Pirates Force D&D Books Offline

Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the Dungeons and Dragons license, is stopping all of its digital sales after it discovered that piracy doesn't just happen to videogames.

Long before there was digital copies, people were using photocopiers to create pirated e-books, but with PDFs, all you need is a P2P client.

Things came to a head on Monday when Wizards' Beholder-Lawyers (see Monster Manual IX) took on eight individuals, alleging copyright infringement for distributing illegitimate copies of the recently-released Player's Handbook 2.

Given that the Handbook usually retails for $34.95, Wizard pulled all of its PDFs off sale until the company can find a way of making its digital copies secure, which may mean DRM on your PHB.

Legal online retailers were given 24 hours to remove their downloads, as Wizards had to "take care of all the crazy action going out there".

Source: The Register
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Well, if they weren't ripping off people with that price, they might not have such a problem - $35 for a manual? Good grief! I'd be bankrupt if I invested in D&D gear.

$34.95?

That's about £25.

Quite expensive for a book.

iain62a:
$34.95?

That's about £25.

Quite expensive for a book.

These books, nay, the entire 4th Edition is a big rip-off anyways. Even though the PH2 is out, there is still no paladin, no monk, no lances, no mixed alignments (Lawful good, Chaotic good, Lawful evil, and Chaotic evil) and the fact that I play a Paladin who charges through his enemies on his Holy mount armed with a greatlance, the game is unplayable for me unless I want to scrap my level 12 paladin to take a level 1 warlord or something.

umm..
Paladins are in players handbook 1.

grinklehi:

iain62a:
$34.95?

That's about £25.

Quite expensive for a book.

These books, nay, the entire 4th Edition is a big rip-off anyways. Even though the PH2 is out, there is still no paladin, no monk, no lances, no mixed alignments (Lawful good, Chaotic good, Lawful evil, and Chaotic evil) and the fact that I play a Paladin who charges through his enemies on his Holy mount armed with a greatlance, the game is unplayable for me unless I want to scrap my level 12 paladin to take a level 1 warlord or something.

Aren't Paladins in the first players handbook?

Are monks still not in?

I'd have thought they'd be in by now.

$35 dollars a book was pretty much what killed my interest in the game. Not to mention 5th Age for Dragonlance and now this Spellplague for the Forgotten Realms that is barely explained in most books. I'm not even really happy with the last Salvatore novel in the Transition series. So, I'm pretty much of the mind that WOTC has done a hell of a job destroying TSR's creation.

vicsrealms:
$35 dollars a book was pretty much what killed my interest in the game. Not to mention 5th Age for Dragonlance and now this Spellplague for the Forgotten Realms that is barely explained in most books. I'm not even really happy with the last Salvatore novel in the Transition series. So, I'm pretty much of the mind that WOTC has done a hell of a job destroying TSR's creation.

Well their nickname "Wizard of the cost" is not entirely without merit.

No shit.

Content gets pirated. At those prices, what the hell did you think would happen? Instead of selling a PDF, why not develop an application with a nice indexing and searching function, a dice roller, and a DM planning utility.

On a related note, if they are serious, the next project should be a iPhone adaptation of their books.

Way to ignore that some D&D material, such as the three core books, were pirated before they ever made it to print. I think they have bigger problems than worrying about PDFs being copied.

iain62a:
Are monks still not in?

I'd have thought they'd be in by now.

They just added bards, barbarians, and druids, so they don't seem to be in too much of a hurry. I assume they are going to introduce monks in another expansion, along with other vaguely eastern influenced classes such as wu jen and ninjas.

Wizards of the Coast? Be Helpful with their non collectable, non massive profit generating properties? Please.

This is retarded! They are going to put DRM into something which has already been uploaded to all the torrent sites.

It's remarkable how little business sense some people have.

I seem to recall paying $18 and $20 for D&D manuals back in the early '80s... given inflation, $35 isn't far from that mark. I also seem to recall saving up money from my part-time job to pay for those manuals, too, earning a heckuva lot less than $6/hr.

Young whipper-snappers these days...

-- Steve

grinklehi:

These books, nay, the entire 4th Edition is a big rip-off anyways. Even though the PH2 is out, there is still no paladin, no monk, no lances, no mixed alignments (Lawful good, Chaotic good, Lawful evil, and Chaotic evil) and the fact that I play a Paladin who charges through his enemies on his Holy mount armed with a greatlance, the game is unplayable for me unless I want to scrap my level 12 paladin to take a level 1 warlord or something.

... Paladin is in the player's handbook. So are the Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil alignments. Given that alignment is essentially 100% roleplay of the character, you can just do it yourself: it's not like you need rules on that.

As to the issue of price: $35 isn't bad for a hardcover book that you can get hundreds of hours of use out of. Given that we're on a gaming site here, and we often pay sixty dollars for games that can end after ten to twenty hours, D&D is good value.

All a player needs is a book and about $10 worth of dice. The dungeon master needs another two books. Everything after this is supplements (including PHB2), which are completely bloody optional.

iain62a:

Aren't Paladins in the first players handbook?

Are monks still not in?

I'd have thought they'd be in by now.

Monks are coming in PH3.

Well its about the same as any other book of the same quality. I dont remember the Paladin in the 1st handbook but its there.

The_root_of_all_evil:

iain62a:

Aren't Paladins in the first players handbook?

Are monks still not in?

I'd have thought they'd be in by now.

Monks are coming in PH3.

Fair enough.

I just thought that since monks are an already established class, they'd have put them in earlier.

I think I'll go buy 4th edition some time soon.

the sad part is that people will prob just scan the book. so what they did was pointless and prob did more damamge then help.

I'd actually recommend the D20 Mafia system. It's quite well done indeed.

The_root_of_all_evil:
I'd actually recommend the D20 Mafia system. It's quite well done indeed.

I'm big on Star Wars SAGA myself, but maybe Fung Shui will replace it... if my book ever arrives!

I think $35 is very fair. Not just because of the quality of the physical book, but because with one book you can play unlimited D&D (as a player). If you are a DM, then you probably want a few more books, but in the end you get a lot out of your relatively small investment.

You could also compare it to a video game, which is $60 for less than 10 hours. A $35 D&D player's manual is like infinite hours of enjoyment.

I am absolutely STUNNED that they only realised this now.

I will admit, I pirated the PH2. Two days before I bought it. And I never even read the pdf. I just got it so I could stick it on my laptop and not have to bring my books with me everywhere. I did the same with the PH1, except I got the digital version after buying the book.

The reason most people pirate DnD books is because there are SO MANY of them. For 3.5 alone, there are something like 120 books. PHBs 1 and 2, DMGs 1 and 2, Monster Manuals 1 through 5, six or so Complete books. And those are just the stuff usually approved by DMs. And all of those were sold for €32 (yes, my 3.5 PHB, which I bought two weeks before 4e was announced, costed nearly €10 more than the 4e PH). Why are they so surprised?

As an aside, my local sells the PH2 for €24, which is $31.83, nearly $4 off the RRP. They also discount all GW stuff by 20%, compared with GW's prices.

Damn, this would be my roommate. I've had moral qualms in the past about his pirating, but I guess that never stopped me from recieving them when he sent them to me.

From now on, I'm just gonna buy the books myself.

Why does everyone blame anyone they can EXCEPT for the offenders? If these books cost 50 cents they would still be pirated, which is still illegal, period. The books are the price they are because there are enough people that pay for them to support the price point.

Bindox makes a good point. True, arguments about price and quality have merit, but the vast majority of pirates would still steal content even if price and quality weren't issues. Most pirates are simply too cheap to pay money for stuff. Now, I'll admit to pirating music, but I'll still go out and buy a CD if there are enough tracks to make the purchase worthwhile and I want to support that particular artist. However, I know there are people who will pirate entire albums (or even album catalogs) rather than purchase a single album. This creates an irritating cycle where companies need to increase prices to make up for lost profits, which in turn drives more people to piracy. Hmm... Well, that rant seems to have lost all direction, so I guess I'll rant about D&D now...
Now, I'm not overly fond of WotC's business practices with 4.0. They've learned from 3.0/3.5 precisely which classes, races, monsters, and settings people love, and they're making sure to mete those out carefully while providing a lot of filler. The fact that Monk- a class which is now considered by many players to be a core class- won't be in the game until PHB3 is outrageous. Meanwhile, we'll see Arcane Power, Divine Power, Adventurer's Vault 2, and the Eberron Player's Guide between now and then- and that's to say nothing of DMG2; why we need a second DMG already is beyond me. The fact that they're releasing a new Player's Guide every year is ridiculous.
I have no problems with the gameplay mechanics or the quality of 4.0. However, I do believe that they're intentionally creating as many "essential" books as possible in order to milk players for everything we're worth.

Milkman Dan:

They just added bards, barbarians, and druids, so they don't seem to be in too much of a hurry. I assume they are going to introduce monks in another expansion, along with other vaguely eastern influenced classes such as wu jen and ninjas.

Aha, but have they added the BARDbarian yet?

It just sucks to keep having the rule book republished and republished and republished. This is pretty much why people pirate these now. It's a tediously expensive hobby to follow but they don't just have one book do they? They have those smaller ones of less quality, the prices are pretty reasonable, but when all you want to know are the rules - you're going to want it for free.

I don't know how DRM will fix that.

It has nothing to do with piracy, in my opinion. WOTC is just jumping on the piracy bandwagon to justify yet another bone-headed business decision in a long string of bone-headed business decisions. They are pulling in the PDF sales so they can attempt (and fail) to strangle the 3rd edition market in favor of the 4th edition market. They also want to bring all of the sales in-house, much like they are trying to do with their online "magazines" and software aids. This is pretty much just like what they did when they canceled (or didn't renew) all of the licenses, such as the one for Codemonkey to develop Etools.

One of the big reasons I say it has nothing to do with piracy, is that they can't have not known that the D&D books have been pirated since before WotC existed! It's always been out there, as people have scanned, OCRed and posted pretty much every one of the books ever made. That's been going on since before the Web, on various BBS's. Even now, it's not gotten any worse over the last 10 years. Book files aren't huge bandwidth hogs (so broadband access isn't an issue for downloading them) and while it's easier to distribute an already made PDF file, all you needed was one person willing to do the scans for everyone to get the book. You can always find one person with too much time on their hands.

This is a bad PR move, and should serve as a warning to the entire game industry: go into business with Wizards of the Coast at your own risk! They WILL screw you over at some point.

I found a legal way to get around the exorbitant expense of all those books. I bought a subscription to D&Dinsider. $60 a year and I get every book released plus the semi-official content from Dragon magazine all rolled into their character builder, and compendium. Heck, there is even a character visualizer in development (no release date).

Virgil:

Doug:
Well, if they weren't ripping off people with that price, they might not have such a problem - $35 for a manual? Good grief! I'd be bankrupt if I invested in D&D gear.

To be fair, the D&D books are very high quality. They're hardcover, with glossy full-color pages. Printing at that quality level is still very expensive.

You can also buy them new for under $25 at Amazon (even though the MSRP is still $35).

Alternatively you could just buy the previuos edition for as little as $1 at a local retailer.

Wait, they really expect people will pay for their manuals twice as much as they do for a high-quality book?

That's like Microsoft moaning about Windows being pirated.