Couple years ago, during a shortlived fascination with Pathfinder, I stumbled upon an obscure related website. It was a simple white page titled "index" and included links to dozens of PDFs. Core Rulebooks, adventure modules, campaign books etc. Doing some research I discovered there was a link to almost every product available at that time. These PDFs were going anywhere from $9 to $30, thousands of dollars in material. The Pathfinder Society Adventure Paths alone were worth hundreds.

I had no idea who had posted these links or why, if it was something official used by a provider somewhere or secret pirate stash. At any rate I kept it to myself but sure made liberal use of the links. I still have the entire collection on disk, but have always felt a little guilty about it.

Since then I have come across similar pages, the most recent including an impressive collection of World of Darkness products, all currently available on RPGNow for a price but absolutely free from the site I discovered. What gives?

Has anyone else found these little treasure troves? Do you make use of them? Do you share them with your group or even post links for interested forum buddies?

So far Ive kept this strictly to myself but having made the discovery several times now Im thinking maybe its not as rare as I believe, and if not, perhaps sharing isn't a terrible a crime as I feel it might be.

Thoughts?

It seems just about every major rpg has this problem.  I and other retailers hear about it all the time, "Oh man, I love Traveller, downloaded it all for free from this site..."

I don't think it can be prevented these days and may even bring in a few new sales and fans.  I think the days of buying something to see if you like it have passed.

So, on the one hand it's outright illegal and legally defined as theft.  On the other hand, I have long believed that if someone won't pay $50 for a rule book they probably won't pay $5 for the exact same rulebook if they can get away with paying nothing.  There's also the question of whether everything always needs to exist in print.  It seems like a bit of a waste sometimes.

I don't think we've found the right answers to digital content and availability yet.

I'm not sure we ever will.

I do wonder who has the time to put these files together.  They used to borrow or buy a book and scan it but probably just buy a pdf and then put it out in the wild these days.

As someone who liked gaming better when it was more DIY the erosion of the publishing industry might even be a plus.

If only I wasn't running a gaming store and trying to sell books.

If only so many books weren't out of print and otherwise unavailable for me to sell.

Who knows?

Although Pundit isn't against piracy exactly, it is against the law and therefore we won't tolerate anyone posting links to it on this site.

Discuss the morality by all means (which has been done about a hundred times already for about a decade) but do not link to anything illegal. Just a heads-up in case someone thinks its a-ok here.

Yes, I have access to a very large pirate network. There's very little gaming or wargame material not available.

Legal issues aside, I will only ever use such things to decide if I want to buy a product; I basically treat it no differently than a library or flipping through a book in a store. I not only prefer hard copies of all my gaming material, I also want to support anyone who puts creative effort into a product I make use of.

What I find funny is how readily google and other search engines link to them.

The other day I was looking for a 1920s guide to London and instead of giving me a Baedeaker's Guide or something similar, I got the CoC sourcebook (not the new one, but the older one). D'oh.  Espeically since a) I had the hard copy of it and b) it's not that good and why I was looking for a guide from that era. (Later found a Muir guide from 1922 on Archive.org)

Im a stickler for the old-school feel of hardcopy too so anything I actually intend to use I either buy in print or have printed, but Ill admit avoiding the initial cost of a pdf now and then when it is available free somewhere. I had no intention of posting the link here and have already turned down some requests privately. I figure they can hunt it down and deal with the ethics the same way I have.

On the plus side I have downloaded countless pdfs which after a brief review decided they weren't for me and deleted. Purchasing all those hopeful but not quite measuring products would have been terrible wasteful. Perhaps using the freebies as a sneak peak isn't so bad as has been noted here.

I know a number of creative types who don't mind piracy, viewing it as advertising, and we're seeing an increase in the 'pay what you want' model of sales for PDFs, which wasn't true the last time I saw this argument here.  Drive thru RPG seems to offer a bunch of products where you type in the amount you want to pay, though does seem to be a minimum 1 dollar.

The thing is, I own something very like an actual Ton of books, not the metaphorical ton, and I move around a lot and travel frequently for 'work', so I own a lot of PDFs for books I also own. I'm not paying twice for the same product if I can help it.  

And sometimes I get the PDF first, maybe for free, then buy the book later, not least of which is the simple fact that mere data files are much more fragile and losable than hard copy books, but also because I enjoy reading books, and I abhor reading PDFs.  I can flip through a book in seconds to find what I want, and even if I'm not flipping, I can read the damn thing three or four times faster on paper due to page flipping vs scrolling, and images and text never displays a white page while waiting for the next batch of data to load.


This can lead me to something I read a few years back about economic models and understanding your business.  I'll sum it up thusly: The Record Industries main failure is that they view their business as selling albums, which is not viable in the changing technological environment, instead of selling entertainment, a much more flexible proposition.

It's against IP law, but morally I see it as equivalent to using a library to read books. I live in an area that constantly wins awards for the libraries. My wife, kids, and I constantly use the library system here. The internet is basically a borderless and unlimited library system. I have yet to see any thread on this over the years change anyone's minds though.

Things like this can often end up being the only way to preserve some older games that are OOP (out of print) or find replacements for things damaged or lost. Or when a publisher does put the game up. But at some insanely jacked price for a PDF.

Example: All the TFT material. Thats never going to see light as anything else at this rate.

Example: Chaosium has Orient Express up as a PDF at an absurd 60$ for a PDF. At this rate Im never replacing my copy that was stolen.

Example: Flying Buffalo on the other hand now has up all their Tunnels & Trolls solo adventures as PDFs ar a reasonable price and I've been buying  those to fill holes in my collection.

Example: All the Star Frontiers material is online with permission from WOTC.

I have used illegitimate PDFs to replace RPGs that I have lost over the years. I try to purchase them in PDF and/or hardcopy whenever possible, eventually.
I do think it's bad, in that the authors aren't getting paid, and I encourage everybodies to pony up if you like/are interested in an RPG enough to download it.

Yes, prchasing a pdf of a title I already own in hardcopy doesn't bother me a bit. I figure I already did my part to finance the author etc. Obviously retailers don't see it that way, usually charging for the pdf in addition to hardcopy.

On a related side note, I recently purchased a $200 laser printer to experiment with providing hard copy of legally purchased pdfs for customers.  At this point I can't compete with Staples .02 per page.  You'd need access to trade discounts on printer cartridges to do so.  A Coverbind system starts at $1100USD and can do hard backs for about $12 which would mean about 100 books to pay for the binding system.  So a 200 page book at $0.05  will be $10 to print and $10 to bind plus $25 for the pdf. and on $45 that I would make perhaps $10.  Lousy margins and that's just in black and white.  I expect the trend to full colour book is in part an attempt to fight piracy by producing books that can't be read when printed in black and white..  It's certainly cheaper to buy the book than it is to print that illegal pdf in full colour.

I buy all of my RPGs hardcopy if I can.

I have moral difficulty even looking at approved libraries of gaming material online. Like SRDs. Because I truly want the authors to be paid for their hard work.

I prefer the feel of real books in my hand. Call me old school. But that is where my comfort zone is.

It may be heavier on my pocketbook. But that's just how it is.

My experience is that pdfs which are downloaded for free are rarely even read, let alone used to run and play games. They just mass-download a shitload of stuff and it sits in a folder on their computer for a few years until their computer dies and they buy a new one. Pirated pdfs are played even less than plastic-covered copies of OD&D owned by some guy at the Acaeum.

So the "morality" of pirated rpgs is a meaningless question. It's like asking about the morality of pornography when you never jerk off or have sex.

Quote from: David Johansen;945319On a related side note, I recently purchased a $200 laser printer to experiment with providing hard copy of legally purchased pdfs for customers.  At this point I can't compete with Staples .02 per page.  You'd need access to trade discounts on printer cartridges to do so.  A Coverbind system starts at $1100USD and can do hard backs for about $12 which would mean about 100 books to pay for the binding system.  So a 200 page book at $0.05  will be $10 to print and $10 to bind plus $25 for the pdf. and on $45 that I would make perhaps $10.  Lousy margins and that's just in black and white.  I expect the trend to full colour book is in part an attempt to fight piracy by producing books that can't be read when printed in black and white..  It's certainly cheaper to buy the book than it is to print that illegal pdf in full colour.

I think the most I've charged for a pdf is $13 for the 472 page behemoth that was StarCluster 3 Designer's Edition. My prices are lower and my books smaller now!