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All D&D Books To Be Available As PDFs
sckeener writes "DriveThruRPG has just announced that it will be selling all of WotC's 3.5 Edition D&D products in e-book format - over 90 books. Wizards has elected not to make the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons available as eBooks at this time, but almost every other current Dungeons & Dragons title will be available from DriveThruRPG. New titles are scheduled to release one each weekday on DriveThruRPG: Some of the titles to be released first include: Book of Vile Darkness, Heroes of Horror, Arms and Equipment Guide, d20 Apocalypse, Champions of Ruin, Complete Arcane, Unearthed Arcana, Masters of the Wild and Book of Challenges. The books are still full price and are DRM protected." I'd be happier about this if they were even slightly discounted, but it's a good step. Heroes of Horror is worth every penny.
There's no printing, storage, or shipping costs associated with the PDF versions. I'd cheerfully start purchasing every one of the books, but no way I'm paying that much for an electronic download. I think my price point for this would be no more than $10. And what about upgrades? Errata? What's the policy on that?
Actually, you can already get a ton of them as pdf. And not too expensive, either.
t /aDAndD2/
http://paizo.com/store/downloads/wizardsOfTheCoas
"Wizards has elected not to make the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons available as eBooks at this time,"
Perhaps the title should be reworded to say, all but the best selling ones.
-Jason
I just checked, and for Frostburn (for instance), I could save $13 by buying it in hardcover form from amazon rather than buying the PDF. Sure, a PDF is more convenient in some cases, but this is ridiculous.
Ideally, I'd want some kind of subscription service. Let me sign up with DTRPG, authorize my credit card, and whenever a new book came out $5-$10 came off my card and I got the PDF right away. If they're worried about people pirating the PDF, a lower price would help that to... for $5 bucks I'd just give books away if I wanted to share the rules.
I think they mean the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual I. But you can get basically free copies of these in the SRD site. It won't be PDF, but they'll be good enough. Or use http://www.d20srd.org/ for your core book needs. Except for the XP chart, starting gold for high level characters, and some WOTC monsters.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
You don't need these. Aside from the lovely consept art, most of the D&D content can be found in the SRD (System Reference Document). Which encompasess the core rulebooks, as well as some of the fringe 3.5 content (Psionics, Divine feats, etc) You can download it in chunks or the whole thing. They are in unencumbered RTF files. Totally free too! In Wizard's own words, here is the missing content from the SRD: Q: What's missing from the SRD compared to the core D&D rulebooks? A: Mostly the "flavor" elements. There are no named gods, none of the spells have significant NPC names, there's no mention of Greyhawk, etc. You'll also note that there are no rules for character creation, for advancing characters in level, calculating experience, or anything else related to the topics forbidden by the d20 System Trademark Guide. Here is the D&D SRD: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/s rd35
Here is the D20 Modern SRD (MSRD):
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/m srd
It is not a god that would do evil biddings, but only a mortal and its limited knowledge would let such atrocities exist
This may be a big deal for D&D fans, but for people who play RPGs in general it's nothing new.