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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."
People will just do what happened BEFORE WotC started selling their rip-off priced pdfs (pdf should not cost as much as the hard-bound book) they will scan them in and put them online.
The moment you release your information to the public you open it up to be copied.
BTW their 4e application (a nice piece of software) requires a subcription to update it (that is fine) my beef with it is if your computer gets reformatted you MUST resubscribe (pay money) to get a full version of it. I think that is crap. If I paid for the software to utilize and decided not to pay for my monthly subscription renewal then I should not have to pay again to reinstall the software.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
What this is really about is them trying to force people to go out and buy 4E material. Having low cost OOP material out there diminishes the value of their current product by saturating the market. D&D is about the story, not about the numbers... so if you have original setting material, it isn't hard to adapt it to current rules.
They lost me a long time ago when then current head of the AD&D product line tried to assert ownership over all third party content, including homemade settings that weren't tied to any particular rule system, claiming that anything that used the AD&D rules was a derivative work.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I kind of hoped that 4e was going to embrace the Internet and allow people to create tools for it... I was trying to have high hopes for the future of D&D, but now I wish I could get a refund for my rulebooks.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
No it isn't. I've been playing since 2nd edition. So far 4e is pretty decent. Yes it has some annoying aspects (daily abilities, more limited abilities to choose from) but it also has some nice ones (when you raise your stat scores you get to raise two of them instead of one, magic items are simpler, healing is simpler, etc). So it has it's positive traits and it's negative traits but overall it's not bad. It's also a much faster combat system.
While I hate buying the books over and over again I also realize that WoTC needs to do that every so often to get more sales. I was annoyed from 3.0 to 3.5 because that was a sham (3.5 was fixing 3.0), but 4.0 is a complete revamp so warrants it. There is still plenty of 3.0/3.5 material that you can play that. There are some companies that didn't even change and will continue with 3.5 material.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Recently I went looking for some 3rd edition books, since I thought they'd be getting scarce soon.
Scarce? I was mistaken. 3.0 and 3.5 are GONE. Every local gaming store, every local used book store, every online store in Canada, and everywhere else I checked were out of old editions.
Especially curious was the fact that one of the gaming stores had about 15 full sets of 3.5 at Christmas, but by the second week of January, didn't have a single copy of any sourcebook from that era. Nada.
Does anyone know if WotC has done a big buyback? It almost seems like someone has been scouring the bookstores methodically, snatching up everything that would suggest an older edition ever existed.
Ah well, screw 'em. I'll play what I want, and if I can't buy the material, I _will_ download it. Way to go, Wizards!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This is their second salvo, of course. The first was when they decided to yank the rights to Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo, the company that salvaged those two titles from their late-1990s slump and made them popular and useful again. Wizards is no longer the cool company that Richard Garfield and crew took from obscurity to gaming geek super-stardom. Since the Hasbro buyout, they've moved further and further into a campaign of systematically alienating and angering every one of their customers, partners, authors and fans.
It's sad, really. There were (and probably still are) some good people there. Oh well, Steve Jackson will enjoy the business, anyway. They still have plenty of PDFs for sale, and even a few for free!
Yup.
And it's the only way you can get Gods, Demigods, and Heroes where TSR violated a lot of OTHER people's copyrighted material.
I started with the three book set, greyhawk, and blackmoor after hearing about the "DND" room at a convention.
ADND (i.e. 1st edition) killed my campaign when the DMG came out. Can't remember why. The PHB and MM were both compatible.
2nd edition wasn't my cup of tea and i stumbled on the Cyclopedia version and fell in love.
Lots of home rules later, my 26 year old rules set and Rev 4.0 are actually a lot closer together. I guess we both grew in the same direction. My rules are formatted Cyclopedia style (and probably still have about 40- pages or 10%-15% of Cyclopedia material).
If I had it to do over again, I think I would simplify things and reduce a lot of these feats (like cleave) to the basics: Unless it is a special squirrelly ability (like flying) then it points down to taking more hit points or doing more hit points.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Steve Jackson? gah. Screw GURPS, too many damn specific rules, combat takes to long, and running on a bell curve with their point system make no sense mathematically.
I gave up on that pile of needless complications 4 years ago.
Try savage worlds and have some fun. Play characters that can actually be cool right out of the gate, and only get cooler. There rule book cost 10 bucks.
What's that? 10 bucks too much to try a new game? well then, I suggest you take it for a Test Drive
Do I sound a little fanatical? probably, but I ahve played it since it's release, and still enjoy it, and have played and ran in almost every Genre available.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
SJGames is an example of someone "getting" gamers.
GURPS is about the most flexible and adaptable game system. It allows you to build your own game with just the basic rulebook. Yet there are quite a lot of books, and funny enough, they also get bought. You don't need them. It's not like in other systems where you can't play a ranger without the ranger book because the info you need to make one isn't in the main book. It's not even that those books give you many new rules.
Most of the time, they give you background information.
As an example, take the "high tech" book, dealing mostly with firearms through the ages, from medieval times to now. Instead of just noting down a list of weapons and what stats they have, you get background information how those weapons worked, when and how they were used, generally you get a book about guns. More as sidenotes, you also get their stats and some suggestions how to convert their behaviour into game terms. Instead of "it is this way, take the rules and shut up" you get "this is how it works, and that's how we think this is reflected by stats".
Personally, I feel I get a lot more out of the book that way. I get to know why and how things work, and I get a feel what could work in a given setting and situation and what could not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
TSR was the love child of two people with a creative idea and the willingness to put it on the line to see it bloom.
Unfortunately, like most companies formed this way, the business aspect was ignored in favor of the 'beloved product'.
They never really had a business plan, and if you viewed the history of the company since it's inception, you'd notice that the way they 'made money' was simply coming up with new ways to repackage their idea. And then the founders got into a fight and lost pretty much the whole deal to a numbnut who didn't even like gaming.
Is it any wonder, when they were purchased by Wizards of the Coast, a company that had a similar history, that the business plan never changed?
And when Hasbro purchased WoTC, they weren't doing it for D&D they were doing it for Pokemon and to a lesser extent, MtG. They also haven't put any thought into what they should be doing with the older, legacy, properties that came along with the purchase.
Unlike TSR or WoTC though, Hasbro is a bona fide corporation, they have cube farms and quarterly meetings, middle management and legal divisons. And unlike TSR or WoTC, Hasbro isn't in this for any 'love' of anything other than money. It shouldn't be any surprise that of the three, Hasbro has been the most willing to screw over fans and partners while doing it's double takes and meandering in an attempt to realize a profit on D&D. Not that TSR or WoTC have ever had a history of not doing so, simply that their actions were usually the result of infighting between people who actually felt they had a stake in things instead of some impersonal jackass looking a bottom line on a report.
They want the printed copy if there is one available, if the book is good. I've seen books that are readily available in PDF form (from other publishers) go for three and four digit sums on ebay because they can't be bought anymore. I'm in a similar boat, I want my book in my hand (ever tried bringing a laptop to a fantasy RPG session? Talk about mood killer).
Allow me to offer up some counterexamples. I was just at an annual gaming retreat with friends last weekend, where we played classic D&D and other games. (a) I ran an OD&D game, and to my great pleasure, one of the players had bought the OD&D PDFs and printed and bound his own little books from them. (b) I also ran an AD&D game, and instead of hauling the big hardcovers with me, I did indeed have them on a laptop, as I've done before, and it didn't bother anyone (kept below table height on a chair next to me).
Here's the upshot: I was just today going to write my player and recommend he also buy the Supplement I PDF to add to his OD&D books. But now he can't do that. Bizarre.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I have every DnD 4e PDF book. I downloaded all of them without paying for them.
I regularly run a DnD campaign, I'm a DCI member, I run RPGA events, etc. I do own the 4e PHB, but that's because I damaged one at a store and felt obligated to the store owner.
Here's why I pirated all those books, and why I am going to pirate the rest of them:
Because fuck you, Wizards of the Coast, fuck you. When you brought out 4e, it was supposed to be a self-contained series of books. There were three books - the DM guide, the Player's Handbook, and the Monster Manual. I pre-ordered them from my local store (significantly more than at Amazon, but I wanted to support my local store.) and was ready to try out the new system. I was ready to pitch all my dead tree 3.5 books to see what you'd learned from 3 and 3.5.
Then you wanted $15/month to access your online content.
Then you announced that there were more CORE books coming out. There's a release party every month now. Twelve books a year? Are you insane?
Then you killed the SRD.
You see me as a cash cow. Fuck you. I'm not paying you a thousand dollars to get all the books when the full set was supposed to be a hundred - or just fifty online.
If you had released all this content as one package and said, "this is fourth edition", I would have bought the set.
You're liars, you're fuckups, and I do not reward incompetence with my cash.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
If it's 1st edition rules you want, OSRIC is an OGL'ed clone of them, and you can either use old 1e adventures or there's also now a small ecology of new supplements out that go with it. I wish it'd get more attention.
-=Steve=-
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
And who the hell at WotC came up with this idea? Combat piracy by making it impossible to get the products people want through legal means? Yeah, that sounds brilliant. The only thing that could top that would be to cut off access to the content they've already purchased with very short notice. Oh. Oh, yeah.
I did like Paizo's response to this, though. They announced a 35% sale on all of their pdf's for the rest of the month, and that all purchases of their printed products would include a pdf version at no extra charge.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?
If you dig back into storage and find some of those early 1st edition dungeon crawls, you'll find that they were printed in a lightish blue ink.
Mimeograph machines and black and white copiers at the time (I don't think color copiers were commercially available yet) had real trouble with that color ink.
This was intentional. It was, in effect, DRM.
Old copies? They will be there, sure. But they will not release new stuff as it was obvious that new stuff will be either leaked or just pirated by "customers". Why continue giving them freebie? Why continue competing with "free as beer" P2P while supplying em with new content at same time?
So you think there's more money in not competing at all, eh? Yeah that's smart. People were buying the .pdfs. And let me repeat, the leaks came from publishers, who could easily create a .pdf to leak to p2p networks when given the book to print in dead-tree format. And barring that, digital copies will still be made. Face it, they will be online and there's nothing you or Hasbro can do about it.
Given that, why would you make the illegal copies the only copies online?
What would you propose, keep current service as "legacy"? To compete with piratebay? With no future? No profitability? Waste of manpower.
Today, you have some people getting copies off of p2p, and some purchasing them legitimately. In the future, everyone who wants a digital copy will pirate it because that will be their only recourse.
How much effort do you think there is in creating a .pdf to throw online once you've already created the book? Is some money more or less than no money?
In their rush to prevent piracy, they are pushing their legitimate customers to it. This is a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The enemies of Democracy are