EN World Thread

So, in a nutshell, a few people pirated the PHB2, and WotC decided to pull all PDF sales. A rather stupid move, in my opinion, I was a frequent customer of 3E material. I guess I'll simply stop purchasing WotC stuff then, and move my money elsewhere for my d20 needs.

A seriously boneheaded move on Wizards part. This is probably going to destroy more than a few PDF retailers, and give their customer relations yet another kick in the balls. Seriously, what was wrong with the Watermarks on the PDF's? Obviously this is how they caught the guys that pirated the material in the first place... All this means is that there will be a 1 or 2 day delay between when the book is released and it's up on pirates bay since the seeder will need to scan it first.

Either that or someone will get their hands on the PDF's that are sent to the printer and put those up like they did with the 4th ed corebooks.

I mean really... if Hollywood, the Music Industry and the Computer Gaming Industry combined haven't managed to 'crack down on piracy' what hope does Wizards have?

Depends - do they have access to ritual magic?

Ba-dump-bump!

Ironically, I saw a little while ago that Palladium Books will begin producing PDFs in the near future.

What a wacky world we live in.

-paws

Hell must be freezing over. I know where I am moving if the greenhouse effect continues.

Let WotC make thier mistakes. It only hurts their sales and profit margins.

But it looks good short term for investors. Would be nice to know some actual figures, but if pdf sales don't resume, they will sell much less stuff. A lot of pdf sales go to people who already have dead tree books, some simply refuse to buy books that weight more than a notebook containing all books ever published. And some people are simply pissed of by that move. If Wizards were Sony, they could get away with blatantly insulting their customers. Alas they are not Sony, so this stunt will cost them.

It's not just sales they're stopping -- which would be understandable, if misguided -- but also distribution. That means that if you've legitimately purchased a WotC PDF from an online retailer, you can no longer access it. Hope your hard drive doesn't crash!

The distribution part is the seriously boneheaded move. Stopping sales is one thing, but robbing customers that have already paid you money of their product? Bad karma from that.

I am just glad that Catalyst is different.

They are not different, they simply are not in the same situation. Yet.

Then not even Sony is Sony.

apple is the new sony

They still kinda got away with it.

Meanwhile, DrivethruRPG is giving away free downloads of White Wolf's Exalted main book. I guess if a company is to take advantage of another company's choice, now is the time. I was just given the heads up about this from a friend, so I'm kinda curious about the game system.

Paizo is offering a 35% discount on all Pathfinder PDFs until the end of the month:

Didn't they do something like that when 4.0 came out? Exchange your old D&D books for copies of Exalted? *shrug*

-paws

aye, they did. well, looks like they're doing it again. persistent aren't they.
what I do like is that paizo is offering the discount on pathfinder pdf's as Fuchs mentioned above. I just saw that on their forums. A lot of companies are trying to take advantage of WotC's decision it appears, good marketing standpoint.

Once WotC realize how stupid they were doing that and that everyone is making fun of them, they will never ever make a single pdf, just so they have not to admit to the mistake.

It's quite a cool time right now, unless you care for 4E.

Maybe we will get lucky and Hasbro will sell off the D&D IP.

But who would do it justice?

The community would do it justice. There would be plenty of bickering to start, but at some point early on, someone would "rally the troops" and take the lead and have a following of enough people that want to help on the project to make it viable. There are obviously going to be forks where disagreements happen, but even if it turns out to be similar to open source software development, having a handful of quality versions of DnD is not going to be a bad thing.

Not that I foresee something like this happening, but honestly, who knows the game, any game, better than the people that are spending hours upon hours running and playing it? Unlike Shadowrun, DnD 4e doesn't need the metaplot. So you are reduced to just the ruleset to play with...

Even more to the point, who could afford it?

AJC

With the OGL, D&D effectively was put in the hands of the community in all but name. Several fans and corporations are doing their own version, based on the OGL/3E rules.

Bullshit. If anything, fans would end up making twenty different versions of Dungeons and Dragons and declaring jihad against all others.

Fans think that it has to include this thing and that thing and those things, even though none of them will ever agree on what exactly this that or those things are! Further, such versions would probably include so much legacy material that it would make the game either nigh unplayable or unmarketable and please only the people who created it in the first place. And a new audience? I figure small interest in the strange, gibbering Frankenstein creature of clunky and highly specific rules from the 1970s. The rpg hobby has moved on.

Heck, how many legacy systems there are out there right now, each trying to be "old school" DnD? Labyrinth Lord and Castles and Crusades are the two I can think of offhand. What about the holdouts who still play Brown Box? Or go Brown Box and Supplements I & II or just I? What about Greyhawk? Do you continue past there? Or loop it all together and stick Unearthed Arcana in there as well? Would you bring back THAC0? Racial level limits? Elf as a character class? How about, as Wesley's topic down thread mentions, female characters that are only allowed 18/50 strength? Where do you place the arbitrary line and say, "no further."?

And you think Harry Potter slash fiction discussions are razor edged? Try a discussion between 1e and 2e DnD players. Don't even think about tossing anyone post TSR in there, they're liable to get shot. How about the myriad versions of 3.*? How much say would they get in this new system? How many people would line up to kick the 4e fans in the stomach while they're curled in a fetal ball crying?

In my opinion, 4e is a game that's easy to teach, that's easy to play and easy to add legacy material to as you go. I realize that my opinion is highly subjective and think that most the edition warfare is either elitist poo-poo'ing or nostalgic vitriol, but despite rules changes its still a game that follows the e3k rule: explore, kick in doors, kill monsters, kollect treasure. Anything beyond that was bullshit that people added on in their own campaigns or came from a rule set that was advertised as being able to do anything, any genre, any game! but didn't actually succeed. I think that Dancy needs a kick in the teeth for trying to sell that particular load...

I've been trying to avoid this whole pdf issue because I knew it would devolve into people taking pot-shots. Is this Sony stupid? Yep. I've spent the last couple of days looking for something that would shed light on why they'd make such an obviously wrongheaded decision, but have thus far come up blank.

If the popular conspiracy is right and this is all a smokescreen while they create their own pdf sales service, there are much better ways to have gone about it. If it's because the lawyers are freaking out over pirates...Wil Wheaton actually answers best: "the people that are going to steal are going to steal regardless of what I do to try and stop them. The best way to compensate is to be open, honest, and try to provide things that you can't get by stealing it online."

WotC had better start frying up some crow but quick or this is only going to get worse. They at least need to stop scrambling around trying to justify it because they're looking like the Keystone Cops. My opinion? This ain't some evil scheme - "never attribute to malice that which is probably stupidity" - this is Lawyertron 500 gone buggy.

But that's the point. In this day and age, just because some game is published by XYZ and can be bought at Barnes & Noble doesn't mean its better. I'd easily accept twenty different versions of DnD and all the bickering. If they are all being actively developed and receive input from the community, then we all win.

I may like version B and you like version C, but seeing neither of us have to shell out $$$ to play it...again, we all win. We get to play a bunch of different games without investing money and then we pick the one that fits our style best and go with it. And if you then get involved and become in part a developer, then we all win again, because its constantly being improved. And I guarantee a good game will still be a good game if its not coming out on hardcopy.

There are so many rpgs out there that sound intriguing or I'd like to play or run, but I'm not gonna shell out more $$$ and take a chance on a dud. But if it was all free...it'd be a different story...

We already have that. Not just all the D&D versions done under the OGL, but the myriad of houserules just about every gaming group uses for their D&D. The OGL made sure that D&D is in the hands of the fans.

As far as input from fans goes, Paizo's Pathfinder is a year-long beta test for their new D&D system. In a few months we will see how much input we had on that projec, when the finished rulebook comes out.

The uphill battle that we, as gamers, have, is that table top games are not all that popular. Its a niche market. So unlike, say linux using an open source model, there are much fewer people using, developing and frankly, interested in rpg rules and settings. I mean, its not like we are going to see an explosion of new people getting into rpgs in the next 5-10 years.

I wish it were different, but there's a substantial investment in time to run and participate in an rpg...and the trend from technology, hobbies, games, even just day-to-day life is smaller, faster and instant gratification/feedback. Something that print publishing is fighting against very strongly...

Made sure that the 3.* version of DnD is in the hands of fans.


Are you kidding? Pathfinder is the exact result of what would happen if fans were allowed anywhere near a rules system. Changes that would benefit the game withdrawn because THAT'S NOT DnD.

The only things that have changed with Pathfinder is that they've got some better art, they've upped magic users abilities, given fighters a token or two, and added flight to the skills. They haven't solved the issue of increasingly huge and overcomplicated stat blocks, taking forever to create NPCs, all of the problems with multi-classing (why thank you, I will take one level of Fighter for a whole bunch of free armor feats...), melee classes being shit weak in the higher levels, hell, how complicated epic play is...

And the more they change and the more they tweak, the less compatible with book standard 3.* it becomes. Funny.



This is way too pie-in-the-sky for me, sorry. Maybe I'm weird and traditional and I'd rather buy from a company that has money and time to stress test a system and bug check it and write some books for it. Not to mention that if the only game in town was free...believe me. Someone would come up with a way to generate revenue from it. Either the ransom system or 'donations' to keep the author in business.

It's great that fans can hack together a system and run with it. It'll continue to be great for the "old school renaissance" that I'm constantly hearing from grognards. Have fun with it. I'm playing 4e and having fun with it.

Look, I'm not trying to start, or in this case continue a fight, but this getting way off topic.



You don't like pre-4e, we get it. There are plenty of folks who would like to take try their hand at taking the clay that is 3.x and turning it into something interesting. There are people who like even older editions, as have been mentioned.

So what if these groups disagree on what's best? It is all personal opinion. You know what they say about people and opinions, right?

Let's try to get back toward the original topic, please.

-paws

Never said I was a pre-4e hater, or my closet wouldn't be packed with pre-4e material I'm just saying that WotC isn't the devil everyone thinks they are. No big deal.

I'll gladly get off the topic though and continue to say that WotC is being incredibly dense about all of this.

You havn't a clue what you're talking about.

They reduced wizard, cleric, and druid power levels (fewer spells per day except for cantrips, polymorph SEVERELY nerfed, most of the save-or-dies and save-or-sucks SEVERELY nerfed, etc); fighters are significantly better between the dramatically increased combat abilities (weapon and armor masteries) and the fighter-focused new feats (such as the Critical feats that can do things like stun the enemy every time you crit); the huge and overcomplicated stat blocks are all caster stat blocks, and with fewer spells per level and fewer overpowered spells, those aren't as much of an issue; there are streamlined NPC creation rules and tables; I and a lot of other people don't see that as a problem with multi-classing; see Fighter above; Epic play is not part of the core rules and Paizo has already said they're most likely going to completely scrap the current Epic rules.

Being a 4E fanboy is fine. Just please don't make statements that have no support about a competing product.

Sorry if that came off harsh. Just tired of seeing people argue "which edition is best" over and over again.


Agreed.
What gets me about it is that it seem totally out of the blue. WotC material has been pirated for... well, a long time.

The idea that they're launching a PDF service is interesting, but... Seems like they're putting the cart before the horse here. If they're doing this, it would have made a lot more sense to have a launch date for the service, wouldn't it?

-paws

All this vaguely reminds me of a story I read not long ago. There was this band out of... Norway, I think. Pretty niche, regional at best. Their new album comes out and they sell a very, very small number of copies (like less than 1000 copies). On a whim, one of them goes out to see if the album is being file shared. He finds a tracker site that says the album has been downloaded from a major p2p network (pirate bay, I'm guessing) thousands of times (like over 200,000 times). They freak out and start talking legal options. After pursuing it for a while, they discover that the tracking site was bogus. You could enter just about anything into the site and it would produce grossly inflated numbers. Whoops. After more research, they actually get a good number. Turns out their album has been downloaded only a couple hundred times. So now the band is mad and embarrassed that they're not being distributed.

You and me both. Try going to every forum and hearing, "WOTC IS THE DEVIL!!!" repeated ad naseum and you'll see why it's hard not to say something from time to time.


And that's what bothers me. There's absolutely no precedence here. You've been pirated? Congratulations, that's what happens on the internet nowadays. In fact, you've offered lots of things for free. Now it's a problem? Since..?

Again: lawyers or critical overreaction to something that has nothing to do with pirates that they're trying to cover-up.


Exactly. Would they want to cut out the middle man and make direct money from pdf sales? Of course. Everyone wants as much money as they can get without having to pay someone else to do the transaction. But this is beyond rationality and veers strongly into tinfoil hats.


Heh, the very definition of eating crow.

Zurai, I'll look into that. I'm going by information I've pulled from other sites. Jeeze, calm down.

Internet? Man, I remember getting (poorly) photocopied books from friends back in the late 80's, before most folks had even heard of the internet. Heck, my dad even copied stuff for me at work. We didn't know crap about copyright law back then (nor did we care).



See also: Damnatus, the 40k fan movie that got scuttled by Games Workshop after it was finished! These folks spent years on this thing. They had no desire to make money from it. But some little bit of German law said that they couldn't surrender their creative works, so... GW said, no you can never release that... yup.

(Care to bet whether or not that movie is out there somewhere?)

-paws

Actually, Damnatus was shot down well before filming began... they just had a major miscommunication. Which sucks balls big times.

if of two minds on this subject...

1. the people that do the hard work needed to create these things need to be compensated for their time.

2. the copyright system is clearly out of date, as it was created back when one needed a very expensive press to make duplications. now, a $200 laser printer can do much the same work, based on a pdf that costs less then one cent to duplicate if one consider the energy cost of recreating a bunch of magnetic field states on a spinning ferrous disk. it was also set up to handle arguments between wealthy owners of said presses, not millions of individuals.

basically, the ones that are screaming loudest here is not the "artist" but the middle man, the ones that have their business model made obsolete by the steady advance of technology.

Really? Hmm. Not what I got from their (very sporadic) newsletters. Maybe something was lost in the translation to English?

-paws

I was under the same impression as well.

AJC

Four thoughts:

1. Digital media is the future of publishing. Anyone who says otherwise is a Luddite. Removing yourself from that model is shooting yourself in the foot.
2. Internet piracy is impossible to stop. However, monetary losses due to piracy can be worked around and should be factored into the publishing model. It's clear that WotC did not do this.
3. While I'm not on board with the whole fan-film thing (mostly because if I was going to put a lot of work into a project I'd like to get some sort of financial compensation for it and perhaps sell it down the road), smart publishers need to acknowledge the gray area that is fandom and not crush fan enthusiasm. Paramount used to toss cease and desist letters left and right but they've since realized that, while yes, fan films technically infringe on IP, it's these same fans who are the company's biggest supporters. In Japan (which has stricter copyright laws than the United States) one of the largest otaku events is the summer fanzine expo where students sell and trade manga that utilizes copyrighted characters. And somehow Kodansha and the other publishers and the students have managed to create a sort of symbiosis.
4. This is the kind of stuff that keeps IP lawyers employed. Unfortunately, those lawyers use the same measuring stick across industries. Entertainment is not the same as manufacturing.

Good points. Not to sound too "fanboy-ish", but I'm interested to see how CGL's newly announced PDF availability thru FGLS works out. In particular, I like the way they've tried a different approach, rather than simply offering "discounts" for the next couple of weeks. Time will tell how successful it will be, but I like the fact that they're trying to take a different approach.

AJC

The future is not PDFs. The future is selling access to digital 'books' that can not be downloaded and are so thick with background art and such they make it difficult, if not impossible to print them out on your home printer. Sure, you'll be able to make a screen capture of each page of every rulebook and sourcebook to make your own PDFs - go for it, I dare ya! but since the cost of subscription will be so low it won't be worth the time and effort to do so.

I'm sure there will still be some limited runs of physical books mind you, but as the wi-fi thing continues to expand and people continue to embrace personal electronics capable of accessing the net from virtually anywhere, the demand for physical books will diminish considerably.

The business model I foresee will be not unlike a Netflix subscription. You'll pay a monthly fee for access to the material and this access will be tiered like Basic Player's Access: just the player's handbook in DnD terms, Basic GM's Access: just the 'core' rulebooks, and Full Access: all rulebooks and sourcebooks plus weekly gems like adventures, notable NPCs, game maps, inspirational artwork etc. And like a Netflix subscription, no downloads, so once you stop subscribing you lose all access.

You do know that any file that can be read can be copied and likely more efficently than print screening. Also if one requires net acess to play pnp RPGs then you've lowered the market shear you have acesse to. Plus the net can mess up so of it goes down I'm a session you can't get any rule books thats asking for me to screen cap all of the pages that Ill use regualy.

No offense meant Browncoat, but were you agreeing or disagreeing with Wes? I couldn't quite make it out from your post.

And even if everything went all digital, I would still print out my books in order to put them up on a bookshelf. But I admit that I'm weird like that.

FYI, I'd still buy hard/softcover RPG books. I like to read the things on a casual basis (and you try taking a bubble bath or sitting on the throne with a MacBook on your lap!). But when I'm writing or running a game, digital is the way to go. Quick reference makes for efficiency.

Monthly fee to access the books? Oh heck no. I want the physical books and to buy my copy of the digital which I can access whenever I feel like it. I'm a dinosaur from the old age and I hate this pay by month subscription idea. If that's the wave of the future, the future stinks horribly.

I'm sure there will be hackers out there that will make a go at cracking the cyber defenses of such a system, but I doubt that there will be much demand in pirated copies when paying for it legally will be so much simpler.

I like having a physical copy myself, and that's why there will always be some print copies. However I don't see the print copy continuing to be the primary means of distribution.


I've heard that before. How many people pay a monthly fee to watch movies on TV, or play music on their MP-3 player? To you and I who (I'm guessing here) are old enough to remember before the internet was a household word the idea that you wouldn't have access to your source material except through an electronic gizmo does rub against the grain. But remember also how we had to truck it down to a public library and mess with Dewy to find some dusty tome on [insert obscure topic here] only to find the library didn't have one and we had to "order" it from a larger library somewhere else? Now we generally skip the library altogether and go straight to the net. Younger generations don't even remember a world without the internet. As the i-phone, Blackberry and associated technological monstrosities become more common- and they will (remember when only pimps, stockbrokers & drug dealers had pagers?)- the idea of subscribing to online services for a small fee will become a given. Having such an apparatus without online services will be like having TV without basic cable or a cellphone without a custom ring tone. Once the cost of distribution is cut and the level of piracy reduced to nearly nothing the price of the material will be considerably lower while the producers of the material will see substantially more profit.

My Netflix subscription runs like $15 a month (I think- I'd have to ask the wife) and the movies I watch through this service cost millions, some hundreds of millions to produce. Do RPGs cost more than a fraction of that to produce if you cut out the cost of printing? Would a DnD player pay $3 (another guess) a month to have access to all the published material for DnD at his fingertips? Think about it: no more "I can't play a sorcerer because I haven't bought the Player's Handbook II" or "I can't take the [enter feat name here] because I haven't purchased the Forgotten Realms Setting sourcebook".

The change will be not just how you get the material, but what material you get. It won't be like buying a book but rather like getting HBO. You'll be subscribing to the DnD channel. The material will be constantly updated so your copy won't ever be out of date. You'll have access to all the maps, all the art, probably even music and sound effects- everything you need to run your campaign for a single low monthly rate.

Of course, I didn't say everyone would like it, just that the current business model of pretending computers don't exist and continuing to print and sell books like it's 1975 ain't going to work. A new model will evolve and we'll either evolve with it or the pencil and paper RPG will go extinct.

sure, if one can have a single reader to access all the data, maybe with a built in offline cache, just in case...

something like a kindle scaled for page size (or maybe the rpg companies should start to retool their books for kindle and similar? i know mongoose sells pocket versions of some of their books) could maybe work...

That's a false dichotomy. A movie is something that is watched once and absorbed - paying a one-time fee to see a film has been the de facto standard since the days of Edison.

Subscription-based music is similar - you listen to a song, you get bored of it, you get a new song. However, the huge majority of people still choose to buy their music outright through the iTunes music store or, as I choose to, on plain old CDs.

A Shadowrun book is a reference source, functionally similar to an encyclopedia - you'll be looking at it repeatedly for years. Unlike subscription-based and continually updated sources like Lexis-Nexis, the content you buy will remain static outside of a few error corrections.

Besides, it takes one guy with a saw and a really good batch-feed scanner to turn a whole text into a .PDF.

one thing just came to mind. what about people that want to play previous versions?

under a subscription model, will they be out in the cold when a new version comes around?

Judging from the way WotC handled it, yes.