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WotC Releases Old Dungeons & Dragons Catalog As PDFs
jjohn writes "Wizards of the Coasts, holders of the TSR catalog, have released rulebooks and modules for most editions of Dungeons and Dragons through a partnership with DriveThruRPG.com. The web site, dndclassics.com, may be a little overloaded right now. Most module PDFs are $4.99 USD."
The article points out that these are all fresh scans of the old books. It's also worth noting that the decision to make these PDFs available reverses WotC's 2009 decision to stop all PDF sales because of piracy fears. The only reference to this in the article is a quote from the D&D publishing and licensing director: "We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?"
Made vs. common sense. It must have been a natural 20.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
for someone to make a will save vs insanity.
Does this mean all the D&D PDFs I bought before, but which were deleted out of my various paizo and drivethruRPG cloud accounts, are going to be replaced? Or a credit issued? The way they were torn out from under me by the license adjustments last time makes me remain a little leery.
The books are going to be scanned and shared whether they post PDFs or not. The only question is whether there's a legit option for those who want to pay.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So if I already downloaded everything from a P2P site because I couldn't get it any other way, now do I need to go buy everything because really I'm just another honest anonymous coward? And you know, all I really want is the complete pdf set of all hackmaster books... Hackmaster took AD&D in the right direction, but I couldn't ever afford all the various monster books, as they charged outrageous prices for short alphabetical sections of monsters....
I ended up pirating the entire catalog of D&D products because I couldn't find the AD&D 2nd Edition books for sale in either print or PDF form. So at least in my case, not printing them in the first place lead to piracy. Hopefully more companies get with the program.
Are these pdf's clean copies, and not just scans of an aging rulebook or module?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Case in point, their site has crashed due to load.
Provide official torrents instead of trashing torrents in general.
Yale-educated artist and porn star Zak Sabbath's DiY D&D site (with occasional exposed nipples art or links to his girlfriend's tumblr and therefore not safe for work) should be required reading for RPG nerds. He's very big on RPG theorycraft, quick rules of thumb and stepping away from canned adventures like those used in many of the prepackaged modules. Having followed his blog for a while, I really see where he's coming from.
It's probably worthwhile to take a look at that stuff, if only to see the historical basis for a lot of role-playing tropes, but any seasoned player can't exactly look at "Tomb of Horrors" with fresh eyes and newbies probably don't want to do the work of converting old stuff to new systems. In the end I suspect that all this stuff is only worthwhile as nostalgia or for historical purposes. Given that, I'm not sure why the price per document is even as high as it is. I understand that this is content that probably shouldn't be free, but I can't see spending $5 on a 32 page PDF that maybe has one or two good ideas to incorporate into a living game.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Even if everything you said is true, they could still make more money from paid legal downloads than if they didn't give that option.
Because I'm too lazy to find a good PDF reader for my tablet that organizes the PDF books like the Kindle Reader app does.
Some people will always pirate the stuff. That's true. But by providing a legal route for the PDFs, you're giving an option to all of the people who were only turning to the torrents because you gave them no choice. Clearly a lot of people are buying the books (and killing the servers), so this was overdue. You won't need 15 minutes to find a torrent of the PDFs of those books. They've been around for years already.
I read the internet for the articles.
Because no matter how low the cost, the number of people who will not pay for the product by using torrents will far exceed the number of people who will pay for the product simply because they can.
On the other hand, the number of people who WILL pay is quite a bit larger than the number who would pay for your out-of-print product that's not available electronically, which is zero.
I'm glad that people are starting to wise up that counting the people who do pay is always, always wiser than counting the people who don't; for so long, so very many copyright holders have been no smarter than that Aesop dog that dropped his bone in the lake.
People are lazy and cheap, which is why if you make it cheap enough they will be to lazy to pirate it.
I don't pirate anything now that netflix and amazon have made it so easy and cheap to get more entertainment than I want. The safest and laziest way to pirate would still be to sign up for netflix and copy dvds and blu-rays.
Guaranteed, within 15 minutes of the first download you will be able to get this stuff for free
Which was also true 15 minutes before the first download. If you don't want to distribute the eWay, only pirates will distribute the eWay. I'm still waiting for HBO Nordic to get their head out of their ass and deliver something better than SD quality with stereo sound, unless you own a Samsung product in which case you can get HD with surround sound. I'll get my shows where I'm a first class citizen, thank you very much.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The retro clones have taken off (in relative terms, this is a niche product obviously) in the last few years. All the old TSR stuff is available on torrents and file download sites anyway. WotC might as well try and get some of the money.
You can already get all this stuff for free. Refusing to offer a legit, paid download has no appreciable positive or negative effect on illegitimate downloads. It does have a direct negative effect on legit, paid downloads.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You could already get it all for free prior to them doing this, so 15 minutes is just a tad of an overestimate.
Luckily, since they weren't for sale there was no loss on the part of the content creator. Copyright was set up to ensure remuneration for the work of the creators of intellectual property. By not offering these for sale in any form, I see no moral dilemma in obtaining a copy from an alternate source.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
seriously. do you REALLY think the original Chainmail was laid out on a pre-press program in 1971? If you aren't that dense, do you REALLY think the original layout is still around?
The music industry said the same thing about iTunes. They said no one will ever bother legally paying for digital music when it was freely available to pirate.
iTunes became the number 1 retailer of music. Your argument suddenly seems very flawed.
Right now, these books can already be pirated, but they couldn't be legally purchased before. Putting them up for sale will increase revenue from zero. That's a win for everyone.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I see a lot of things missing there, like the "Complete Handbooks", and all the boxed sets. I know it's a challenge to scan in a boxed set with off of its maps and other stuff, but that would be something I'd like to see. I'm jonsing for some Spelljammers. It's such a shame 4e has to suck. I'd still be playing D&D if I didn't have to convert all this cool stuff to those inane 4e rules. Pathfinder is the way to go these days, IMO.
So, your argument is that getting money from zero percent of the potential market is better than getting money from a small percentage of the potential market?
This presents an interesting challenge for the D&D design team. They're working on a new edition of D&D (it's in open playtest as they develop it).
Now, the new edition will have to compete for sales against D&D's own back catalog. If their upcoming product doesn't appeal to fans of First Edition AD&D, or Second Edition, Third,or Fourth, then people will just buy and play the old stuff. The next edition will have to compare to the classics or it will fail in the marketplace.
This is a victory for the consumer, who gains real choice.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
They always have a choice.
Pirating or going without.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Yes, these appear to be clean.
I just downloaded the (free) B1 "In Search of the Unknown" module and it looks great - even has bookmarks.
They finally figured out that they REALLY screwed up with 4E, and Pathfinder was eating their lunch. Last-ditch effort to turn the ship around before 5E.
I remember cutting lawns for the old 2nd edition books. I loved the smell of them.
I know a guy that owns the majority of the original artwork and what-not that the books were printed from. He'd routinely travel to ex-TSR employes homes to make purchases. Most of it's sitting in wal-mart quality bookshelves in his spare bedroom. The guy made millions trading books and game stuff like this on ebay and eventually his own business. he's a jerk though, half the books he started with he stole from my basement. But whatever... his money makes him completely in-tolerable. You show up at his house and hes all like "Lets ride around in my Mazzaradi and talk about me" Can't stand that.
Did I mention the most ironic part? He never really played D&D. The few times he did he played a chaotic evil mage and spent most of his time greifing the rest of us by "playing his alignment" I think he made it all the way through 2 modules before we stopped inviting him over. Life's funny.
Damn you WotC. The only reason my wife let me keep all my original AD&D manuals is because they were not legally available in PDF format!
Sigh.
FTFA: "The scans are good quality, and best of all, the PDFs are searchable."
I was curious if they had re-set the type for a slimmer PDF. I would expect 320 pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide (even at 1-bit) may be hefty, but maybe not. Certainly more economical for a lost art.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
I've still got physical copies of the core books from both first and second edition. Plus a big handful of companion books. The monsters in my Monster Manuals are even colored in. Who's going to have that in a PDF?
Though considering I've moved those books about 17 times over the years, maybe a PDF form factor would be slightly more convenient.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Right now, these books can already be pirated, but they couldn't be legally purchased before. Putting them up for sale will increase revenue from zero. That's a win for everyone.
Well, as long as the profits made from sales are higher than the cost of scanning the books and setting up the store to sell them. In theory the vendor *could* lose if they spend more than they make back. Not that I really think it'll be an issue in this case.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
If you want to invent a single cool thing and profit from it your whole life, then you need to invent things in the physical world. To me, your logic shows its flaw best when applied to dance instructors, who get nothing for subsequent dances after your classes have ended. And yet there are still dance instructors.
In the content world, you need to keep coming out with new cool stuff all the time. As your audience grows you have to split your efforts between "stuff" that is good for the newbs, and stuff that is good for the advanced players. It is a hard game to play right, and TSR did it for quite a few years.
If you were looking for reasons beyond the publishers business acumen, it seems pretty inarguable that computer-based adventures stole away quite a bit of the player base. Half-Life was as adventurous as all but a few AD&D games I ever played.
It is if 1 person can buy the high quality digital content for $5 and distribute it to the rest of the world and cause significant drop in profits in their published books market. Of course, ultimately that ends up signifying which format most people prefer or at least the delta in cost to benefit ratio.
There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.
There are services that will scan books for $1.
Assuming they sell a single copy at $5, then they've turned a profit.
And even if this venture isn't massively profitable, you're better off converting pirates to customers so you can reach out to them for future products. There are benefits to purchasing digital goods legally (no fear of malware/virus, not waiting for someone to seed old RPG PDFs, being able to re-download from the service, etc) that might encourage future sales.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is the perfect excuse to read up, get your fix, then hop into D&D Online and get some tabletop action come to life. The client and a decent amount of content is free, and the DM voiceovers rock.
NOTE: This is Dungeons & Dragons Online, not WoW. There be TRAPS in dem dar dungeons, and they can and will kill you very dead!
WE ordered the cash
you paid we ran away laughing
Because no matter how low the cost, the number of people who will not pay for the product by using torrents will far exceed the number of people who will pay for the product simply because they can.
On the other hand, the number of people who WILL pay is quite a bit larger than the number who would pay for your out-of-print product that's not available electronically, which is zero.
I'm glad that people are starting to wise up that counting the people who do pay is always, always wiser than counting the people who don't; for so long, so very many copyright holders have been no smarter than that Aesop dog that dropped his bone in the lake.
The folks over at gog.com (once called Good Old Games) also proved that people will pay reasonable prices for old stuff. However, not unsurprisingly, when they first started gog.com, it was apparently a struggle to get vendors to agree to sell DRM-free versions of their out-of-print games.
By that I mean the 83-87 Mentzer revisions of the D&D Basic and Expert sets (and Companion, Master and Immortal sets) or better yet the Rules Cyclopedia, and the Gazetteer series, Wrath of the Immortals, Dawn of the Emperors, Champions of Mystara and Hollow World sets. Had a bunch lost em in a flood.
My question is who is getting the money for these PDFs. If the original authors are getting a percentage, great. If it's just going into Hasbro's general revenue, screw them. It's just a last ditch attempt to monetize assets that otherwise have little value to the company, many of which they didn't even produce.
No, it was to ensure remuneration. Just because the words of the statute don't mention it explicitly doesn't mean that it was not the driving force. If it weren't for the money, we could just skip the entire debate. Nobody (of statistical significance) expends substantial effort to author a creative work with the sole intent of never showing or distributing it.
Copyright protects the livelihood of the creators of works of knowledge or creativity to ensure that they may do so with the knowledge that they will receive just remuneration for their effort. Without that basic tenet, only those of independent wealth would have the means to create and we would lose an entire segment of professional creative people. In a way, its no different than the ownership of real property - you can't pick up real property and move away with it, and anybody can walk on it. Neither are like personal property, and there are special laws to deal with ownership and transfer for each kind - both of which are in existence to preserve the monetary value.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
they crowd source to make there stuff then they sell on that same site as wotc.
i have not bought a single WoTC book since they started the 3rd edition.
i made code for a browser based mass combat basic edition game that uses the events and dominion rules.....
wotc told me i could as long as i dont make money
so i thought about it and never bothered to finish it.
and its never going to happen 1977 then 2013 now
36 years both authors passed on and im not creating for it for free....sorry...
To a certain extent, you're correct.
However, part of the social contract that exists to support Copyright, is the implicit agreement that "We (society) allow you to protect your item, and in return you make more of them so we can use them". Failure to live up to that implicit contract (i.e. sequestering I.P.) on the content provider's end voids the social contract (i.e. consumer's promise to respect Copyright).
I'm not a big fan of many of the justifications for copyright infringement, but in cases of "lost" authorship or abandonware or failure to publish or deliberate removal of a product from market, the I.P. author has effectively forfeited any rights they have.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
old? Please.
1st edition is where it's at. A couple of things in 2nd edition were worthwhile, but, overall, it wasn't great. The rest (i.e. 3.x and beyond) were merely TSR/WoC's attempts to get us to (a) buy more crap without delivering any new improvements, and (b) change AD&D to look like some sort of MMORPG on paper. Virtually all the later editions are attempting to emulate the online RPG experience, which is exactly wrong, in the opinion of the vast majority of people who played RPGs before computers. A paper RPG is much more interesting and creating than a computer one, and to change the paper RPG to use the computer model is asinine.
Hell, I'm still writing heavily expanded 1st edition stuff, and there's a vibrant modded-1st edition community out there. Don't waste your time on the later stuff - the original (with improvements from the various on-line rulesets) is far, far superior.
./
At least I can now buy inspirational material for my Pathfinder games. Good idea, WoC.
Yes, and we have a choice, accept that copyright is a worthwhile law to follow or not.
If it was still based around 14 years, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
It isn't AD&D if you aren't rolling THAC0. 2nd Ed FTW!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
http://www.dndclassics.com/product/17158/B2-The-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-(Basic)?it=1
Keep on the Borderlands, module B2. Originally printed 1979 - 34 years ago.
Selling for $4.99 as pdf.
I bought that module at Jolly's Games in Southtown, Bloomington MN in the summer of 1980, for, as I recall, about $5.
Yeah, SURE that's going to work, I'm certain of it.
Private Note to WotC: FUCK YOU YOU REMORSELESSLY GREEDY PIGS.
Seriously? You *first* re-engineer the rules for what, the FIFTH time in 15 years(?), expecting your "fans" to buy new rules and supplements, and now you want to sell ancient crap for the same price it sold for 30+ years ago? Seriously?
"We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?"
Too late. Personally, I've probably dropped well over $2000 on D&D products over the decades, not to mention 4 Gen Cons (UW Parkside 2x, Milwaukee 2x). You come out with NEW content, I may buy it. Keep trying to squeeze blood from old, ancient content? I'll buy it for $1 from the used-game bins at the gameshop down the street.
-Styopa
It's like buying a series of robotic arms, conveyor belts, etc to MAKE the car.
Coincidentally, how many times does the robot manufacturer get paid?
Oh right, only ONCE PER ROBOT.
I think that sums up the cops opinion on somebody stealing a nerd's D&D supplies especially in the late 70s through 80s.
Assuming they didn't read (Jack) Chick Flicks, in which case they would probably have gotten a warrant and figured out a way to arrest you for involvement in some sort of occult gathering.
at $18 per pdf, they're definitely pushing folks to use torrents
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Thanks WoTC. I doubt my collections value, what little there was, will hold now.
Please re-print Mox's now for game play.
Work for hire. Like a cartographer drawing a map for someone.
You pay them "X" to produce a work for hire. I guess the theory here is lack of creativity. You look at the land and draw a usable map. Pretty much any map maker could draw the same map. As opposed to an author writing stories and dialog that would be almost the same.
If they were hired to do write these "manuals", they may not have any rights to profits. I also agree that Hasbro has finally figured out there choice was to cash in on the PDF market or continue to let pirate downloads be the only source for PDF's.
I swear sometimes corporations are like prostitutes that want marriage outlawed because they are against anyone getting sex for free on general principle.
vi +
Thank you for proving my point.
How dare those evil corporations make money off of something they own! That's a travesty and injustice because I demand they give me what I want for nothing or else I'll go find a way to get it anyway so I don't have to pay for it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Except that they can't, because none of the books that WotC is putting up in digital format is being sold physically. They're only putting out old stuff that they no longer have in print. So there is no "published books market" of this content to cut into.
Hasbro gave a sack full of money to the people who owned Wizards of the Coast, in order to own the rights to the books. WotC gave a sackful of money to the people who owned then owned TSR, in exchange for the rights to the books. TSR was founded by Gary Gygax and his friend Don Kaye. Gygax was one of the original authors who owned the rights to the books (near as I can figure out Dave Arneson, the co-author, was paid for his work but was not a shareholder in the company.) But writing a book does not immediately turn into money, which they needed to produce the game, so they brought in a third shareholder, Brian Blume, as an investor. When Kaye died, Blume's father bought out his shares for a sackful of cash, and later transferred those shares to his other son. Those shares represented the assets of the company, which were primarily the rights to the books. So again, the rights were transferred in exchange for a sack of cash. Eventually the Blume brothers and Gygax parted ways, in exchange for another sack of cash. Note that everybody who transferred their rights got their payday when it happened.
So the original owners wrote the books, made some money (and names for themselves), then SOLD the rights to the books. Every time the ownership of the books changed, the new owners paid the old owners for the privilege. The old owners got their payday for a sum that considered some future sales (which is why the buyers are willing to pay the money.) That transfer doesn't take away the value the books have to the current readers or to the future purchasers, which means that if the books have more than zero value to you, it's not ethical for you to make a copy of them -- regardless of the owner of the rights.
And your last sentence doesn't even scan: "last ditch attempt to monetize assets that otherwise have little value to the company"?? That's kind of the point of purchasing assets, which is to make money off them. They have exactly as much the value to the company as the company can make from them. It's interesting that you even acknowledge that the rights to the books are assets.
Now, if you don't like Hasbro for whatever reason, (maybe you had a traumatic experience as a kid with a G.I.Joe action figure,) then don't give them your business. But you have no right to copy from them without paying the price they're asking. Not only is it the law, but it's fair.
John
You might want to check out your facts before you claim them.
http://www.dndclassics.com/product/110211/Dungeon-Delve-(4e)?src=FrontPage
http://www.amazon.com/Dungeon-Delve-Edition-Supplement-Adventure/dp/0786951397/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358959369&sr=8-1&keywords=Dungeon+Delve+(4e)
Interesting - no one had mentioned so far that they were putting up 4e products as well.
Note, though, that they only have nine products listed for 4e - all of which are older products from the line, but which doesn't include any core products. Unfortunately, Wizard's site doesn't give in-print/out-of-print status for their books, but I'd be willing to bet that all nine of those products are ones that Wizards is no longer producing in print. In that case, while there may still be copies in the supply chain, there's no more money flowing to Wizards from print versions of them - so, again, they would have no print sales to risk by putting out electronic versions.
Further note, after looking through everything being offered on dndclassics.com - they have the 1981 Basic Rulebook available there... but they don't have any of the "core three" from any edition of AD&D. Back in 2000, when Ryan Dancey was talking about what Wizards had discovered by looking through TSR's sales records, he mentioned that the perennial best sellers were the three core AD&D books, and that the Player's Handbook was the best selling of those. (Which makes sense, as there are a lot more players than DMs.)
Wizards has already released new in-print versions of the core three for 1st edition AD&D, and announced it for "3.5". My guess is that they're going to release print versions of the 2nd edition core books as well, and that's why they're not putting up PDF versions of those. As for Basic... well, the Basic Rulebook only covers levels 1-3 anyway, and Basic/Expert/etc. was never as popular as AD&D. If they're going to re-release a book in print there, they'll probably do the D&D Cyclopedia.