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Current D&D Products in PDF form
sckeener writes "The latest Wizards of the Coast D&D product Frostburn has also been release as a PDF. There are also older D&D products in PDF format at RPGNow. The current products are being tested at Drivethrurpg.com with the catch being Adobe DRM locks on the PDFs."
...now if only I played RPGs, I could carry the books on my Palm, yay!
Or download them, DRM-free, from your favourite P2P network. Decisions, decisions...
Seeing as RPG books usually come jam packed with additional cut out pieces with permission granted to photocopy and all that, then maybe it would be an idea to make these extra bits available to download from the publisher's website.
Not everyone can afford / be arsed to find a colour photocopier in their neighbourhood.
$34.95 USD for a PDF? When I know I can get a real, physical book at the same price or cheaper? WTF?
as they would consider that distributing it beyond the machine you downloaded it on. And of course, your linux box is out too, I am assuming. As would be printing it, etc. I wonder if it expires as well?
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Anyone know Dmitry Sklyarov's number?
When they start pricing their non-physical versions like Monte does his, I will buy more Wizards books. That isn't to say I don't buy Wizards books now, but I mostly limit it to books that I'm getting a lot of use out of. If I'm just browsing I grab a copy from P2P. Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed was only $5 (there was some sort of special because I bought some other PDFs) so I bought it. For $5 I support one of my favorite designers, avoid doing something illegal, and get much better quality.
For those looking for legit copies of old AD&D books, check out the old 'Core Rules' CD. Came with a bunch of utilities, a mediocre character generator, and a bunch of the manuals in rich text format! There were other things on it as well, but having the tables in RTF format was worth the CD alone. I don't care if it is 'simple to remove' DRM like some other industries are promoting right now, I really do not want to screw with copy protection on stuff I shell out money for.
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Legal 3e sources:
D20 SRD(RTF files) Information from the core rulebooks, Deities and Demigods, the Psionics Handbook, and the Epic Level Handbook. Crystal Keep D20 Compilations Compilations of rules content indexes from various products(about six months out of date-last update included the Player's Guide to Faerun)-these indexes are expanded far beyond the standard, often including all the needed information for those feats/spells/whatevers.
P2P Networking: A downloaded copy of Unearthed Arcana can be rendered legal by taking some variety of PDF/Image editor and blacking out the following: The cover, the Contributors/Playtesters/Credits page, the Githyanki/Githzerai, Slaad and Yuan-ti bloodlines(and any other references to those races in the book).
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
Now you can drop it on a laptop? I applaud the advance in technology, don't get me wrong (Save your backs, kids! Don't stuff all those books in your backpacks!). However, it just strikes me that something is lost, just like the first time, many years ago, I saw a computer printed dungeon map as opposed to a hand-drawn one on hex or graph paper...
I feel old.
Dungeon Master: You enter a dark room. You hear breathing coming from the far corner. The cleric lights a torch. You encounter - A BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!! You have initiative, what do you do??
Warrior - I bash the screen with my fist.
Rogue - I sneak around back and unplug it.
Wizard - I cast Bigby's Typing Hands to press Ctrl-Alt-Del
Cleric - I cast a curse on Bill Gates
Sorceress - I summon Tech Support
I got ATLAS SHRUGGED from some p2p service and read all of it on my screen. Over eight fuckin hundred pages. An awesome book, sure, but my eyes hurt for a whole week after I finished!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm the head artist for the brood D20 Modern series Year of the Zombie, and we are releasing all of our books as both PDF and Dead Tree versions. PDF is really where most of the gaming books are headed. One nice thing that this allows is for companies to sell short campaigns for a few bucks each as PDFs, which is nice because they are often short enough to be resonalbly printed off by the DM, but it would not be reasonable to do a full print run for the books.
The nice thing about this setup is that it allows startup companies to sell their work without having to go through all the trouble of getting publishers to publish a book, and it allows established companies to put out short books.
PDF versions of books also are nice for people who run MUDs or games on IRC, where it is often more convenient to have a pdf on the computer.
While these are not the types of materials that one would want to get for reading on a PDA on long flights, there are many advantages of having electronic distributions of gaming text. [obligitory self-whoring]
Year of the zombie should be released soon, anyone interested in zombie themed D20 modern games should check it out
[/obligitory self-whoring]
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Game publishers should really do this kind of thing when they kill off a game line...
:-(
Take White Wolf for example. This year they killed off the entire line of previously existing World of Darkness games so that they could "reset" the whole world and start fresh. There are many similarities between the old games and the new games which have risen from their ashes (e.g. Vampire: The Requiem is very much like the previous Vampire: The Masquerade). However, there have been a LOT of changes, not just in rules, but primarily in setting.
This has a lot of WW purists cheesed off... "Where is my favourite clan? How could you get rid of them and keep clan X!", etc. There are a lot of people that would be happy to just keep continuing playing the old game, and that also includes people who like the new game as well.
Problem is, now all of the books for the old games are out of print. If you already have the books, well, you're golden for now... until they wear out (and yes, if you actually use them regularly they DO wear out quickly). For now, yeah, you could buy them online, or at your local game store, or whatever, but there is a finite supply. Eventually, they will be either impossible to find or too expensive to buy. At that point, the game will start to die as new players can't get books, etc.
IMHO, some fixed time after they kill off a game, I think they should just take every book that was ever released for it, and jam them onto a CD as PDFs. Sell that sucker for $20 or whatever. Then at least the game will live on forever in theory.
Luckily, I have a copy of the Vampire Revised CD-ROM that they came out with a few years ago, which has the core books on it. But, it doesn't have all the books, and it really really sucks for anything but a quick fact check as the viewable area of the pages is so damned small. A so-so solution at best I'm afraid
Mechanik
WOTC has a lot of old dnd material available for DL http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downl oads
Here's a link to a comment made on Enworld by Sigil
below is a cut&paste of the comment. It should be noted that I disagree with his views on DRM and the price of Frostburn. I am fine with both. I just think his comment sums up the pluses of PDFs in a table top RPG environment.
Sigil:
Speaking from my POV as an avid PDF consumer (though since I am also a PDF publisher, you may wish to take it with a grain of salt; I am trying as best I can not to bring publisher bias into the equation, but in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you I write PDFs too - though I should also tell you that my policies as a PDF publisher are essentially governed by, "if I were buying this product, what would I want?").
Quote:
Originally Posted by rowport
Hey, there! I am glad that you posted about this, because I am curious of the opinion of a true pdf fan: do you think that pricing the electronic document the same as the MSRP for the hardback volume is reasonable?
In two words, "{expletive edited for Eric's Grandma}, NO!"
Traditional (non-DRMed) PDFs have the following advantages over print products (in no particular order):
1 - They don't take up shelf space - when you have a collection of over 500 PDFs, as I do (at least, I'm pretty sure it's approaching 500) you appreciate not having to find room for 500 books.
2 - "Take only the parts you want" - As an extension of the above, you need only print small sections of the PDF that are relevant to you instead of lugging the whole thing around to your games. Alternatively, a DM can print only those portions of a PDF he wants his players to see.
3 - Cut and Paste - Again, related to "take the parts you want" but very nice for quickly pulling material from a dozen sources to create a customized "sourcebook" for your PC.
4 - Searchability - The "search" feature of a PDF lets you almost instantly find that nasty little rule to stump (or be) a rules-lawyer.
5 - Backups - PDFs are easier - and much cheaper - to "back up" in case of catastrophe than traditional print items. In some cases (such as RPGNow.com), you have the ability to send yourself re-download links of products you've already paid for in case of true catastrophe (e.g., the house burns down - at RPGNow.com, you can simply use a few clicks to regenerate your PDF collection for free).
6 - Cost - In theory, part of paying for a print product includes the cost of printing, binding, warehousing, and distributing - including the cost of materials (paper, ink, & glue); a PDF needs not include these costs (IIRC, a good rule of thumb is that publishers get around 25% of the MSRP for each book and that's BEFORE they have to account for printing costs). Of course, Economics 101 tells you that the price of a good has NOTHING to do with the cost of production and everything to do with how much people are willing to pay (soft drinks, for example, have HUGE profit margins for this very reason).
7 - Instant, Free Updates - Some PDF vendors update their products for free... again, because the cost of distribution, et al, is negligible... don't you wish you had gotten a free 3.5 PHB if you had bought the 3.0 PHB, for example?
It should be noted that DRMed PDFs often (not always) take away some of these advantages. In particular:
3 - Cut & Paste - Most Drivethrurpg PDFs limit your cut & paste ability to 10 cut/pastes in a 10-day period. This doesn't do away with the utility entirely, but does mitigate it considerably, as most people (a) don't want to be bothered rationing their cutting/pasting and (b) in my experience, want to cut lots of small sections rather than a few large ones.
5 - Backups - As has been discussed before, some of Adobe's limits (6 computers) can come into play; also, a computer without an internet connection (e.g., a laptop) can't be used at all to display things... not to mention the trouble with remembering
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I sort of agree, but my limit is when there is a legal alternative to downloading from a P2P network.
WotC is doing more than most of the Record Industry or MPAA. They are actually working with e-distributors to release a product. The least we can do as consumers is respect the designer's method of releasing a product. Either buy a hardcopy or buy the PDF, but do not download the PDF from a P2P network.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
As one who has purchased PDF's from Drivethrurpg.com and RPGNow.com I can honestly say that RPGNow is a much better alternative. Why? Well I have a linux box that I view my PDF on, I print it out at work, I also have a laptop for my game. DRM will not do. So i downloaded 2 programs which ripped it to another file and removed part of the process. I think took the file and then had another program 'clean' it up as far as fonts, searchability, and picture locations. Total time between installing software, reading manual, and doing the process: 3 hrs. Total time to repeat process: 30-45 min depending on the size. It still came out a lil blurry but otherwise very usable. Now I carry it around on my USB thumbdrive so it's handy and portable but did come out a bit larger in size. Go figure.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
They're my favorite rules, but no good scans of those anywhere. :-( Just some so-so pir8 scans I found on iRC, not even OCR'd.
The Rolemaster PDF's are much better priced! I paid $20 for both the HARP main book and Magic book.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Hey, I helped write that character generator! It wasn't medio... um... well, actually I guess you're right.
Still, the manuals in RTF were cool. Core Rules 2.0 (which is what I actually worked on) came with the manuals in RTF, Windows Help, and sweet, sweet HTML. Absolutely no DRM or anything similar; you could copy them onto your hard disk and do what you wanted with them. If you got the expansion, you even got all of the Complete Handbooks for all the main races and classes. That did rock hard. On the down side, it was only for the 2nd edition rehash books (the black bordered 2nd edition). As far as I know, there was no similar product for 3rd or 3.5 ed.
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Let me state *for the record* I've only had experience with the Core Rules v1.0, so I never tried your kit.
Growing up, character generators have been one of the primary motivators for learning new languages and platforms. From the HP28C calculator to the blackberry, and everything in between. The bar was pretty high for that one application. (have I properly backpedaled here?)
Ah, what a small world... Wish they had done the same with the newer books.
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Heh, no offense taken. Core Rules 1 and 2 were both full of compromises and had their weak points. That sort of compromise are why lots of money was invested in the goofy movie in CR1, why the interface is custom (and thus harder to use). I'm proud of lots of CR2, but there are big parts I wish could have been different, but it wasn't an option given the demands of TSR/WotC, the budget, and the release schedule. Still, for first job out of college, it rocked hard. (How many job interviews feature your future boss asking if you're willing to run a D&D game at the office? At one point Jim Ward played in a game I ran there.)
Similar compromises caused the 3e product (the Master Tools) to never really appear in a finished version. It's telling that eventually the E-Tools / Master Tools were taken from the original developer and handed to the open source group responsible for PCGen.
This seems as good a place to mention it as any... because I was working on the Core Rules 2.0, I got to visit TSR just as they were closing up and moving to Washington / Wizards of the Coast. I wrote up a bit about my visit to TSR, which might be interesting. It's still a draft (I'm hoping the co-worker mentioned in the story will give it a once-over), but it's reasonably polished at this point.
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The Hardcover book is $23.77 on amazon.com.
6 928964/qid=1096408239/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-5791 064-5229501?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/078
TSR did go to hell in a hand basket around then. After all the railing they did to the PCGen folks and a few other people building tools about copyright I opted to keep what I wrote to myself. (Mostly 1st edition stuff, with a few 2nd edition rules in the mix) Damn, though... definitely a sexy first job out of school.
Looking at your site you may have seen some of my krufty bioinformatics code. Didn't work for Accelrys, but I know they licensed some of the C code that could have used a bit more time. (grin)
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