D&D Reader App Coming This Fall? [UPDATED]

Many people have been asking for official D&D PDFs, and WotC has been addressing the need for electronic reference materials at the table in various ways. According to Mashable, WotC is releasing a D&D Reader App this fall. It's not a PDF, but it's basically a D&D-specific Kindle-esque app for iOS and Android. Mashable reports that "Each book is broken up into different sections. So with, say, the Player's Handbook, you can tap on little thumbnails in your library to check out the introduction, a step-by-step guide to character creation, a rundown of races, individual sections for each character class, equipment, and all the other pieces that, together, form the D&D Player's Handbook."

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It's possible they are just referring to D&D Beyond (some of the details below correspond very closely with that), but it may be that a separate D&D Reader is in the pipeline.

UPDATE -- EN World member TDarien asked Adam Rosenburg (the author of the article) whether this was different to D&D Beyond, who replied "Yup. Beyond is more activity-oriented, so it can handle stuff like dice rolls. Reader is basically Kindle, with good, clear chapter divides."

UPDATE 2 -- EN World member kenmarable has spotted that Polygon also has an article about this. It is a separate app called D&D Reader - not D&D Beyond - being made by Dialect, the company which does Dragon+ for WotC. They tried a beta version, although it wasn't complete at the time.

Other items from the report include:

• You can favourite specific pages.
• Some of it is free, and the rparts of books are paywalled. "If, for example, you'll only ever care about rolling a bard, you can just buy that. Prices for individual sections are $3 or $5 (depending on what you buy) and the three full rulebooks — Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide — are $30 apiece for everything."
• If you buy parts of a book then buy the full thing, the cost is pro-rated.The free sections include "character creation, basic classes, gear, ability scores, combat, spellcasting, and all the other sort of ground-level features that everyone needs to understand in order to play."

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[Mistwell]

I wish you would stop trying to malign folks with nefarious and illegal intent just to win an argument. What’s wrong with you man?

I said I could be wrong and it's only a guess and I don't want to attribute false motives. That's in response to you smugly saying that you expressing your opinion repeatedly was you telling me how it is and implying people should just shut up if they disagree with your opinion because once you expressed it that should be the end of it...which is how you started the post I was replying to. Maybe stop with the didactic tone and explain your motives instead?

 

[darjr]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION] I must concede, that no, apps are not routinely removed as you assert I’ve asserted. However that wasn’t my point. My point is that I believe PDF is a perfectly viable and fine way to deliver RPGA books. And I’d like to be able to purchase PDF of the core from WotC.

 

[darjr]

I said I could be wrong and it's only a guess and I don't want to attribute false motives. That's in response to you smugly saying that you expressing your opinion repeatedly was you telling me how it is and implying people should just shut up if they disagree with your opinion because once you expressed it that should be the end of it...which is how you started the post I was replying to.

I implied nothing of the kind. You just didn’t seem to be listening.

 

[Mistwell]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION] I must concede, that no, apps are not routinely removed as you assert I’ve asserted. However that wasn’t my point. My point is that I believe PDF is a perfectly viable and fine way to deliver RPGA books. And I’d like to be able to purchase PDF of the core from WotC.

Sure, and I have no problem with you wanting to buy PDFs. And my point is an app is also a perfectly viable and fine way to deliver RPG books, or at least this company thinks it will be.

 

[mjsoctober]

It’s not from WotC. It’s clearly a licensed product. I suspect you’ll see a LOT of licensed products you don’t want over the coming years. That’s OK. Hell, I don’t even know what DDB is!

I get that it’s not worth the price to you. That’s fine.

I have to side with Remathilis here, and point out that the problem isn't 3rd parties offering the content in different formats, but offering it in the same format for the same price with fewer features.

We are scratching our heads because DDB (D&D Beyond) is working on an app for iOS and Android that will allow offline access to the books.

If you buy the PHB from DDB for $30 you also get a rich desktop solution with all the content you bought along with a character builder, and homebrew monster builder at no extra cost.

If you buy the PHB from DDR (D&D Reader) you don't get anything else, just the PHB.

If DDR cost less, it would make sense, but at the current listed price it just doesn't make sense. Before someone says "But maybe someone will want it in that different format, please remember that D&D Beyond will have the same format coming out!

In the end, yes, it doesn't hurt me one little bit for DDR to exist, but part of me is annoyed that people who read about DDR, but don't know about DDB, will be ripped off.

For what it's worth, here's a handy chart:


View attachment 88915

 

[rknop]

... An app however is as "hard a copy" as a PDF most of the time, and there is no reason to believe it will mysteriously be remotely removed from your devise or locked along with all of it's content some day without your permission. You keep asserting that apps are somehow routinely removed remotely or locked or otherwise disabled, but reality doesn't support this view. It's supported with websites, but not with apps you buy. As I just mentioned, my daughter routinely uses apps I paid for years ago on a device that has no connectivity. It's much more akin to software you purchase on a disc than it is to a website.

How much software on disks that you purchased 20 years ago can you still use?

Chances are the software came on 3.5" floppies. (Well, 25 years ago.) Many computers don't even have that format any more. Lots of people have word processing documents from ages past that they can't open because the proprietary software used to write it no longer exists. (Paperback Writer on the C128, anybody?)

As the Gutenberg project has been arguing for years, the most future proof format for text documents is plain ASCII. However, PDF does pretty well. Crucially, it's an openly documented format. Anybody can implement it, and all the information needed to do so is publicly available. This is not true for a proprietary format, nor is it true if you need a specific app to run it.

Apps are almost as old as PDFs,

Um. The iphone was first a thing in 2007 or thereabouts. I was writing PDFs in the late 1990s. PDF as a format is at least twice as old as apps are.

I've used quite a number of android apps that I can no longer use because they don't work with newer versions of android, and because the author of the app no longer cares to update it.

Another point of history: when DriveThruRPG first opened, there was a kerfluffle because they were using DRM on their PDFs. A lot of people (myself included) complained about this. Among other things was the complaint that these PDFs were not future proof. They depended on an Adobe server that would be there to authorize the DRM for you. Many people argued back that we were being paranoid and open-source zealots. Adobe, after all, is a very big and stable company, and it's ridiculous to fear that it will go away any time soon.

You can guess what happened. Within a surprisingly short period of time (if memory serves, it was only a year or two), Adobe announced that it was discontinuing the DRM that DTRPG was using. DTRPG was forced to issue new PDFs to the people who'd bought them. The people who'd bought them were lucky that DTRPG was still around to do so; had the company gone out of business (which wouldn't have been a problem, DRM proponents argued, because Adobe was plenty stable), people would have been SOL.

DTRPG now makes the very wise choice to sell watermarked PDFs rather than DRM-encumbered PDFs.

It's always a mistake to buy content with proprietary locks on it, unless you're happy with the risk of not being able to access that content five or ten years in the future. DVDs are mostly OK, because the locks have been fully cracked. Of course, it's not legal to download the software necessary to watch a DVD you have legally purchased on hardware you own... but that's the US copyright regime for you. If you really want to *own* the RPG books you buy, if you want to be able to crack them open in 40 years (like I did the other day with my 1e PHB), you need them in an open format that is supported by lots of different readers. They can't be a format that's only viewable by a set of proprietary readers, or that's locked behind DRM. Track record shows that PDF is probably the best format to bet on.

 

[Mistwell]

How much software on disks that you purchased 20 years ago can you still use?

Just about all of it?

Chances are the software came on 3.5" floppies. (Well, 25 years ago.) Many computers don't even have that format any more.

I have 3.5 drives on all my computers still. They're really cheap, and the slot is tiny. I also move stuff from 3.5 to sticks sometimes. If you actually have a need for an old program, it's not that hard.

Um. The iphone was first a thing in 2007 or thereabouts. I was writing PDFs in the late 1990s. PDF as a format is at least twice as old as apps are.

Hahahaha that's cute that you think the iphone invented apps!

Again, I have apps from my palm treo from 2002. Palm devices had apps going back much further than that (Pam Pilot was 1996 for example). The Psion Organiser was invented in the mid-1980s, though I never used one. Apple had nothing to do with inventing the concept of the app. They just improved on it - which accurately describes pretty much the entire history of Apple.

I've used quite a number of android apps that I can no longer use because they don't work with newer versions of android, and because the author of the app no longer cares to update it.

But they still work on older versions of android. Which you likely still own. Much like I do. And there will always be emulators for old versions of android as well due to this very issue. Your old android apps will never go away if you still want to use them. Much like, even if you don't own an Atari 2600, you can still find lots of ways to play all the games from the Atari 2600. Apps are like software that way...they live on.

It's always a mistake to buy content with proprietary locks on it

I disagree, but even if I agreed your entire basis for assuming there is a lock on this is pure speculation. And my pure speculation is this will be an app where, once you download it and the content, it will stay on your device and be usable even without connectivity or the continuing existence of the company that made it. Maybe I am wrong...but we're both firmly in the realm of guessing on this point so I am not sure what the point is of debating it.

 

[rknop]

Hahahaha that's cute that you think the iphone invented apps!

Again, I have apps from my palm treo from 2002. Palm devices had apps going back much further than that (Pam Pilot was 1996 for example)

...and if you still have Palm devices around to run those apps, then you are an outlier.

But they still work on older versions of android. Which you likely still own.

Nope. Devices don't last that long. They die. Their batteries go to hell. It's not worth keeping them going.

Think about what you're suggesting here. Keep around a whole bunch of old devices so that you can run the old apps to get access to the books you bought back when those apps where the current thing. Compare that to just being able to move your whole collection to whatever your current computer is and use the reader of your choice. The latter is what PDF offers. The former is a huge pain in the butt, and not at all comparable to having DRM-free PDFs.

Or, sure, emulators. It's still a pain in the butt. And if the apps have any kind of DRM or software protection on them, chances are you're violating the law when you strip it in order to run it on your emulator.

 

[darjr]

Or shift it to another device after it’s not available to buy.

 

[Mistwell]

...and if you still have Palm devices around to run those apps, then you are an outlier.

First, I think wanting to use PDFs of a version of a game from many years ago already makes someone an outlier. Second, emulators are free.

Nope. Devices don't last that long. They die. Their batteries go to hell. It's not worth keeping them going.

Think about what you're suggesting here. Keep around a whole bunch of old devices so that you can run the old apps to get access to the books you bought back when those apps where the current thing. Compare that to just being able to move your whole collection to whatever your current computer is and use the reader of your choice. The latter is what PDF offers. The former is a huge pain in the butt, and not at all comparable to having DRM-free PDFs.

Emulators are free.

Or, sure, emulators. It's still a pain in the butt.

It's not really more a pain in the butt than constantly updating to the new version of my PDF readers. Which seem to update all the friggen time due to the new viruses they keep finding that takes advantage of some of that technology.

And if the apps have any kind of DRM or software protection on them, chances are you're violating the law when you strip it in order to run it on your emulator.

Generally speaking if they no longer make the original device it runs on and the company is long gone, there is no legal issue. Generally, those companies that don't exist don't renew their IP.

I think people are dug in on their opinion on this one, but in reality we're not talking about a huge difference between a PDF and an App for long term usability. Both can be used long term most of the time, and wanting to use it in 20 years from now to begin with is slightly on the unusual side anyway. Realistically you will likely be playing something else by then anyway.

But you know, the Internet, and outrage, and we want what we want when we want it and damn any who disagree, and all that. But I think most people will get what they want out of an app as much as they'd get what they want out of a PDF.