Power Cards, Cheat Sheets, and the Wii: Why I want legal PDFs

[samursus]

As far as images, a 1 month sub from DDI would allow you to download the ENTIRE image archive up to the date of your subscription. This includes all the images from every 4e book, magazine and module. (I also think it might include 3.5 archives).

For personal use only of course.

 

[Obryn]

I dunno... Given how much WotC PDFs cost, a 1-year DDI subscription costs less than 3 books. I think you'd get better value for your money with the subscription - you can snag images as images, copy-paste actual compendium text instead of finding the right stuff in a PDF, and benefit from both automatic updates and a pretty great search function.

Now, there's still the ownership issue. And yep, someday DDI will probably DDIsappear, but I'd wager we're still a few years out from that and it's too early to know what WotC will do with it at that point.

-O

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yes, yes, yes.

For my current gaming purposes, a pdf is much more useful than the physical book (even with the DDI, because fluff isn't in the DDI).

Not that I don't get by with my mix of physical books and scanned material, just that it's such a tremendous hassle, I would gladly pay for an easy way out.

As an aside, why doesn't D&D have its own Wiki?! It strikes me that for FFZ, I can look up almost anything in any FF game on the FF wiki, but for the D&D stuff, I need to reference about a thousand different documents. I mean, mechanics aside (though it could probably include d20 stuff), it would be so useful to have a quick historical glimpse of what, say, Orcus has been up to for the last 30 years of gaming history, and where the Dragonborn originated and how they changed, and that kind of stuff is too obscure for Wikipedia.

 

[Mark]

(. . .) but I'd wager we're still a few years out from that and it's too early to know what WotC will do with it at that point.

I wouldn't wager either way and some in WotC already know a bit of what plans are laid. If we know anything from the run up to 4E it's that they begin planning the next edition years in advance of release. It's my belief that the installation of Scott Rouse's replacement heralds the next edition and asking around at the larger or busier FLGSs will give some clues as to the state of sales, both of the ongoing "core" books (PH#, MM#, and DMG#) and supplements. As sales drop off, you can be sure that a new edition is in the works. Someone should start a poll with the months of each year from, perhaps, August 2010 onward as being when they will announce the next edition is in the works and begin hyping it.

Obryn? You'd be in for release no sooner than February 2013? When do you believe they will actualy release it? When would an announcement come?

 

[Hussar]

As far as images go, why limit yourself to WOTC official images?

There's a metric butt load of fantastic art out there on the Internet. MASSIVE amounts of it. GOBS of it. If you want images of monsters, conceptart.org, Deviantart, just to name a couple, have pretty much every possible image you could ever want.

Heck, most of the WOTC artists have galleries. Google the artist name from the Monster manual, and you'll find 99% of the art for the monsters on the artist's homepage. There's no need for a pdf at all.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I take the long view when it comes to gaming material. When Dragon 1-250 came out on CD, I snatched it up. I mine it for resources all the time. Similarly, there's tons of stuff 10-30 years old I continue to use in games.

DDI is a great way to copy and paste into a game now. If I go back to a game 5 years from now, I'll have to resubscribe, if it's still there. If I go back 10 years from now, I'd have to pay again, if it's there at all. It's nice that it has access to everything new that's released, but that's only a value if I'm happening to use it now. If I were planning to run a game with the original 3 books and nothing more, it would be less useful.

Right now, for long term use, PDF and print are superior since you can depend on support for them for a long time. I'm in the process of (destructively) scanning my archive of Dragon and Dungeon magazines so I have them in digital searchable form. It's time well spent, since it means that in a year or ten years, I'll have it at my fingertips.

 

[Hussar]

Umm, Alan, that's not correct as I understand it. Right now, if you subscribe, you can download all the material from the WOTC site. The only thing you couldn't download is the any material which came out after your subscription ended.

The material you download, however, doesn't suddenly vanish when you stop subscribing. It stays on your hard drive.

So, in a way, it's no different than the Dragon Magazine CD that you bought. There's nothing on that CD which was released after Dragon 250, just like there would be no material on your hard drive released after your subscription ran out.

The DDI is not a wiki. It does not exist solely online. Once you get a sub, you download the content and it is yours.

 

[Drkfathr1]

So just hope that your Hard Drive never crashes.

 

[malraux]

So just hope that your Hard Drive never crashes.

Backups? With data storage as cheap as it is, a single point of failure shouldn't ever wipe out stuff like that.

 

[Obryn]

Obryn? You'd be in for release no sooner than February 2013? When do you believe they will actualy release it? When would an announcement come?

I have no idea, and I'm not going to begin to guess. If history repeats itself, it won't be for a few years after WotC begins hiring again in earnest. They're attritioning now, rather than hiring.

When they hire a bunch of people, we'll know it's a few years out. Until then, speculation on a specific timeframe is just messageboard bait.

-O