Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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.
I'm hoping that they're doing the OCR work on these. If you're charging $5 for material as old and obsolete as this you had better be putting at least the minimum amount of effort into it.
My guess is the originals are either lost or sitting in a box in a storeroom somewhere on ancient backup tapes in some unsupported format and it's easier to just find an old copy of the books and scan them in.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
The format is well documented and surely you have backups.
He said they were in The Cloud. Why would he need backups?
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
In case it rains. Just like paper documents under a real cloud, electronic documents fall apart if it rains in the Cloud.
Because he cared about having the files in the future?
Trusting a cloud provider to the point where you don't have backups is one of the stupidest things I have heard today.
Hey, we never had any search function with the dead-tree copies, I don't see a problem with not having it in the online version. I knew more or less where things were anyway, if I opened the Monster Manual and Kobold was on the page then I had to go back a page or two for Kirin.
Summary says "most editions", I wonder if they'll have the original three softcover books that came in the white box with a couple of dice. That was the set I first learned on. Haven't seen those anywhere since about 1983. I remember they always smelled smokey, because Stan kept his pipe in that same box.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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!
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?
Quark or Pagemaker files? You do realize that a lot of this dates back to the '70s and '80s, right? I doubt any of it before the late '80s was done with any sort of desktop publishing software. They may have been using professional publishing software, like And, of course, until writable CD drives became reasonably affordable in the mid-90s, they were probably storing any files they were creating on floppies, then later on Zip drives. Chances are good that all the early stuff only existed in dead-tree format before they started scanning it.
At a guess, I'd say that all the original D&D, the first two versions of Basic D&D, and most of the first edition AD&D materials would be in that boat.
I just downloaded the free one they have, though, and the scan is very clean - clean enough that I'm sure they've gone to the trouble of cleaning it up. They've also OCR'ed it at the least, since I can do text searches in it. The module in question is B1, "In Search of the Unknown", with a copyright date of 1981.
Oh... and they are watermarking the PDFs, with the purchaser's name and the order number at the bottom of every page.
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.
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.
Ah now a good weekend will have any setting converted to another system, and it takes even less time within the same system. That's if you don't just build on your system yourself, hacking this stuff is one of the great pleasures of TTRPGs for me.
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.
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.
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.
So you've never bought a game through Steam?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Both of which outsource to Amazon.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!