Slashdot Mirror
No More D&D PDFs, Wizards of the Coast Sues 8 File Sharers
An anonymous reader writes "On April 6th, Wizards of the Coast took all of their PDF products offline, including those sold at third-party websites like RPGNow.com. From the RPGNow front page: 'Wizards of the Coast has instructed us to suspend all sales and downloads of Wizards of the Coast titles. Unfortunately, this includes offering download access to previously purchased Wizards of the Coast titles.' Wizards of the Coast also posted a press release to their website that states they are suing eight file sharers for 'copyright infringement,' and WotC_Trevor posted a short explanation about the cessation of PDF sales to the EN World Forums."
They want to prove that there are at least 8 people still playing D&D.
Wizards of the Coast are trying to do the same thing with DnD that they do with their card games. Make rule changes constantly that make anything old defunct. It's the ultimate in forced obsolescence.
Just fucking go out of business already. Dungeons and Dragons was finished when I was a little child. Your existence serves no useful purpose. You deserve nothing. Doubly so because you had no part whatsoever in creating it.
I was going to get a copy of those books for my kid next week too... but now that I've read this, I'm going to buy a used set.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
D&D has been long outclassed by any number of better PnP games that haven't completely buggered their rulesets to fit better with CRPG programming logc. With 4e, it's just a greasy, vaguely equine-shaped smear on the pavement.
The old-school fans have moved on, since there's no need to stay loyal to a company that's not around any more.
D&D these days is just another hyped-out brand name.
Although D&D has a long and venerable history with much background material, settings, and characters enjoyed by generations of gamers it has basically been in decline ever since WotC was bought by Hasbro and probably even before that. The D&D system was already outdated by about 1994 when newer and more innovative games, notably GURPS but also the HERO system and others, were equaling and surpassing the first generation games, most notably D&D, which arguably founded the genre. By the time Hasbro bought WotC the best things D&D had going for it were the immense body of extant work in the settings, characters, and modules published in Dragon and Dungeon magazines and a declining store of good will among older gamers with fond memories of D&D gaming during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even if Hasbro hadn't bought WotC I think that D&D would have been difficult to salvage as a system. Indeed, many of the ideas and concepts pioneered by D&D were not and could not be copyrighted and therefore have been well translated into games like GURPS as source books, further weakening the D&D franchise. The D20 system was too little too late to salvage D&D in light of the superior systems being published by Steve Jackson Games, White Wolf, and others. The original D&D systems (pre WotC and Hasbro) will probably continue to be fondly remembered by and even occasionally played by older gamers, but really there are much better systems and source materials out there now and it is time for PPRPG gaming to move on.
While that may be the case in the US, I'd like you to know that here in the Netherlands the law trumps any contract. So if you have any clauses in your contract that aren't in concert with the law they don't hold up in court. Even better, in many cases having 'unreasonably constraining' articles in a contract, everyone can safely sign the contract and simply ignore those articles, and when you try to get a judge to enforce them he will simply throw them out. I wonder if any retailers have contracts with WotC outside the US...
You are a flat out moron and should not represent your country. Then again if you are correct your country is full of shit and thank god I don't live there. Contracts are a set of legal rules set by at least two entities. It is made to fill in a void the gov't law does not answer. The only times contracts are not valid are when they break criminal law (e.g. a contract to have someone murdered would not hold up in court), or if they are used to supersede "dummy" laws. Dummy laws are laws, civil laws, used to protect (generally consumers) the public and they cannot be suppressed. For example if you sign an apartment rental agreement a dummy law (in Pennsylvania) states that your landlord may not enter your apartment without your consent or it being an emergency (fire, flood, etc). Some apartment owners have you "waive" that right in the contract, however, it is not legal.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity