with a strange sort of pride, as though actually playing games was beneath them. I remember the looks of disdain and startled surprise from other pros at my first Gen Con when I went off to actually play games with actual gamers. There was an undercurrent of arrogance among many of my peers, and even a mild contempt for the audience.

I suspect this is why I didn't make a lot of friends within the industry on the whole, particularly early on. But really, it's not so hard to see where they were coming from. Across the board, none of us were getting paid much. We were all overworked. And let's face it, cynicism is nothing if not virulent. So I don't find it too hard to excuse what seemed like arrogance and contempt for what it really was: disenchantment and fatigue.

I think the products published at that time really reflect this attitude. This was not a time of innovation and excitement. There were exceptions, of course, like Ars Magica, Vampire, and to some extent Rifts and Shadowrun (and some of those actually came out in the late 80s). And there were a smattering of interesting supplements, like some of the Rolemaster Companions, or solid new editions, like Champions. But by the mid-90s, even these games felt somewhat tired. And there was less and less coming out to keep gamers excited. The wheat was getting hard to sift from the chaff, and sadly, nowhere was this more true than at the core of it all, TSR. There, as I would soon learn first hand, cynicism and Just-Another-Supplement Syndrome reigned supreme.

Next: In Part 3, things at ICE really start to fall apart. I jump ship and go it on my own, only to get an offer I couldn't refuse (although I thought I could). Plus, a simple little card game changes everything.

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