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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.'"
Eat a niggerdick. All your friends do.
agreed to a judgment against him of $125,000
So they didn't roll for damages?
Could someone please explain wtf is the purpose for this and the earlier case of taking those PDF's off. I cant find a reason for it.
Not that Wizards of the Coast and D&D is extremely nerdy already, but then this kind of shit too. I am a nerd myself, but I always have to tell other people that I'm not that kind of nerd.
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
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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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.
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)...
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?
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.
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
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............
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 $35 version without the PDF) Well worth the money for a system that is very simular to 3.5 for players and DMs.
You can do it this way. Or alternatively, you can buy Player Handbook to get the rules and then Subscribe to D&D Insider for 1 month and download everything from there, including Character Builder and Adventure Tools. With that you get:
All the rules for all characters, explained in full.
VERY nice tools to compute all the numbers, prerequisites etc for you.
All monsters from all published books and adventures, with tool to modify them and print out whatever you need.
15+ issues of Dungeon, with 3 adventures in each (same bad, some quite good)
15+ issues of Dragon, for some flavor reading.
Basic trick is that if you get Character Builder once (you don't need long subscription, just grab it once per year or so), you don't need any of the splat books anymore. For Monster Manual, Adventure Tools give you all stats with possibility of modification, only pictures are missing - but guess what, pictures from all the books are available for download on Wizards site...
So, for cost of PH, DMG and 1 month subscription to Insider, you get amount of material which hardly can be matched with any other offering - with tools which are way better than anything done so far (with all due respect, PCGen is not coming even close to quality of CB, despite being developed for many years more).
I'm wondering when they will realize that having so good CB is reducing splat books sell numbers.
Real cost in 4e comes from miniatures (for maps, battle map is good and one-time expense). For that, look for ebay/etc - people are still selling some cheap commons from Wizards skrimish D&D (whatever was the name). You can get a lot of them at cost of 0.20-0.40$ 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.
GURPS?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.