Old D&D books as print-on-demand is a great idea that will never happen

So ... a couple of points:

Corporations can (and do make) good decisions and good long term decisions. To argue solely that a corporation is limited by short term concerns, or out of a general inability to manage itself well, seems to be a weak argument.

Twenty-year old interns can do pretty well. In my experience, interns do well or poorly based on their skills and attitude, on the quality of the mentoring that they receive, and how ready the work set is for them. I've seen interns do very well, and have seen interns do quite poorly.

Both presentations are mildly disrespectful. I don't think we will find a good answer the the original question with disrespect.

Thx!

TomB

Do we need WotC to do this?

Perhaps if any of us want supporting material for OD&D through 2E, we'd be better off supporting retroclone projects and people publishing for them.

With the OGL opening up previous editions, we can have excellent products available for any edition of D&D.

I suppose though, that still leaves the specific excellent products from all the various lines not in print. It's nice that someone might make a great OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord adventure, but that doesn't help us if we want a specific TSR published adventure.

I'd rather support a new publisher of B/X D&D stuff than hunt eBay for an old TSR module. With the only other way of getting one's hands on it being, piracy. People are also far, far more willing to pirate when they can't purchase what they want.

Either way, WotC's current choice means that they can't have any revenue off of this stuff even if someone wanted to give it to them.

With D&D going through its fifth round of redoing the whole game, republishing the core books in altered form, and reshaping the whole community, I'd expect something like the abandonware idea to crop up at some point.

In the video game industry, it's an accepted fact that you might just make some money of the older titles you're currently holding the rights to - but it's just too much hassle to still market them. In step fan-based communities of old video games and found places like Abandonia. At places like that, you can download over a thousand old titles (complete with original music, box scans etc.) for free, get your hands on software that's needed to ensure to-day compatibility, and find forums to support you if you have trouble running that half-remembered childhood dream. The software companies holding the rights are specifically asked for their permission, and many of them do give it.

Abandonware sites run on trust: the downloadable products must be un-protected, or the whole idea would break down under an onslaught of lawsuits. To the software companies, abandonware sites can offer the benefit of keeping up customer interest in old titles to be picked up again a decade or two later (like Syndicate, for example). In other cases, where nobody really intends to do anything with the old trademark or content, abandonware sites at least don't damage any corporation's profits, since they'd not be interested in marketing their old titles anyway.


Might something similar be possible with D&D content? Might Hasbro/WotC allow fan-based downloading offers of old modules, for example, if said offers were strictly free and strictly limited to one module at a time (so no infringement on the D&D trademark were included)? Abandonware is a bit of a legal gray area, but so long as there's a gentlemen's agreement, and that agreement is kept up on both sides, there need be no trouble.

Hussar said:

Plus, you're overlooking the biggest cost - the lawyers. Every single product would have to be checked that WOTC owns the copyrights to all the art.

You're looking at trying to track down artists from fifteen or twenty years ago, when you've got a contact list that's a decade out of date. And you're paying the lawyer about 300 dollars an hour.

There's a reason we cannot buy the Dragon Compendium CD Roms anymore. They got spanked for doing that.

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Now that's an interesting point. That, as much as the fear of piracy, may well be the real reason the old-edition PDFs we withdrawn from sale so suddenly. And if so, there's basically no chance we'll see them reappear, ever.

(As Hussar points out,it's not just that WotC may not own the rights - it's that in a lot of cases they simply don't know. A lot of the old work was done on custom contracts, and a lot of that paperwork was simply lost.)

That said, WotC should have full (and documented) rights to everything from 3e onwards, and they should have suitable files ready to go. It would be nice to think that those, at least, could make an appearance.

And certainly, going forward they really should make everything (possible) made available in electronic formats (whether PDF, eBook, or whatever), preferably with the same sort of model as Paizo - buy the hardcopy and get the e-copy free, or at least greatly discounted.

And, really, even some of the early 3e stuff might be a bit dodgy. I have no idea how stringent WOTC's accounting principles and legal tracking were before Hasbro bought them out. It might very well be that there's some iffy stuff buried in the 3e stack as well.

Possibly.

I know that listening to a number of presentations on ebooks by various publishers, it's not a cut and dried issue. Places like Baen Free Library and Tor (to name a couple) have to be pretty careful rereleasing back lists of authors. You never know what might be lurking in there. Some poem gets reprinted in a novel and not properly credited and you get a lawsuit.

I imagine the same sort of thing can happen in RPG books as well. Just who wrote some of the fiction in the source books?

Even if there is nothing there, you have to treat every product as a potential risk of copyright violation, which means bringing in the lawyers to vet every single product that goes out the door. I could see the price of that precluding putting out a lot of the pdf's which I don't think would make the money back - or at least wouldn't make it back in a timely manner.

I'm not a lawyer, so, maybe I'm way off base here. But, I do know that WOTC and TSR have had legal issues in the past. It only takes one to pretty much blow any profits out of the water for the whole project.

I think the simplest solution would be to take the text of the old items and just combine it with art from their massive collection of work-for-hire, completely WotC owned Magic: The Gathering art.

Hire one layout guy who's good at general graphic design who's job it is to take old products and update them with the new layout and M:tG art and re do the maps with a simple cartography setup.

The PDFs are put up for sale and the best selling ones get re-statted to be D&D 5E products as well.

Given how little the 5E playtest Caves of Chaos departs from B2, this could also be an excellent source of Dungeon Magazine content for DDI subscribers.

Heck, just put the DDI Dungeon Mag team on doing this for 5E.

nnms said:

I think the simplest solution would be to take the text of the old items and just combine it with art from their massive collection of work-for-hire, completely WotC owned Magic: The Gathering art.

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Hmm, I was under the impression that they actually don't completely own art for the Magic stuff, except maybe the really early cards. But I could be wrong.

nnms said:

I think the simplest solution would be to take ...

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This would take an epic length of time. This layout guy would be assured of at least five years' work.

Marius Delphus said:

This would take an epic length of time. This layout guy would be assured of at least five years' work.

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My friend's wife is in graphic design (specifically layout) and it's amazing how fast she is.

The catalogue though, is vast. Enough material to reformat for Dungeon & Dragon for a decade or more of good DDi subscriber content.

To be honest, I would LOVE to see that stuff put up as DDI material. That makes fantastic sense. Draw people in as sub's, put up two or three old books a month - maybe 1 a week, more if you can and it would be totally worth it.

This is a business strategy that I would totally agree with.