D&D Handbook Distribution Lawsuit Settled For $125,000 124
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? (Score:5, Funny)
agreed to a judgment against him of $125,000
So they didn't roll for damages?
Re:Agreed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Free advice: do not address Judge as Dungeon Master. IANAL.
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So court procedure and etique is more important than things like the law.
Re:Agreed? (Score:4, Informative)
In theory, all legal cases should be decided on the merits.
In practice, as with all situations, dissing the people in power will bring holy shit of vengeance upon your head.
The sad part is that often times the shit will fall in the form of a prejudicial ruling, rather than a contempt of court fine.
Another thing that pisses me off in legal proceedings is how if you screw up, you're toast. Case in point: e390 v. Spamhaus. Technically, the us court didn't have jurisdiction. But once it was removed to federal court, "you automatically waived the right to contest any jurisdictional issues". A booby-trap.
Our legal system is hosed and strewn with traps that, you guessed it, only high priced lawyers are smart enough to work around. I'd call it a damned protection racket if you asked me.
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In theory, all legal cases should be decided on the merits.
In practice, as with all situations, dissing the people in power will bring holy shit of vengeance upon your head.
The sad part is that often times the shit will fall in the form of a prejudicial ruling, rather than a contempt of court fine.
Another thing that pisses me off in legal proceedings is how if you screw up, you're toast. Case in point: e390 v. Spamhaus. Technically, the us court didn't have jurisdiction. But once it was removed to federal court, "you automatically waived the right to contest any jurisdictional issues". A booby-trap.
Our legal system is hosed and strewn with traps that, you guessed it, only high priced lawyers are smart enough to work around. I'd call it a damned protection racket if you asked me.
Please replace smart with knowledgeable. Lawyers aren't necessarily smarter then the rest of us they just study more.
AG
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Does the acronym IANAL bug anybody else?
Because, while not a lawyer, I definitely not ANAL.
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Does the acronym IANAL bug anybody else?
A little, but I don't have a bug up my butt about it.
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Of course Dungeon Masters were originally called "Judges..."
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Damage: d20+124,990
So, $125,000 is about average.
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Actually, that would be d20 + 124,989.50.
How's that for combined geek and math pedanticity!
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From one pedant [wikipedia.org] to another.
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Actually I think damages were 40000d6, for which a final roll of $125000 is slightly below statistical expectation. In order to count the sheer number of dice, a roller rink had to temporarily be rented out as bean counters dumped the entire truckload of all 40K dice.
That's so many six sided dice, WotC has announced plans to buy out Chessex.
In other litigation news, GW is suing WotC for the usage of the term, "40K dice".
Re:Agreed? (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately for the defendants, there is no saving throw against punitive damages.
Re:Agreed? (Score:4, Funny)
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+1 sad but true.
Although that should be "charisma modifier"
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Don't arrest me, jerkwads! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Several days ago, I downloaded 40 (I just checked) D&D 4e books. Then I noticed their pulling of the PDFs from legal sites and was happy for being able to retroactively claim justification. :)
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My first reaction was remembering that even though I own the 3.5 manual (which I paid $90 for some years back) I still don't have pdfs, and need to obtain them.
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Thanks, I wasn't sure how to go about doing that. I didn't realize people just post these things in full.
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They got their judgement. Now will they become for profit lawsuit machine or will they actually make something worth downloading? I suppose at some point I'll have to play that version of D&D but it sounds about as boring as some of the eternal leveling before the fun starts MMORGs.
And yes it's wrong but it is obligatory. It's one of the fascinating facets of the Streisand effect.
Re:Don't arrest me, jerkwads! (Score:4, Interesting)
Widespread consensus? Not in my groups. Oh sure, there are those people around, but we learned to ignore them like we learned to ignore the people who still protest that 1st edition was the best and demand that people play it.
We like 4th edition because it's not dumbed-down, it's wised up, with a system that's actually got some thought into its overall, not just a random mish-mash of whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.
Just the idea of all the class having actual abilities done along the same lines makes 4e a lot better.
But hey, you want to play 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Pathfinder, or whatever, you go for it. Like what you like.
Just don't diss me because I like what I like.
Re:Don't arrest me, jerkwads! (Score:5, Interesting)
At first I liked some of the ideas in it, but after a while it seemed it mattered very little which class you played, they all end up pretty close to being the same, often with abilities that are the same (or very nearly the same) but with a different name. All the spells with great non-combat use, for example, are missing. All the abilities of every class in fact, focus on combat. Hack and Slash is fun and all, but it isn't the sole reason why I play rpgs. If I wanted that only, I'd just play a computer game. Some of the best sessions I've ever played in were games where not a single attack was made the whole time. I'll probably play 4E again some time, but probably like the board game it feels like it is trying to emulate.
Now that Fantasy Craft is out and I've had a chance to read through it a bit, I think it is what 3.5 should have been. The rules are complete, handle combat and non-combat well, and give you real choices as you level up as to what you want to do with your character.
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All the abilities of every class in fact, focus on combat. Hack and Slash is fun and all, but it isn't the sole reason why I play rpgs. If I wanted that only, I'd just play a computer game.
You essentially are -- World of Warcraft.
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More likely you play with a bunch of moronic juveniles who can't figure out HOW to run a game session without combat.
Sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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On the other side of the coin: I got into D&D through 4th edition as have many people I know.
Their marketing has dramatically improved, the game seems easier to pick up and I'm seeing D&D expand pretty widely beyond the original core. I imagine that was Hasbro's goal and in that regard they seem to be wildly successful.
Re:Sigh. (Score:4, Interesting)
That said the rest of what you say has a pretty good point to it and I'm glad it brought you into a hobby that I hope you enjoy. I'd also be curious to see where you are in 2-5 years and if you've moved on to something that supports more complex and challenging role-playing side of things or if the tactical challenge is what you enjoy. 4th edition plays like a artificial tactical game to me and really doesn't provide the effective simulation feel of previous versions. I feel more like I'm playing a card game or a board game but that's just my personal feeling.
Again, I am glad it introduced you to table top RPGs and I hope it helps grow the market as a whole. I just don't know if I believe that it has without seeing some numbers given the contentious nature of it's launch.
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Maybe. But that's what DMs are for right? To make up rules on the spot. The group I play with really doesn't care at all about rules. We usually make up stuff in whatever we do because we almost always are doing things that no rule maker would ever think was reasonable. :D
I would rather there be a good, simple core set of rules which are easy to get new people up to speed on quickly. It seems like most of the rule reduction occurred inside the player abilities, which is what a new player has to lear
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I take slight issue with your analogy regarding classic board games. They have very simple rules that allow for complex tactics but the complexity and freedom of the player are not the same thing. These games offer complex strategies but few options in individual moves. This results in strategies being an emergent
Re:Sigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
On one side of the coin, I understand and agree how you could come to your opinion RE: the direction Hasbro is taking.
On the other side of the coin, knowing the history of all the companies that have been behind D&D since it started, I have to think this is simply a rinse and repeat cycle that's been happening since the first edition and spats between Gygax, Arneson, and the Blumes.
This is a franchise run by people that have always been willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory whenever someone in charge wakes up and gets greedy. It just seems to be in genes.
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Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Funny)
4th edition does suck - simplified math, weird non-euclidean map geometry, nobody dies because everyone can heal, no usb, less space than a Nomad, no wireless, lame.
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While I would heartily agree that 4E does suck, I don't think it's for the reasons that you mention.
The simplified maths is good for everyone. Having 1d20 + half level works so much better than some of the 1/3rd of level that saves were using in 3E, or the "whatever we thought looked good" tables that 2E and earlier used. It also goes along way to fix some of the balance problems that plagued earlier editions, and made some characters unplayable or broken at high levels. Oh, it's very handy for eye-balling
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I'm personally reserving judgement on the 4th edition for the moment, since I haven't actually played or DM'ed a session, I've only read the books after torrenting PDFs of them via The Pirate Bay.
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Lies! Hasbro just dealt with that problem by suing people. Surely that means the PDFs are now completely unavailable?
*shakes head* (Score:5, Insightful)
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for those who don't know (Score:5, Interesting)
Wizards of the Coast was bought out by Hasbro a while back and underwent a transformation from geek utopia to corporate cash machine [salon.com].
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.
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It looks like the pen and paper RPG-market is plummeting right now. That is bad new for me as a customer, because I really enjoy playing D&D. and I want to be able to buy new and exiting products in the future..
I personally hope that Hasbro makes enough money to keep making new D&D products, and I don't support sharing their stuff illegally over the internet.
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Can you give a little more information about the "chase rarity"? I assume it's a level above rare, and there aren't many cards in it. I remember the Star Trek CCG did that a loooong time ago, and people didn't like it. I haven't played Magic in many years, so I've lost track of this stuff.
Re:for those who don't know (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, they added "Mythic Rare" a couple of years ago. The set that is releasing right now has something along the lines of "secret rare"
WotC has added "priceless treasures" into some packs of their newest release, Zendikar. It is estimated that about 1 in 20 boxes have a "treasure card". Some people have opened 2 treasures in a single box.
Almost all of these cards are valuable cards from the early years that are on the reserved list. WotC did not violate the reserved list by including them because these
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For the first time in over 15 years you now have a chance to actually crack open a Black Lotus from a $4 pack of MtG cards. Winning the lottery is more likely, but it is still possible.
And buying it outright will still be cheaper.
Re:for those who don't know (Score:5, Informative)
Can you give a little more information about the "chase rarity"?
Yeah. Specifically, describing it that way is the sort of thing you see from people who can't do math. What they did was make rares more common, then introduced the "mythic rare" at the approximate frequency ordinary rares used to be.
Odds of finding a specific rare card in the rare slot of your pack, older "large" sets:
Alpha: 0.86%
Beta: 0.85%
Unlimited: 0.85%
Revised: 0.83%
4th Edition: 0.83%
5th Edition: 0.76%
6th Edition: 0.91%
7th Edition: 0.91%
8th Edition: 0.91%
9th Edition: 0.91%
10th Edition: 0.83%
Legends: 0.83%
Ice Age: 0.83%
Mirage: 0.91%
Tempest: 0.91%
Urza's Saga: 0.91%
Mercadian Masques: 0.91%
Invasion: 0.91%
Odyssey: 0.91%
Onslaught: 0.91%
Odds of finding a specific mythic rare card in the rare slot of your pack, newer "large" sets:
Shards of Alara: 0.83%
Magic 2010: 0.83%
Zendikar: 0.83%
Odds of finding a specific rare card in the rare slot of your pack, newer "large" sets:
Shards of Alara: 1.65%
Magic 2010: 1.65%
Zendikar: 1.65%
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A card's rarity is usually describe as "chase" when you don't get a card of that rarity level in every booster pack. Magic had settled down to a three-rarity level system: in each pack you got 11 commons, 3 uncommons and 1 rare. Since the set would have the same number of distinct cards in each rarity class, there was three times as many of any given uncommon as any given rare, and 11 times as many of any given common as any given rare. (I leave out the complicating factor of "foil" cards, since they mad
I knew they were doomed... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com]!) being pulled in to playtest the latest
In other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile companies like WizKids and Games Workshop continue to show [games-workshop.com] their complete disdain [photobucket.com] 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.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile companies like WizKids and Games Workshop continue to show [games-workshop.com] their complete disdain [photobucket.com] for their customers and the fans of their products as well as their utter inability to properly market their games.
Wow. This part of the Terms of Service for Games Workshop is pretty disturbing:
"SUBMISSIONS
Any notes, e-mails, online messages or bulletin board postings, ideas, suggestions, concepts, designs, or other material submitted to any physical GW company address or to any web site owned or controlled by GW and/or to any e-mail addresses contained in or on those web sites ("GW Web Sites") will become the property of GW throughout the world and GW shall be entitled to use the material for any type of use forever, including in any media whether now known or hereafter devised. When you submit any material to any physical GW company address or any GW Web Sites, you agree, offer, warrant, and represent, both explicitly and tacitly (and GW accepts) that you are assigning all intellectual property rights in that material to GW and that GW has the right to use that material at any time entirely in its own discretion for whatsoever purpose including for commercial, promotional, and advertising purposes without any obligation (including any financial obligation) to you now or at any time in the future. You waive and relinquish any rights, including "moral rights," that may exist in any content to the furthest extent permissible by law and agree not to assert any rights over that content. We are afraid that in order to protect ourselves legally, this is the only way we can operate. If you are unhappy with this policy, then please do not post or send any material to GW.
Is this just Games Workshop being incredibly greedy, or is this SOP for online sites now?
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It's SOP for greedy companies. Before the days of the internet, many companies that allowed you to submit 'fan' work had similar disclaimers when they provided the address to send to.
A good spin doctor will tell you it's to protect the interests of the company, since you are likely creating a derivative work based not just on their copyrights but using their trademarks. But it's mostly so that if you send them something they decide to use, they don't ever have to get into an issue with you asking for money.
D&D (Score:2)
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.
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Planescape [planewalker.com]
Dark Sun [athas.org] (This one seems to be down, hopefully it's not down for good.)
Re:D&D (Score:4, Informative)
They are supposed to be bringing back Dark Sun, but it'd be best to have very low expectations, cause they just want something "gritty".
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/drfe/20090814 [wizards.com]
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They are supposed to be bringing back Dark Sun, but it'd be best to have very low expectations, cause they just want something "gritty".
I can understand if you feel cynical after seeing how FR was treated, but I don't honestly see how you can read that article and just by its own contents imply that the people building the new product don't "get" Dark Sun. It was an incredibly gritty setting.
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Yes, it was a very gritty setting with lots of depth, but I believe they are bringing it back merely to fit a buzzword niche, not because they thought it was an awesome world. I expect them to 3/4-ass most of it and have "once you've made your X character, see the X Handbook for more than just subheadings" at least once.
Perhaps I'm reading more into it, but all I saw was "this is EXTREME, so it will sell".
Err... (Score:1)
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No Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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).
You forgot about clerics, and sorcerers.
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May I offer... (Score:2)
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Re:Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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"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. ;^)
Re:Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Hey, thanks, I appreciate responses more than mod points anyway. ;)
Re:Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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 diffe
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For example, my soul knife uses Player's Handbook (Fighter), a Dragon Magazine (Feat), Expanded Psionics Handbook (Base Class), PHBII (feat), Co
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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.
Re:Nerds (Score:4, Informative)
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 [amazon.com] books [amazon.com]! And anyone paying attention had noticed that Wizards had been experimenting with radically new mechanics [amazon.com] 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.
Try pathfinder rule system (Score:2)
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
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To scan the rules without buying a copy check out the open gaming reference document.
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ [paizo.com]
But let me assure you that the book is well worth 35 dollars on amazon. Hell it is probably worth full price if you want the PDF.
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. . . 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 P
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You can get everything for 15$ once (Score:1)
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 adventure
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Ah...but would that be Lawful evil or chaotic evil?
Re:Nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Well, avoid the DRM'd crap then (Score:2)
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 DR
networking (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Poor sales and it only contributed to piracy. (Score:2)
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 fi
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But information wants to be FREE!
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One of the main reasons people griped about PDF being pulled off, was that numerous products of historical value, unavailable in print form, disappeared. People still cherished previous editions, even if the books were more than 10 years old.
It's like a library being closed down. Also, PDFs unless being downloaded, they hardly generate any costs (electronical storage is much cheaper than dust collecting specimens on forsaken magazine stalls).
regards,
Ruemere