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?"

Finally

[asmkm22]

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.

$5 seems high

[slaker]

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) [slashdot.org] 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.