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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."
$34.95 USD for a PDF? When I know I can get a real, physical book at the same price or cheaper? WTF?
Anyone know Dmitry Sklyarov's number?
now if only I played RPGs, I could carry the books on my Palm, yay!
Heh. I used to run my dungeons in a FileMaker Pro database on a borrowed PowerBook Duo. I built the worlds on my Quadra 700 and transferred it to the Duo via floppy disk (the owner had a dock). The most fun was coming up with sound effects to deal with game events: chimes for treasure, screams for player deaths, howls for monster deaths and a soundbite of Letterman saying "You babies!" for player complaints.
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'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
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