Wow, what strange timing. A week ago I discussed older forms of Dungeons & Dragons, and mentioned the easy availability of legal pdf downloads of product for these games. As of Monday, April 6, 2009, Wizards of the Coast (owners of the D&D copyright) revoked the license of the various sites that sold these files. For the moment, no legal pdfs exist for any version of D&D prior to the new 4e (and not for that version either, if I understand correctly).
The internet gaming community has been discussing this at length, usually quite angrily. WotC hasn't issued much in the way of explanation, other than to state that they are trying to crack down piracy. Of course, this isn't done by denying access to paying customers, so speculation on the real reason has fallen into two camps. On the one hand, some feel that WotC are trying to shore up the position that they aggressively defend their copyright, as they commence with legal action against eight individuals believed to have illegally shared scans of the new 4e Players Handbook 2. Eventually, WotC will open their own online shop to sell pdfs. The other, more cynical view, is that WotC want to force those with an interest in D&D into playing 4e, and so have removed the availability of products through which the company competed with itself.
I'm hoping the rationale is the former, while I suspect it is really the latter. I don't know the actual state of affairs, and can't make even an educated guess. I do feel strongly that removing the availability of old school D&D pdfs will ultimately only lead to more people downloading pirated versions. This material isn't hard to find on file sharing and bit torrent sites. Just do a web search for the name of any older D&D product, and you'll see all sorts of illegal results. It really is that far out in the open, at least for the moment.
I know that those who seek long enough can find old Middle Earth Role Playing products, and those are items the designers WANT to be available to potential players! MERP was always far more obscure than D&D, so older D&D products are not going into hiding, despite what WotC may want. Perhaps this will all blow over soon, or possibly the outcry among gamers will be great enough to force some sort of change. I'll be watching curiously from the sidelines in the weeks ahead.
2 comments:
The bastards are trying to get everyone to play that monstrosity otherwise known as 4th edition, so that they have to buy it. Then, in about 5 years, they'll dump it like last year's software.
Here's an idea--stick with 1st and 2nd edition stuff. The game was much mroe pure then, and all of that stuff is easily available for a low price on Amazon, Ebay, etc. Then you can see what D&D is realy supposed to be about.
Some of the stuff is expensive on Amazon and ebay. The rulebooks were so widely printed and distributed that they can be had cheap, but many of the best modules and such are expensive as hard copies. They WERE available as cheap pdfs until a week ago, but now can only be had cheaply via piracy.
That may indeed be a move to force honest people (or ones with technological limitations) to play 4th Edition. Whatever the reason, i don't like it!
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