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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.
I love this idea. While I like having my nice tidy bookshelves full of books, being able to have my laptop right there with a PDF to search for Rules or concepts would make people who are rule whores like me be able to find the specifics quickly without spending 20 minutes looking. I would like to see the PDFs discounted though, that would be a kicker to have to pay full price for the PDFs again just to have them on my laptop and not have to have 09571340987 books to look through. It would also be nice to see the Fantasy World books put out by Wizards to be in PDF too. Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
No all I need are some friends to play with :-(
... They won't have Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwells, or Gary Gygax's signatures on them like my old copies!
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
There they go and take a perfectly cool idea and corrupt it. These books should be sold with a huge discount because lots of costs have been cut by distributing them online as PDFs. And don't they realize that the very value of a PDF is intrinsically lower than that of a hardbound book? I might as well just buy the real thing and be done with it.
Besides... PDF DRM? I've been given tons of supa-dupa-drm-protected PDFs in the past and usually they gave up in under 10 seconds. As usual, determined attackers will get what they want, while people who are obviously loyal to the brand and good customers get shafted by having their book usage restricted.
(OK, I have an axe to grind... I never really forgave them for the switch to d20... or for buying RTS at all)
Global warming is a cube.
While I do love electronic distribution, trying to read something as long as the Spell Compendium in a PDF makes me shudder. I love being able to physically flip pages, pass the book around and read without a computer. There are certianally things that are nicer about an electronic distribution, but when they try to recreate a book on a computer, it loses a lot of what makes reading on a computer better. When I can do a spin-find, resize the window and have the text rewrap, change fonts for maximum readability, etc., then I'll give it some more thought. Until then, I prefer that my books are in fact books, and that my files stay delightfully DRM-free.
#define DRM chmod 000
This is certainly a good idea since a large number of computer geeks (yes, admit it.. you are, and so am I) play, and we're the most likely to adopt e-books or books in PDF form. However I personally prefer to have a book in physical form for all things, so unless there's some motiviation to purchase the book in this format (financial or otherwise) I'm not going to be doing this.
The one benefit that is very clear though, is the ability to purchase books and have them immediately, and not be limited by what the bookstore happens to have in stock today.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I don't think you're trolling and I agree. 3rd Edition is perfect rules for Video Games. I always liked the 2nd Edition rules with THAC0 and such. Hopefully they WILL put 1st and 2nd edition into PDFs. I would definately buy them.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Cool, so the DRM comes pre-cracked, and these should appear online within a month or so. ;-)
On a more seriously note - I think RPG rulebooks work better in physical form. Granted, you can't drag an entire shelf of books around with you, but the players guide, DMs guide, and whatever setting-specific guide applies to your campaign, doesn't really take that much effort - The Dew and snacks for the evening probably weigh more than the books you need.
And as for looking up a particular rule... C'mon, admit it folks - you have the rulebooks all but memorized, and just need to check whether half-ogre gets a 15% or 20% racial modifier to damage with a double-handed flail...
Sigh... And after writing the above, guess what captcha I get? "losers". Not so subtle hint, oh Gods of Slashdot?
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
DM - As you enter the dimly lit room, you see a creature lurking in the corner, laughing in the corner. As you approach it, things to dark for a second and then the entire room is illuminated with a bright azure light. You have encountered - A BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!
Fighter - I punch the the screen with my fist.
Rogue - I sneak around back and attempt to unplug it.
Wizard - I cast "Bigby's Typing Hands" to press Ctrl-Alt-Del
Cleric - I cast "curse" on Bill Gates
Sorceress - I summon Tech Support
"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
Then how come most 3rd ed. d&d game have performed poorly while Baldur's Gate 2 (AD&D - the "worst" ruleset according to a good many!) is widely hailed as a spectacular CRPG, if not one of the best games of all time?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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
Do you game strictly at home, or do you ever go to a game store that provides places for gamers to game?
If you ever go into a store, how many copies of the DnD books does the store carry?
Have you considered how much of the store's capital is tied up in those books as a percentage of their total inventory?
How about the square footage to display the books?
Now how do you expect the store's owner to feel if those books were available as eBooks for one fourth of the hardcopy retail price? (Game stores generally do not have the option of returning unsold books for full credit the way bookstores do)
Generally speaking the surviving game stores are on pretty tight margins - it would not take much to tip them into the red. WOTC sells lots more than DnD to those stores - doing things that may put their customers out of business is generally a Bad Thing.
So, while it may look like simple greed to you, there are other considerations that enter into the pricing.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
A lot of people here seem to be sans clue about the 'costs' of physical books. Books are sold to distributors at about 25% of retail cost (and there has to be a small profit on that), so, if you just cut out the physical costs of the books, you will save about 15-20 percent. Furthermore, if PDFs are significantly cheaper than physical books, this undercuts retailers, who get angry, and stop ordering the product. If brick-and-morter stores stop buying, this cuts out the main source for new players entering the hobby. Keeping the physical distribution chain alive is key to the long-term survival of the genre.
If they're going to load them up with DRM and make it all crippleware, I'll pay 1/10 of the price of a hardbound copy.
If they remove the crippleware and sell them as straight PDFs, I'll pay 1/2 of the price of a hardbound copy.
If they sell crippleware versions at the same price of the hardbound copy, then I'll wait until someone cracks the DRM and posts them on the internet, and I'll get them for free.
That's how it works. It would be refreshing if some publishers realized that, but it's no big deal from my end.
This shows foresight, as WotC hasn't had to deal with piracy for as long as the music companies have. They must be aware just how freely their books are available on limewire, and as long as people want them digitally, they'll sell them instead of not even have a piece of the action. Good! I imagine we'll even be able to search the text, once the DRM is cracked--most excellent.
What they don't get is that I download copies to supplement the physical copies I own, so I can look up something on the road from a book I don't have as I prepare the next session for my group. They are seeing it as a replacement, as it costs as much as a book.
I'm not planning to pay as much as a book costs to get something that isn't as good as one. Back to limewire for me. But their quick acceptance of digital distribution, unlike that of most media companies, leaves me hope that they will get it before 4.0...
nobody
"PDFs are not as handy for a casual read, like when you are in the bathroom."
Yech. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want to be flipping through a book that my GM's been reading on the crapper. I know, the book is probably perfectly clean, but given what my current GM looks like, the visual is disturbing.
Besides, now I'm going to be thinking of unique items like Ragnar's +2 Plunger of Clog Slaying, or Charmin's +5 Vorpal Toilet Paper.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Kragnar the Barbarian cares not for spoiled milk! Kragnar the Barbarian smashes his enemies! Kragnar the Barbarian laughs at his fallen foes and drinks spoiled milk with glee!
(I'm buzzing. I always love it when I submit something that is accepted.)
I recently looked into rolling my own PDF copies of my gaming books. Here is the thread on Enworld.
For those that don't want to click on that link, I basically talked to 3 IP lawyers about how to do it. It all comes down to the receipt. You have to have the receipt to prove purchase. A scanned receipt is fine as long as it shows your name and the product. Basically you are making your own watermarked pdfs. One IP lawyer with 20 years in the software IP field told me a horror story about how you could have the original software CD, license #, have the software registered with the vendor, and you would still need to produce the receipt to prove ownership. Without the receipt it could be stolen.....
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
This may be a big deal for D&D fans, but for people who play RPGs in general it's nothing new.
OK, I see a lot of people complaining that these are DRM encumbered and that they are the same price as the hardcover copies. There is no benefit to purchasing these over the printed books. Well there are slight benefits such as serchable text but that's about it.
I agree though, it's not worth it. The solution is to not buy it.
I am sure that people have been demanding a PDF release for quite a while. This is pretty much the only way to do it. Release it as restricted PDF to cut down on "sharing" of the files is obvious but why make it the same price as the paper material? Simply to not piss off the small game vendors.
Yes the local RPG outlets are usually Mom & Pop style stores owned and operated by fans. They have a few rooms in back where you can get together with other players and play a game; if you need more players or are looking for a group, they offer a bulletin board. This is where new players learn how to play.
They have been slowly going the way of the video game arcade. The difference is that video games could easily move right into the home. RPGs, a social experience, aren't so lucky. Role-playing cannot survive in an online only world. I've tried dozens of times including currently with WoW but it isn't the same. It's like online poker; the mechanics are there but the social aspect is gone.
Now I personally hate D&D, as well as the whole D20 system, but it does bring new blood into the hobby. (So does LARPing but that's another story) RPG based video games also do but afterwards players need a place to meet up with others. These game stores are exactly that.
If people purchase their books and resources online exclusively, the struggling game stores lose even more money and close. Once they close, the gamers either play in their homes or leave the hobby entirely. Either way, there is no new blood infused into the hobby. No people to buy the RPG books be it printed or PDF and the game industry suffers.
So if you like the hobby, go support your local game store. Buy your overpriced splat books there instead of online. Have a chat with the owner, he's probably there. I don't think that his story will differ much from what you've just read here.
Here's an idea.
Set up WotCbooks.com. Sell books on their at cover price. When you buy the book, you're given an instant PDF download, and the normal off-the-shelf version is shipped out to you.
I defy anyone to find a flaw in that plan which doesn't exist in the current system. No, the fact that you can't double dip customers isn't a flaw.