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D&D Handbook Distribution Lawsuit Settled For $125,000
The Installer writes "Wizards of the Coast is in the process of settling its claim against several individuals for illegal distribution of its newest copyrighted handbook. 'In one of three lawsuits brought by Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc., US District Judge Thomas S. Zilly on Friday accepted a settlement in which Thomas Patrick Nolan of Milton, Fla., agreed to a judgment against him of $125,000.' These were the lawsuits that went along with WotC's decision to stop selling the handbook in .PDF format. 'According to court filings, more than 2,600 copies of the handbook were downloaded from Scribd.com, and more than 4,200 copies were viewed online before the material was pulled from the document-sharing site at Wizards' request.'"
agreed to a judgment against him of $125,000
So they didn't roll for damages?
Anyone have a bittorrent link?
Is it wrong that my first reaction was to flip over to a torrent site and snag my own copy of the PDFs? Purely for research purposes, of course.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Because this is news for NERDS. Stuff that MATTERS! Seriously, you need to wash the troll stank off yourself and get out. Nerd news is nerd news. Why do you think this article is in its own section?
Boredom is bliss.
I'm tempted to just say "who cares 4th edition sucked" since I don't personally like it and think it is dumbed down MMO style mechanics made into a table top game. In fact I think the fact that I bought the first set of books probably hurt Hasbro in the long term. If I had previewed them somehow and didn't like them I probably would have continued to look at their products but since I bought them and didn't like them I haven't picked up another 4th edition product. However, in the spirit of an actual discussion I'll give my 2 cents beyond just my dislike of 4th Edition.
I think you're about to see Hasbro get all litigious on folks because they are not making what they think they ought to from the brand. Whatever the reason I think when companies start worrying about this kind of nonsense rather than continually producing good content its a harbinger of hard times ahead. Hopefully they'll sell of the brand or others like Pathfinder will take their place. I think it was a bad sign when they nixed the d20 license from 3rd edition. I don't know what Hasbro's numbers looked like but the industry as a whole was much better off when everyone was writing d20 products and the bookstores and cons were full of the stuff. Today D&D is almost irrelevant among the people that I know who still play RPGs. As a disclaimer, I'm just a sad creature who still reads through the books for entertainment value and writes a few pieces from time to time.
I always knew Wizards of the Coast wasn't too great - they've cheapened tabletop gaming to an almost insane degree and discouraged many people from playing... but suing gamers? From my experience, I've found that when most people start out, they aren't too sure about what to get and tend to borrow or download materials. Gamers who have been playing a long time will usually buy handbooks, custom dice sets, player figurines, etc. So basically, WotC is driving away NEW players with this - and people wonder why tabletop gaming is getting stale and too introverted for its own good? To provide a comparison - imagine if there was a company from the mainframe days which created the first operating systems, and copyrighted the hell out of them. Now imagine that almost every other operating system was derivative from those original ones. This means that everyone would essentially be enslaved to that company, and to get freedom they would have to start from scratch, and couldn't use any of the ideas and refinements that that company had used.
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(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
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It's not really clear what you're asking but this matters on non-nerd levels aside from beloved nerd game's mired history of legal action becoming even more mired. In my opinion, something needs to be done about consumer awareness when purchasing digital editions of songs, movies, books, photographs and digital art in general. All too frequently we purchase things without really understanding what exactly it is we are purchasing. This court case may just be another case of piracy but what sparked it is -- again, in my opinion -- an omen of a landslide of similar digital rights revocation. Because customers don't understand what their rights are and almost always wording is put into the agreement, terms of service or license text that gives the company complete authority to terminate your right to enjoy that piece of work whenever they want, even iTunes Music Service has this.
Basically what we're looking at is a future where if any of those content providers starts to do badly in the market and they're offering digital works of their cash cows, they will terminate those licenses. They will blame piracy. While it may never be clear why they started losing money, it won't matter. They'll be sitting with their fingers on a reset switch that will only work once that will theoretically boost sales again. Now, that's laughable when you look at how they can enforce that unless they have a draconian DRM scheme in place. But the simple fact of the matter is that I want the same exact rights to digital content that I received with a good old fashion book or I'll pay the premium for the book. Those rights are simple: lifetime rights for myself to enjoy that work digitally in an open fashion on a number of third party devices. I have yet to see this in any of my perusals of online publishing. Digital publishing licenses are a very sorry state of affairs right now which is sad because it has such liberating potential for the consumer.
My work here is dung.
Wizards of the Coast was bought out by Hasbro a while back and underwent a transformation from geek utopia to corporate cash machine.
The current dire state of the economy is forcing them to show their true nature to an unusual extent- for example, they've recently added a chase rarity to their flagship product, Magic: The Gathering, as well as releasing semi-monthly "collector's edition" products for same.
Well, if you do actually want to get nerdy about it.. Wizards of the Coast is the most "evil" company for roleplaying. Their games and rules bring down the other, actually great, games down to something like Wii level. And now they're suing publishers who sell their handbooks for a reason I still dont understand. Most people getting into roleyplaying actually would *want* to get those. So what is the reason to ban the sales?
My, when the IT bubble burst in naught one, this D&D nerd at work was canned and that night, at a D&D game, he gets another job - for more money! Those games are what golf is to other professions!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Other gaming companies are embracing the idea of open source and digital distribution, for example: Catalyst Game Labs. More importantly, their open source release of Eclipse Phase, and perhaps even unofficial support for the fan-made MegaMek/MekWars for their Battletech line.
Meanwhile companies like WizKids and Games Workshop continue to show their complete disdain for their customers and the fans of their products as well as their utter inability to properly market their games. Which is especially evidenced by the utter failure of WizKids' "Mech Clix" line for Battletech, and arguably evidenced by Games Workshops' constant price increases for Warhammer 40k; Catalyst seems to be going in completely the opposite direction - embracing digital distribution and open source in ways essentially unheard of in this day and age.
Haven't played D&D since middle school (AD&D 2nd ed era), though I did buy the 3rd edition core books and never used them. Are Planescape and Dark Sun still out of print? Those were the shit, man.
Property is theft.
From what I understand, the digital distribution of the .PDFs did not sell very well, and the sales figures for digital distribution were very low when WoTC pulled the service (remember, they are a corporation, not a nerd-utopia). Combined with the fact that a majority of the PDFs available on torrent sites and file-sharing sites were the digitally disturbed .PDFs, it makes no sense, from a business perspective, to continue distributing products in a way that ended up costing a company more in lost sales figures than actual sales.
And yes, I know, you can't stop piracy. But they did cut off the main source of piracy.
Then again, I could never read e-books or role-playing game manuals on a computer screen, so whenever I'd pirate things like role-playing game manuals, I'd usually end up buying them if I liked them anyway (that included the 4th edition, which I purchased after reading the .PDFs, and I am satisfied with my purchase)...
Because they're selling pirated copies of the handbook, which is the problem. Its not that sales of the handbook are banned, but buying a PDF from some dude who made one without authorization is pretty much a crime, like the counterfeit dvd factories in Hong Kong, not the dude sharing over bittorrent for free. But, oh yeah, this is Slashdot -- home of the FOSS zealot -- fans of a system which lives or dies by copyright, but to whom copyright is anathema.
The reason is that they fucked up their model.
DnD 3.0 (and really, the fixes in 3.5) were a way of taking all the organically grown rules from the previous editions, making it simpler, and then putting the game back together in a reasonably streamlined process. They opened up the core rules as an SRD, so you could run the game with no money down. The SRD didn't have all the rules, monsters, or flavour text, but it had the core rules.
The problem came from splat books. Anyone could write a book, and there were some terrible ones. You could combine the books and make ridiculously powerful characters. More to the point, WotC didn't get the money for lots of those books.
Along comes 4th edition. It took everyone by surprise. One day, they put it up on their website with no notice to game stores or players, lots of whom had amassed thousands of dollars of these splat books. Money that wasn't going to Hasbro.
WotC split up the core rules into a clever scheme wherein you couldn't get along with just one book. They put some characters in one book, others in another, and put out extra books that had parts for both characters. If you have a party with a bard and a paladin, you would have to have:
1. Player's Handbook (paladin)
2. Player's Handbook 2 (bard)
3. Martial Power (paladin supplementary)
4. Divine Power (paladin supplementary)
5. Arcane Power (bard supplementary)
6. Player's Handbook 1 miniatures
7. Player's Handbook 2 miniatures.
8. Subscription to D&D insider at $15/month. (Dragon Magazine has extra rules and benefits for players)
This is for a game that's been out for about a year, and that's JUST FOR THE CORE RULES FOR TWO CHARACTERS. This doesn't include the DMG 1 & 2, MM 1 & 2, maps, figures, etc.
For some _unimaginable_ reason, people said "WTF is this shit?" and just grabbed the torrents for the books. While they were still printing the PDFs, it was incredibly easy to just pack them up as a torrent and share. Now it takes an extra day with a flatbed scanner. Well, it does make for slightly larger files, but that's about it.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Anybody else notice that there are still copies of the book up on the scribd website?
Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?
Wish I had mod points for the parent.
The main reason this was done was to protect the fact that Wizard's is spending most of its energy focusing on its online product. Ebooks are a direct competitor to their fee-charging online service.
When they only release a decent amount of content for players once every year, its no surprise they'd be more protective of their content. Everyone I know who still is fortunate enough to have a 3.X DnD group has every WotC PDF on their computer and/or hard drive. And the group collectively owns every book. In my own group we have 5 copies of Lords of Madness, 2 of Draconomicon, 4 Complete Warriors, 3 Complete Arcanes and, of course, countless players handbooks, monster manuals and DMGs for 3.0 and 3.5. And we still downloaded content.
And we were happy to pay money for the books since we weren't given these official online resources that you pretty much need to use more than half the content 4.0 has to offer. We liked paper and flipping through well printed books. Ebooks were an ok substitute when our book was being loaned to a friend or something...but for the most part nothing beat paper since there were no advantages to using ebooks other than search features (which, really, isn't that good a feature since a lot of the times you'll forget the exact wording of something and are better off flipping through a book until you find the adjacent picture).
Every other month Wizards would release some amazing module for players to get new ideas. The complete and environmental series gave us feats, spells, items and classes. Campaign modules gave us the same. Monster Manuals gave players new races and summons. Nearly every module until May 2007 (Complete Champion) (hey, a month after 4.0 was announced to be released; coincidence?). Every month we'd also get a good dozen or so feats and a handful of prestige classes from a dragon magazine too.
Flash forward to 4.0 where Wizards wants to make the game "easier" to attract a wider audience. Now we get ~6 powers per dragon magazine, about 3 classes races every 6 months and most updates to the game are to make it "easier" (Monster Builder tools, character creation tools, etc...) and to promote their monthly subscription service with some new online trinket no one asked for.
DnD was played like Magic the Gathering in many ways. It was "collect the books/magazines/obscure article". And players loved it. It added a certain radical element to RPGs--the ability to have something no one player has or knows about without being substantially or necessarily stronger or weaker than them. Where RPGs like WoW or tabletop RPGs like Shadowrun have such limited content that nothing a player has on his or her sheet is ever 'new' to someone who scans the modules/playguides or has played for over a year, DnD flooded the market with so much 1st and 3rd party material that players had the opportunity to 'feel special'.
The other bonus element was the fact that players who didn't like scouring every source for obscure little classes or whatnot could feel like they are doing something new and special using the player's handbook, as the optimizers and vorthos' preferred the unique classes and avoided the player's handbook classes like the plague (save for dips, wizards and druids).
Of course it doesn't matter how many classes you make for 4.0. They all basically fill in the same 4 basic roles that ensure once you've played 4 different characters, you've done it all.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Hey, thanks, I appreciate responses more than mod points anyway. ;)
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I knew they were doomed when I ran into to WotC employees at GDC'06.
It was after hours, and a few of us working at the conference were getting together for the yearly D&D game. We asked the two WotC people working the booth if they'd like to join us. "Oh... We don't play games, actually..."
Big difference from the old days of any random person at WotC (even accounting!) being pulled in to playtest the latest
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
"Because they're selling pirated copies of the handbook,"
Got a torrent? I can't see paying a pirate for what I can pirate myself. ;^)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I never understood this..
Why ... The ... Hell ... Did ... You ... 'Need' ... Those ... Books
(sorry)
Don't those books just give you extra rules and powers? What happened to simply making up house rules to fill whatever gaps you percieve there are? Is it so important to have publisher certified material say that you get extra turn undead roll on level 12?
Making those rules and sharing them with community? Or is there some comandment that you mus only ever use whatever is in handbooks, no more, no less?
Have players and DMs grown so pitifull that they can not use their own fantasy and creativity to have fantasy adventure? Have you all turned to munchkins in few years since I last played RPG?
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
I use that many books for a single character from 3.5. The difference is the books were cheaper ($10 on ebay if 6 months or older; $25 in comic shops; $30 retail), there was no DD-insider (meaning more people owned more paper books so you could borrow from friends) and the online content wizards provided was free (there was a LOT of free content on wizards.com).
For example, my soul knife uses Player's Handbook (Fighter), a Dragon Magazine (Feat), Expanded Psionics Handbook (Base Class), PHBII (feat), Complete Warrior (feat), Shining South (Prestige Class), Magic item Compendium (gear), a third party Psion book and uses a custom race varianted from an AEG book.
Exploring lots of books is not my problem with 4E. Its how little content there are per book and how unusable all of the content is for fear of an "unbalanced game". Yeah, you can get infinite attacks with an unerrata'd loop found a week before 4E launched using just the Player's Handbook 1. Games will be broken, that's why we have GMs.
The truth is, 4E still has less classes, feats and races after a year then 3.X had with JUST the SRD. Not even the actual books. Yes, I'm including monstrous races since I believe one of the greatest appeals for me in DnD was the ability to play more than a human, a short human, a short buff human, a big ugly human or a tall foresty human or a half-human half-tall foresty human with barely any the benefits of either. And I wouldn't even be that angry about it if Wizard's didn't market 4E as having 'more interesting races' like the half-demons and half-dragons. Despite the fact they had them in 3E at launch in the Monster Manual! Yes, level adjustments are a little odd...but the SRD includes rules for buying off level adjustments that balances them and makes them fun for the player quite easily (I'd say 'but they are a headache for the DM, but that's just not true for a competant DM who knows more than 'insert X monsters into room and see how my players fair').
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
of course WotC was FOUNDED as a maker of earlier edition DnD add-on books and they didn't pay TSR anything for them. When WotC got big on Magic about the same time TSR tightened the "derivative works" publishing rights on everybody else. It didn't work then, I'm surprised it's worked for so long with 4th ed.
That's just completely, utterly, false. Why don't you also claim you need to buy the official WotC dice? It's about as true as the rest you're saying.
As a group, the only WotC products you need are the original 3 core books, same as with 3E. You'd think this would be obvious from the fact that thousands were playing the game before all the other products you mention were even released.
Yes, if you specifically want to play a class from PHB2, then you need PHB2, duh. If you specifically wanted to play a warlock in 3E, you needed Complete Arcane. This is no different.
There's no reason to buy the "Power" books, unless you'd like more options for your characters. Same as with the "Complete" books in 3.5, and the spatbooks in 3.0. And Complete Martial is not at all a Paladin Supplement. It doesn't have any significant content for paladins, and it's explicitly not marketed as a paladin supplement.
As to the official mini's: these are not at all required, and I've never before heard anyone claim that they were. The same is true for a D&D Insider subscription. That's basically a subscription to Dungeon and Dragon magazines plus some online tools. Do you feel Dungeon and Dragon magazines were required to play 3E? I should hope not.
And what's that nonsense about 4E being a complete surprise? WotC announced 4E 10 months in advance. They even published preview books! And anyone paying attention had noticed that Wizards had been experimenting with radically new mechanics for D&D for at least a year before that, so it was only an open secret that WotC was working on a new edition.
All in all, your post is nothing more than a troll.
You.. Don't
He's just blowing hard. I've been playing 4th edition for that last year with just the Player's Handbook, and I've been having a lot of fun.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
For my own spare time, I found that there is enough legally freely available content on the web that I don't need to buy much stuff anymore. This includes stories, computer games and even some older Hollywood films that are now being put on YouTube by the rights holders.
Also, many independent labels still release CDs without DRM. These cost money but come with the traditional lifetime rights for the consumer.
In short, there is absolutely no need to buy anything from a vendor who wants to rip you off with DRM encumbered products. And in some industry sectors managements seems to get it, CDs with DRM for instance are getting less common. But it may take a few more failures before all of them get it.
C - the footgun of programming languages
it's not for free like DDO now? WTF I want my money back! oh wait............
Bullshit.
Without the Complete Divine (for example), a Charisma-based Paladin is an "incomplete" class, with a host of abilities that do not match their class designation.
The "base book" set (PHB, MM, DMG) is simply incomplete.
Sounds like it... WHy don't you just go and pick up TSR editions of D&D and AD&D and get playing the real way, instead of the spoon-fed WotC way? L.
If you just make up a million house rules there's a huge chance you won't get the balancing right. You know, the people writing those handbooks don't just sit at home, make up some spells and then send that straight to the printer, they do heavy playtesting and balancing.
When you have to do all of that yourself, it's no longer a game, it's actual work (the job is called "game designing" btw).
. . . you would have to have. . .
(Emphasis mine)
I take small issue with that there. If your party had a paladin and a bard, the only books you have to have are
1. Players Handbook (paladin rules)
2. Players handbook II (bard rules)
Yes, all those other things are available but by no means required, and are in no way the "core rules" for for two character classes. All the other books contain additional options for these classes (feats, powers, rule options, etc) but in my experience, people rarely use all the options available in the PHB, so why spring for a bunch more? But the books are there for the people who want them.
WoTC is a publishing company. They make money when they publish books and other products/content that people buy, so yes, they are inclined to write as many books filled with as much cool stuff as they think will people buy. If you don't like WoTC or D&D 4e, that's fine, but don't go tossing out false implications like 5 books, 2 packs of minis and a subscription to a couple of magazines is somehow required to play the game when it's not.
There are many kinds of players. Lots of the younger players are bored and are looking for something social to do together. They don't have a lot of control over their parent's purchasing power, and so will try and get by with a couple books a year, or so.
Then there are adults, some of which take their social time very seriously. They see games like these as a good investment. They would likely quote you how much month of nights at the bar costs in number of books they can buy. These players tend to be min-maxers, zealots, and other types that look for tiny nuances within the rules that make them 'better' than their peers. They may have a tricked-out charater idea, a totally unique character, or a deeply rich roleplaying platform that they want to beat you over the head with...
The latter group seems to be who Hasbro has targeted.
To answer the question, though, no one really needs those books. Or really any books at all. I ran a wildly successful campaign on a wide-open version of WEG's D6 system. You could be anything you wanted to be, so long as you made it out of 18 dice. Things were made up on the fly. The player who wanted flying wings paid 4 dice. Ouch, right? But they decided to make their character a youngster to make up for it. The party had paladins, ogres, gnomes, and a hot female minotaur. No pages were flipped through, and we played for a long time. Fun was had by all.
If you just make up a million house rules there's a huge chance you won't get the balancing right. You know, the people writing those handbooks don't just sit at home, make up some spells and then send that straight to the printer, they do heavy playtesting and balancing.
This is only half true, but to be fair if you saw the other side of it you'd probably stop buying books.
They do start with a balanced game. They do, in fact, do heavy playtesting.
They also break the balance on purpose to 'force' you to keep the books up to date. Any but the smallest gaming circles will invariably have one player that springs for the new book for his class, and suddenly has advantages over the other characters. Next week other new books start showing up...
This is not an accident.
If you're example was "Fighter and Wizard"....two classes essential to the game, then you're book list changes to: PHB1 (essential) Martial Power and Divine Power (optional) Everything else is optional. You really don't need all that.....you just WANT it. As many people did. Hell, I've got all of the books myself, although mostly to make them available to players who want to explore the options in the optional books, but almost all of my players have only invested in the PHB1, a few have the PHB2, and exactly two have the Adventurer's Vault 1. The only ones with more books than that are the others who like to DM (which is just me right now) or who like to collect them (which fits three of my 13 players over two groups).
You don't need all those books, unless you're a completist. A year and a half later, and my two regular 4E groups are still mostly using the first Player's Handbook's materials, with a couple players using some supplementary content. The main concession I'll grant to those complaining about the new format and approach of 4E is that it does parse out content over more books than previous editions, such as 3.X, which was a bit like drinking from a firehose....all the years I ran 3.X games and I saw maybe a dozen prestige classes in play, in contrast to the thousands of actual prestige classes in print! That said, if you think of 4E as a game unto itself, it works fine; it plays the same as all previous editions, regardless of what people say, and offers up just as much useful content, but parsed out a bit more carefully (and in a marketing-is-happy kinda way, sure). I dunno..guess I got tired of drinking from a firehose, much prefer to sip my drinks....
Just a quick note: if you have the D&D Insider subscription, then you have all of those books' rules built into it for character creation. I just run it to update all of my players' characters and they print out their new sheets with new items and skills, etc when they level.
If you just make up a million house rules there's a huge chance you won't get the balancing right. You know, the people writing those handbooks don't just sit at home, make up some spells and then send that straight to the printer, they do heavy playtesting and balancing.
This is only half true, but to be fair if you saw the other side of it you'd probably stop buying books.
They do start with a balanced game. They do, in fact, do heavy playtesting.
They also break the balance on purpose to 'force' you to keep the books up to date. Any but the smallest gaming circles will invariably have one player that springs for the new book for his class, and suddenly has advantages over the other characters. Next week other new books start showing up...
This is not an accident.
Depends, I'd say that most of what you see in new splat books just adds flavour and more options. The main problem is that each additional book increases the number of combinations by a big factor, and it's often that a few fringe combinations can use some rules loophole to do something insane.
If anything I think the problem is that WotC usually only did errata on the factual text, while in some cases they should also have done a bit more on the actual mechanics, if they were open to abuse. But I suppose it's a question of cost. I've been trying to get them to just make their database of Customer Service answers available, as a lot of those would have helped a lot in clarifying things.
I have well over a meter of 3/3.5 edition books alone, and very little material in there is really over the top, I'd say about 1-2%, sometimes just because of unclear wording. The problem is if your players are power hungry and want to "win" the game and go for that 1-2% unbalanced stuff, and the DM does not stop them.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The problem is that each add-on book adds abilities that are just mathematically superior to previous books so if you use only the base books and other player use splat books there are huge imbalances in the characters since a splat feat is many times as effective in combat.
My last campaign was a system test. We ran 3.0 and 3.5 from 1st to 20th level only using official rules and errata to see how the system worked at all power levels. (I also tried 4.0 but quit by 9th level)
WotC released plenty of broken splat books. In 3.0 and 3.5 I had players hit 50 AC at level 10 via combining various core abilities allowed by the rules, I had people find cheaty hax allowing individuals to open with 200 damage on an surprise round killing anything even close to their level. What was scary is I had a low magic campaign with roughly a quarter of the magic and wealth a regular campaign is supposed to have. Be happy my group of munchkins never decided to visit your table. They would have destroyed a lesser GM's mind with their encyclopedic knowledge of the rules. *heh*
I must admit I enjoyed it. They were a group of really brilliant people who optimized as a team. I was excited when 3.5 fixed some of the problems of 3.0 and again when 4.0 fixed some of the core problems in 3.5. But they lost me utterly and forever with Players handbook 2 for 4.0.
Now please understand that I play with a bunch of engineers. They mathematically model every feat and ability and run combinations through simulations to check how they fare against other classes. PHB2 feats and abilities were 2 to 3 times more effective than the base book abilities. I pay WotC to give me a rule system to build a game around. Yet they have proven to be incapable of releasing a balanced system. Even very simple to balance feats require so much work form me that I could just rewrite the rules more easily. (I have done that before) WotC has always had problems balancing abilities but 4.0 just took it to humorous levels.
I know 5 GMs who switched to Pathfinder (often referred to as 3.6 by fans) rather than the official 4.0 release. (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG.)
Paiso released a "fixed" version of 3.5 rules where a lot of the chronic balence issues were addressed. They basically did what I always hoped WotC would manage. Now I have a much tighter system by people who understand rule balance and are not obsessed with selling me the splat book of the month.
My former players are excited about the new rules where 4.0 was driving them away. I highly suggest fans of DnD to check out the pathfinder system. The book is beautiful and the PDF means I have a personal copy on my key-chain usb-drive for quick reference between games. (Amazon has a $35 version without the PDF) Well worth the money for a system that is very simular to 3.5 for players and DMs.
The problem is if your players are power hungry and want to "win" the game and go for that 1-2% unbalanced stuff, and the DM does not stop them.
And with the splat books, this is really easy to do. Not so much with the 'core' material.
Little known fact, the majority of items 2-5 on your list are covered by item 8. I'll agree that for someone who has been playing 3.5 for a long time, the 4e PHB seemed a little limiting, but D&D insider is actually a pretty interesting proposition. 15 bucks a month, split between 5 players, is incredibly cheap, for this, you get access to all the rules for creating characters existent in all supplements for 4e ever published. As someone who maybe bought a D&D book once a year, the prospect of paying 36 bucks a year for a complete and constantly update ruleset is... uhm nice.
And while I don't use alot of the online tools, I appreciate then when i'm introducing friends to the game, there is a really decent character builder. And the monster builder is pretty handy for teaching beginner DM's what they need to know. (or for making more balanced monsters than I normally care to create).
Also, to play 4e, all that is required is the PHB, and the MM. The DMG contains almost no useful rules, it's all just delicious creamy filling of advice on how to run a tabletop RPG. I would recommend the book for anyone running a kick in the door style game under any system. (Or even just incorporating those elements into other games).
In summation, wizards wants to charge me about 3 bucks a month, and in exchange will publish all their content online, in a fairly DRM heavy format. In exchange, they told some dudes that selling the e-books at a one time price, was a no go. It's sad that my 3 bucks a month won't buy me something I can play 10 years from now, but if I wanted to, I could buy physical copies of the books I actually like. They are basically just saying that digital media sold by them needs to be heavily DRM-d and only sold through a subscription basis. Kinda annoying, but atleast it's cheap.
You can do it this way. Or alternatively, you can buy Player Handbook to get the rules and then Subscribe to D&D Insider for 1 month and download everything from there, including Character Builder and Adventure Tools. With that you get:
All the rules for all characters, explained in full.
VERY nice tools to compute all the numbers, prerequisites etc for you.
All monsters from all published books and adventures, with tool to modify them and print out whatever you need.
15+ issues of Dungeon, with 3 adventures in each (same bad, some quite good)
15+ issues of Dragon, for some flavor reading.
Basic trick is that if you get Character Builder once (you don't need long subscription, just grab it once per year or so), you don't need any of the splat books anymore. For Monster Manual, Adventure Tools give you all stats with possibility of modification, only pictures are missing - but guess what, pictures from all the books are available for download on Wizards site...
So, for cost of PH, DMG and 1 month subscription to Insider, you get amount of material which hardly can be matched with any other offering - with tools which are way better than anything done so far (with all due respect, PCGen is not coming even close to quality of CB, despite being developed for many years more).
I'm wondering when they will realize that having so good CB is reducing splat books sell numbers.
Real cost in 4e comes from miniatures (for maps, battle map is good and one-time expense). For that, look for ebay/etc - people are still selling some cheap commons from Wizards skrimish D&D (whatever was the name). You can get a lot of them at cost of 0.20-0.40$ per piece. For 100$ you can get few hundred 'mass' minis for your needs. After that, you can spend few bucks a month to get a nice monster to particular adventure you need and slowly build your minis library.
Ah...but would that be Lawful evil or chaotic evil?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
And these are precisely the kinds of players that I won't play with, because they ruin games. Nothing is worse than The Rules Lawyer (especially in the middle of combat), or The Munchkin, or The Deep Brooder who doesn't understand why you don't want to read his sixty page character background. Scary people. They are good for business, though...
On a slightly different topic, when I was heavily involved in role playing (D&D and Werewolf, mostly), my groups rarely went beyond the core books. We made our own backstories, our own plots, and didn't ever see a need for "It's a fighter, except it uses oriental weapons and farts fairy dust so it is a different class with a totally different (yet the same) rules!"
If you wanted a fighter that used oriental weapons, well, then guess what - you were a fighter and you used oriental weapons. You don't need a $29 source book for that. It doesn't even make sense.
We did buy the occasional campaign settings - Ravenloft, Planescape, Council of Wyrms - but, keeping true to the Golden Rule of the WhiteWolf system, if it didn't work in our game, it was tossed out. This was always fascinating when someone new would join up, and things wouldn't be Exactly The Way The Bible Says It Is, and would totally flip out.
Honestly, a vast majority of the character classes outside of the core of 6-8 or so are really nothing more than very minor variations on the same theme, nothing that can't be accomplished with some light role playing to add a little flavor.
Love sees no species.
GURPS?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I never understood this..
Why ... The ... Hell ... Did ... You ... 'Need' ... Those ... Books
(sorry)
Don't those books just give you extra rules and powers? What happened to simply making up house rules to fill whatever gaps you percieve there are? Is it so important to have publisher certified material say that you get extra turn undead roll on level 12?
There are many reasons, but the #1 is TIME and #2 is STANDARDIZATION.
You can House Rule everything. But so what? If you do, you end up spending more time thinking about, explaining, and recording your house ruleset than you do playing the game. And if you break from a previous ruling unintentionally, then your players get annoyed because the game is now totally arbitrary and subject to whimsy.
Second to that, is the ability to add in new players. It's simply 100 times easier if the new players have the books (or PDFs), rather than your own house ruleset listing.