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Role Playing (Games)

Current D&D Products in PDF form 73

sckeener writes "The latest Wizards of the Coast D&D product Frostburn has also been release as a PDF. There are also older D&D products in PDF format at RPGNow. The current products are being tested at Drivethrurpg.com with the catch being Adobe DRM locks on the PDFs."
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Current D&D Products in PDF form

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  • Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by N473 ( 183700 ) *
    ...now if only I played RPGs, I could carry the books on my Palm, yay!
    • as they would consider that distributing it beyond the machine you downloaded it on. And of course, your linux box is out too, I am assuming. As would be printing it, etc. I wonder if it expires as well?
    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

      by qengho ( 54305 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @07:48PM (#10368393)


      now if only I played RPGs, I could carry the books on my Palm, yay!

      Heh. I used to run my dungeons in a FileMaker Pro database on a borrowed PowerBook Duo. I built the worlds on my Quadra 700 and transferred it to the Duo via floppy disk (the owner had a dock). The most fun was coming up with sound effects to deal with game events: chimes for treasure, screams for player deaths, howls for monster deaths and a soundbite of Letterman saying "You babies!" for player complaints.

  • Or download them, DRM-free, from your favourite P2P network. Decisions, decisions...

    Seeing as RPG books usually come jam packed with additional cut out pieces with permission granted to photocopy and all that, then maybe it would be an idea to make these extra bits available to download from the publisher's website.

    Not everyone can afford / be arsed to find a colour photocopier in their neighbourhood.
    • by ivan256 ( 17499 ) * on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:41PM (#10367451)
      Or download them, DRM-free, from your favourite P2P network. Decisions, decisions...


      Support the people who are publishing these materials, or don't and let the people who make them go out of business...

      That said, I bought a couple modules offboth RPGNow and drivethrurpg.com two weeks ago. First off, the RPGNow PDFs are *NOT* Adobe DRM protected, and secondly, you can't read the drivethrurpg.com PDFs on a non-windows machine. In other words... Buy from RPGNow, and not drivethrurpg.com.

      Anybody have an updated version of that Elcomsoft utility?
      • Support the people who are publishing these materials, or don't and let the people who make them go out of business.

        Somehow, I'm not worried about Hasbro [hasbro.com] going out of business.
        • Most of the things published on those two sites are *not* published by Hasbro/WoTC
          • Who the fuck cares? They're still not getting my money. I'm not sure if you're aware of this but there's something called a library where you can check these books out for free anyway. So what's the difference if I d/l PDFs from eMule or if I check the book out and make my own PDFs?
            • I guess whoever modded this Troll didn't have an answer to my question.
              • The investment of your time and hardware.

                Unless, of course, you can scan, copy edit, and publish a PDF of a 100+ page book in under a minute.

                Call me crazy, but the smart money says you can't. I guess if you insist on violating the copyright of others, no one says the copyright holder has to make it easier for you.

            • First of all, I don't know where you think you're going to find a library that stocks recent RPG modules and campaign settings. Assuming you can find one, you'd have found a library that is in the minority.

              Secondly, just because you can get the book out of the library doesn't make it legal or ethical for you to make a permanent copy the book for yourself out of the library copy rather than buying your own.
            • Oh, two more things.

              What incentive do people have to publish these things in the first place if everybody is going to have your attitude? If nobody published them, there wouldn't be anywhere for you to go to get free copies of this stuff.

              Secondly, a PDF you buy instead of scan is smaller in file size, and higher in image quality than a scan. Plus, you can text search an official PDF, but you can't text search a scan.
              • A PDF is not worth the same as a paper book. Any company that wants to sell them at the same price deserves to lose all of their business to piracy and go out of business.

                I really have no sympathy for WotC's plan.

                As for text searching, an OCR copy of Frostburn has been circulating P2P services since about the day before its retail release, and on Usenet soon after.

                The current distribution model does not work. Somebody is going to go out of business. Maybe publishers. Maybe retailers. But someone's gonna
      • Support the people who are publishing these materials, or don't and let the people who make them go out of business...

        I'll support them, but at a fair price.
        • Check out RPGNow. You may be surprised... Modules are much cheaper in PDF form through them than the published hard copy prices.
          • Considering the royalty (expressed as a percentage) expected for a hardcover is generally a significant multiple of the royalty (expressed as a fraction) expected for an electronic book, I cannot condone DriveThruRPG.com's pricing model.

            In good old slashdot parlance...

            1. Obtain electronic rights to old geeky stuff.

            2. Price at original cost for hardcover.

            3. Skip the ??? step.

            4. Profit!

            Baen books sells its first run issuance DRM-free for 5-6$ -- heck, you can't even get them in pdf -- where the dead

            • You realize that you're talking about a different site than me?

              RPGNow prices it's PDFs at half or less than the hard cover price. I don't recommend buying anything from DriveThruRPG.com. They're over priced and you can't read them on Linux or MacOS.
              • Yes....

                And the OP referred to both sites.

                I was contrasting DriveThruRPG.com's price for a first-run D&D manual at 34.95$ (with bonus DRM!) vs. RPGnow.com's second-run at 5-10$, noting that other successful electronic publishers also use the same model as RPGnow.com.

                Baen books has been demonstrating that e-publishing without DRM at significant discount to dead-tree prices is a workable model. Of course, you have to settle for Profit! rather than OBSCENE PROFIT!, but you'll likely make it up in volu

    • Wizards/Paizo(the company now responsible for Dragon/Dungeon) generally do. IIRC, the last time anything like that was necessitated for D&D was March and the Unearthed Arcana variant checklist-and that was released in DRM-free PDF format.
    • Or download them, DRM-free, from your favourite P2P network. Decisions, decisions...

      Legitimate files tend to be much smaller than scans, unless someone took the time to OCR the text.
    • Given the price of some items, while I know that it adds to the ease that these can be pirated, I think that some of the larger 'campaign sized' modules should come with a CD giving you the text of the module plus the maps. Examples would be "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" or "World's Largest Dungeon".

      The edge to edge printing on many of these modules make them a pain to work from directly. RttToEE has statblocks together at the back of the module while it has the room descriptions at the start -

  • Overprice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:29PM (#10367344)
    $34.95 USD for a PDF? When I know I can get a real, physical book at the same price or cheaper? WTF?
    • Re:Overprice (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb@NOspaM.gmail.com> on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:41PM (#10367454) Homepage
      Depends on how bad the DRM is, and how good the PDF is. I can see where a P&P player would appreciate having a library of fully searchable guides on a flash RAM card. I know it would have been handy back in the day when I'd lug five or more big books from game to home to game again. That's carrying capacity that could have been used for Mountain Dew and Ho-Hos.
      • by Anonymous Coward
        wow. you are a nerd god.
      • Re:Overprice (Score:2, Informative)

        by Arivia ( 783328 )
        They are also insanely helpful for copying selections of text to relevant notes. I buy D&D books in hardcopy(and carry them with me.), and yet I keep a library of electronic copies for text searching(especially helpful when chasing down obscure Realmslore) and for copying to notes(helpful when using variants from books players don't have access to). Oh, and actually, in the heat of the game, the hardcopies are much better. Seriously. Now if Wizards would only ring-bind them...
      • But you know...no matter if it's PDF on a flash card or a pack full of books:

        You're still living in your parents' basement saving up to get the Star Trek:TNG series in the DVD-Borg-Cube edition. And nobody really cares which third level spells your Paladin half-elf pulled on that hot chick at the bar.

        • by Babbster ( 107076 )
          Maybe, maybe. But I still haven't done a blog entry about the cool new Star Wars DVD, so you're one nerd point up on me there.

          Now, let's get back to doing something productive, like playing City of Heroes. :D

    • Re:Overprice (Score:5, Interesting)

      by msuzio ( 3104 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:42PM (#10367460) Homepage
      So... as usual, a poor understanding of the economics of things dooms what could have been a great idea.

      Oh, and not being able to copy it among my various machines dooms this too. I do my session notes and creative work on my desktop machine. Then I bring my laptop to the sessions with me... Actually, at this point, pretty much my entire group has a laptop or desktop at the table when we play. So am I going to buy a hardcopy version I can pass around to people as needed, or a software version that I can't? Hmm...

      I think what I'm actually going to do is buy the hardcover, and download the scan of the same book on my P2P network of choice!

      Oh wait, that's what I already do. :-)

      I call this idea DOA, but let's see how it plays out.
      • Oh, and not being able to copy it among my various machines dooms this too. I do my session notes and creative work on my desktop machine. Then I bring my laptop to the sessions with me... Actually, at this point, pretty much my entire group has a laptop or desktop at the table when we play. So am I going to buy a hardcopy version I can pass around to people as needed, or a software version that I can't? Hmm...

        Passing around is possible under DTRPG scheme, as long as you register all the machines under y
      • I think what I'm actually going to do is buy the hardcover, and download the scan of the same book on my P2P network of choice!

        Oh wait, that's what I already do. :-)


        obviously you didn't read where this was posted from...here you go:

        Posted by Zonk on Monday September 27, @05:22PM
        from the legal-pdfs-mean-designers-can-eat dept.
        • The grandparent poster is supporting the designers by buying the hardcover.

          I tend to do the same thing -- buy the hardcover, both because I want to support the industry and because having the real deal is just handier in a lot of cases, and then P2P download a .pdf of the same book for the things .pdf is good for.

          Now, the publisher could make this easy on me by providing a unique access code for a copy of the .pdf available with the purchase of the book, but until that happens, this method is pretty e
          • I sort of agree, but my limit is when there is a legal alternative to downloading from a P2P network.

            WotC is doing more than most of the Record Industry or MPAA. They are actually working with e-distributors to release a product. The least we can do as consumers is respect the designer's method of releasing a product. Either buy a hardcopy or buy the PDF, but do not download the PDF from a P2P network.
    • DTRPG's recommended price scheme is that more recent PDFs cost 2/3 what the original dead-tree version cost. Older (i.e. out-of-print) books are about 1/2 original price.

      They can recommend whatever they like, but the actual pricing is up to the publishers. WotC is the first one I've seen where the PDF is the same cost as the deadtree.
  • by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:04PM (#10367611)
    Anyone know Dmitry Sklyarov's [slashdot.org] number?
  • Monte Cook (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lexarius ( 560925 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:18PM (#10367712)
    When they start pricing their non-physical versions like Monte does his, I will buy more Wizards books. That isn't to say I don't buy Wizards books now, but I mostly limit it to books that I'm getting a lot of use out of. If I'm just browsing I grab a copy from P2P. Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed was only $5 (there was some sort of special because I bought some other PDFs) so I bought it. For $5 I support one of my favorite designers, avoid doing something illegal, and get much better quality.
    • You've got a seriously good point. From what I can tell, the $34.95 price tag is pretty close to the retail cost of the physical book, but without the overhead cost of distributor markup, retail markup, printing, and shipping costs. If they sold the PDF's so that they made the same ammount of profit as the books, I bet the price would be a lot more favorable.
  • For those looking for legit copies of old AD&D books, check out the old 'Core Rules' CD. Came with a bunch of utilities, a mediocre character generator, and a bunch of the manuals in rich text format! There were other things on it as well, but having the tables in RTF format was worth the CD alone. I don't care if it is 'simple to remove' DRM like some other industries are promoting right now, I really do not want to screw with copy protection on stuff I shell out money for.
    • Legal 3e sources:

      D20 SRD [wizards.com](RTF files) Information from the core rulebooks, Deities and Demigods, the Psionics Handbook, and the Epic Level Handbook. Crystal Keep D20 Compilations [crystalkeep.com] Compilations of rules content indexes from various products(about six months out of date-last update included the Player's Guide to Faerun)-these indexes are expanded far beyond the standard, often including all the needed information for those feats/spells/whatevers.
      P2P Networking: A downloaded copy of Unearthed Arcana can be ren
    • ...check out the old 'Core Rules' CD. Came with a...mediocre character generator

      Hey, I helped write that character generator! It wasn't medio... um... well, actually I guess you're right.

      Still, the manuals in RTF were cool. Core Rules 2.0 (which is what I actually worked on) came with the manuals in RTF, Windows Help, and sweet, sweet HTML. Absolutely no DRM or anything similar; you could copy them onto your hard disk and do what you wanted with them. If you got the expansion, you even got all of th

      • Let me state *for the record* I've only had experience with the Core Rules v1.0, so I never tried your kit.

        Growing up, character generators have been one of the primary motivators for learning new languages and platforms. From the HP28C calculator to the blackberry, and everything in between. The bar was pretty high for that one application. (have I properly backpedaled here?)

        Ah, what a small world... Wish they had done the same with the newer books.
        • Heh, no offense taken. Core Rules 1 and 2 were both full of compromises and had their weak points. That sort of compromise are why lots of money was invested in the goofy movie in CR1, why the interface is custom (and thus harder to use). I'm proud of lots of CR2, but there are big parts I wish could have been different, but it wasn't an option given the demands of TSR/WotC, the budget, and the release schedule. Still, for first job out of college, it rocked hard. (How many job interviews feature your

          • TSR did go to hell in a hand basket around then. After all the railing they did to the PCGen folks and a few other people building tools about copyright I opted to keep what I wrote to myself. (Mostly 1st edition stuff, with a few 2nd edition rules in the mix) Damn, though... definitely a sexy first job out of school.

            Looking at your site you may have seen some of my krufty bioinformatics code. Didn't work for Accelrys, but I know they licensed some of the C code that could have used a bit more time. (g
  • by gamgee5273 ( 410326 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @08:24PM (#10368698) Journal
    Call me odd... I started playing D&D back in 1980 or 1981 and the cool things about the game were the books. It was almost arcane in and of itself to be dragging a DMG, Monster Manual, and Player's Handbook to and from friends' houses.

    Now you can drop it on a laptop? I applaud the advance in technology, don't get me wrong (Save your backs, kids! Don't stuff all those books in your backpacks!). However, it just strikes me that something is lost, just like the first time, many years ago, I saw a computer printed dungeon map as opposed to a hand-drawn one on hex or graph paper...

    I feel old.

    • Yeah. progress sucks. But look on the bright side-- you can download [rpgnow.com] each and every one of those original books...!

      Only problem is they only have the crappy "Legends and Lore", not the original "Deities and Demigods" with Elric and Cthulu.

      God. I really haven't grown up one bit in the last twenty years.

    • Actually, given that the core rules are "open" through the SRD, there really hasn't been a need to own any of the books to play D&D since 3E came out.

      Having said that, I own the books because the quality of the hardcover manuals is superior to any other RPG manual I have ever seen. They're worth owning because the authors, artists, editors and designers put so much work into every book.

      That's a fine way to prevent piracy - producing a product that you know anyone can just copy, but making the product
  • Gaming V2.0 (Score:5, Funny)

    by MagicDude ( 727944 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @08:29PM (#10368735)
    Dungeon Master: You enter a dark room. You hear breathing coming from the far corner. The cleric lights a torch. You encounter - A BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!! You have initiative, what do you do??

    Warrior - I bash the screen with my fist.

    Rogue - I sneak around back and unplug it.

    Wizard - I cast Bigby's Typing Hands to press Ctrl-Alt-Del

    Cleric - I cast a curse on Bill Gates

    Sorceress - I summon Tech Support
    • by servognome ( 738846 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @11:51PM (#10370368)
      Warrior - I bash the screen with my fist.
      Warrior, you fail your saving throw and take 6D6 electrical damage
      Rogue - I sneak around back and unplug it
      Rogue, you fail your electronics skill check and end up unplugging the desk lamp. You are now hidden in shadows
      Wizard - I cast Bigby's Typing Hands to press Ctrl-Alt-Del
      Wizard, You fail your arcane skill check and are unable to interpret the glyphs on the keyboard. Your spell hits 3 random keys, with no apparent effect.
      Cleric - I cast a curse on Bill Gates
      Cleric, Bill Gates resists your spell. He stares at you quizziclly, smirks, and says "Wise adventurer, answer me this question; where do you want to go today?"
      Sorceress - I summon Tech Support
      Sorceress, Tech support speaks to you in a foreign language. You are unable to communicate with him.

      • The first post seems like typical players and the reply post seems like a typical killer DM.

        What kind of DM throws a Blue Screen of Death at a party except the sadistic killer DM type? I can just imagine the screams of frustration from the players. Even if the players escape the BSOD, they still might have lost what they were working on! All their goals dashed in one BSOD encounter.

        They need to switch Role Playing games and go to one that is more solid where a surprise BSOD won't happen.
  • I got ATLAS SHRUGGED from some p2p service and read all of it on my screen. Over eight fuckin hundred pages. An awesome book, sure, but my eyes hurt for a whole week after I finished!
  • This is the future (Score:5, Insightful)

    by miyako ( 632510 ) <miyako AT gmail DOT com> on Monday September 27, 2004 @11:18PM (#10370146) Homepage Journal
    I'm the head artist for the brood D20 Modern series Year of the Zombie, and we are releasing all of our books as both PDF and Dead Tree versions. PDF is really where most of the gaming books are headed. One nice thing that this allows is for companies to sell short campaigns for a few bucks each as PDFs, which is nice because they are often short enough to be resonalbly printed off by the DM, but it would not be reasonable to do a full print run for the books.
    The nice thing about this setup is that it allows startup companies to sell their work without having to go through all the trouble of getting publishers to publish a book, and it allows established companies to put out short books.
    PDF versions of books also are nice for people who run MUDs or games on IRC, where it is often more convenient to have a pdf on the computer.
    While these are not the types of materials that one would want to get for reading on a PDA on long flights, there are many advantages of having electronic distributions of gaming text. [obligitory self-whoring]
    Year of the zombie should be released soon, anyone interested in zombie themed D20 modern games should check it out
    [/obligitory self-whoring]
    • Personally I would prefer them in RTF format - I like to be able to easily take the relevent chunk of the module that I need for that session along with me to GM from. I have a preferred format for NPC and monster stat blocks (the WotC stat blocks make me dyslexic, I can never find the number I want in that crushed up little block of text). Putting it in a PDF just means I need to cut and paste it out into a text editor anyway, and hope that column control doesn't make too much of a hash of it for me.

  • by Mechanik ( 104328 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @06:12AM (#10371904) Homepage
    Game publishers should really do this kind of thing when they kill off a game line...

    Take White Wolf for example. This year they killed off the entire line of previously existing World of Darkness games so that they could "reset" the whole world and start fresh. There are many similarities between the old games and the new games which have risen from their ashes (e.g. Vampire: The Requiem is very much like the previous Vampire: The Masquerade). However, there have been a LOT of changes, not just in rules, but primarily in setting.

    This has a lot of WW purists cheesed off... "Where is my favourite clan? How could you get rid of them and keep clan X!", etc. There are a lot of people that would be happy to just keep continuing playing the old game, and that also includes people who like the new game as well.

    Problem is, now all of the books for the old games are out of print. If you already have the books, well, you're golden for now... until they wear out (and yes, if you actually use them regularly they DO wear out quickly). For now, yeah, you could buy them online, or at your local game store, or whatever, but there is a finite supply. Eventually, they will be either impossible to find or too expensive to buy. At that point, the game will start to die as new players can't get books, etc.

    IMHO, some fixed time after they kill off a game, I think they should just take every book that was ever released for it, and jam them onto a CD as PDFs. Sell that sucker for $20 or whatever. Then at least the game will live on forever in theory.

    Luckily, I have a copy of the Vampire Revised CD-ROM that they came out with a few years ago, which has the core books on it. But, it doesn't have all the books, and it really really sucks for anything but a quick fact check as the viewable area of the pages is so damned small. A so-so solution at best I'm afraid :-(

    Mechanik
    • I can attest to that... White Wolf's binding falls apart faster than a newly established Iraqi government. Too bad, because their books are some of the most interesting reads you'll find in the RPG industry, even if the system is a bit lackluster IMHO.
    • actually many of the WW products are sold at Drivethrurpg [drivethrurpg.com].

      Currently over 343 products from WW are sold there. Here is a more direct link to their products. link [drivethrurpg.com]

      You are correct. I can think of several RPGs that have disappeared over the years. It would be nice if I could legally get them some where without having to bid for it on an auction site.
  • by Harlockjds ( 463986 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @10:21AM (#10373926)
    WOTC has a lot of old dnd material available for DL http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downl oads
  • Enworld link (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sckeener ( 137243 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @10:27AM (#10373994)
    Here's a link [enworld.org] to a comment made on Enworld by Sigil
    below is a cut&paste of the comment. It should be noted that I disagree with his views on DRM and the price of Frostburn. I am fine with both. I just think his comment sums up the pluses of PDFs in a table top RPG environment.

    Sigil:
    Speaking from my POV as an avid PDF consumer (though since I am also a PDF publisher, you may wish to take it with a grain of salt; I am trying as best I can not to bring publisher bias into the equation, but in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you I write PDFs too - though I should also tell you that my policies as a PDF publisher are essentially governed by, "if I were buying this product, what would I want?").
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rowport
    Hey, there! I am glad that you posted about this, because I am curious of the opinion of a true pdf fan: do you think that pricing the electronic document the same as the MSRP for the hardback volume is reasonable?

    In two words, "{expletive edited for Eric's Grandma}, NO!"

    Traditional (non-DRMed) PDFs have the following advantages over print products (in no particular order):
    1 - They don't take up shelf space - when you have a collection of over 500 PDFs, as I do (at least, I'm pretty sure it's approaching 500) you appreciate not having to find room for 500 books.

    2 - "Take only the parts you want" - As an extension of the above, you need only print small sections of the PDF that are relevant to you instead of lugging the whole thing around to your games. Alternatively, a DM can print only those portions of a PDF he wants his players to see.

    3 - Cut and Paste - Again, related to "take the parts you want" but very nice for quickly pulling material from a dozen sources to create a customized "sourcebook" for your PC.

    4 - Searchability - The "search" feature of a PDF lets you almost instantly find that nasty little rule to stump (or be) a rules-lawyer.

    5 - Backups - PDFs are easier - and much cheaper - to "back up" in case of catastrophe than traditional print items. In some cases (such as RPGNow.com), you have the ability to send yourself re-download links of products you've already paid for in case of true catastrophe (e.g., the house burns down - at RPGNow.com, you can simply use a few clicks to regenerate your PDF collection for free).

    6 - Cost - In theory, part of paying for a print product includes the cost of printing, binding, warehousing, and distributing - including the cost of materials (paper, ink, & glue); a PDF needs not include these costs (IIRC, a good rule of thumb is that publishers get around 25% of the MSRP for each book and that's BEFORE they have to account for printing costs). Of course, Economics 101 tells you that the price of a good has NOTHING to do with the cost of production and everything to do with how much people are willing to pay (soft drinks, for example, have HUGE profit margins for this very reason).

    7 - Instant, Free Updates - Some PDF vendors update their products for free... again, because the cost of distribution, et al, is negligible... don't you wish you had gotten a free 3.5 PHB if you had bought the 3.0 PHB, for example?

    It should be noted that DRMed PDFs often (not always) take away some of these advantages. In particular:

    3 - Cut & Paste - Most Drivethrurpg PDFs limit your cut & paste ability to 10 cut/pastes in a 10-day period. This doesn't do away with the utility entirely, but does mitigate it considerably, as most people (a) don't want to be bothered rationing their cutting/pasting and (b) in my experience, want to cut lots of small sections rather than a few large ones.

    5 - Backups - As has been discussed before, some of Adobe's limits (6 computers) can come into play; also, a computer without an internet connection (e.g., a laptop) can't be used at all to display things... not to mention the trouble with remembering
  • The Rolemaster PDF's are much better priced! I paid $20 for both the HARP main book and Magic book.

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