New SRD => No useful searchable document?

[KrazyHades]

The 4th edition SRD will be much more of a reference document than the 3e SRD. The current edition contains almost all of the rules and allows “copy and paste” publishing. WotC would prefer to see 3rd party publishers to use their creativity and talent instead of reformatting or slightly changing pre-existing rules. As such, the 4e SRD will contain more guidelines and pointers, and less straightforward rules repetition.

This seems to me to mean that we will no longer have something like d20srd.com to check the actual rules. In fact, it sounds like the SRD will jsut be a bunch of guidelines, like "It's usually a bad idea to force players onto a particular adventure path." Perhaps WotC doesn't like the fact that one can play a satisfying game of DnD without buying a single one of their products.

Am I just being silly and wrong here, or does it look like the SRD will be basically useless?

 

[Lackhand]

Your "useless" is the small-press publishers "Aaah, not getting sued"

But, yeah, that's my take on the issue too.

Supposedly the DDI will be good for it; in practice, I'm a hacker on a mac and I *enjoy* having the SRD locally so I can grep through it and patternmatch to my heart's content.

The problem is that you can't watermark a .zip of .htmls. They can password protect it, but then someone just explodes it and repackages it without the password. So there's no way to prevent theft.

If they go the pdf route, there are linkable, searchable .pdfs, but 1) not flat text (I probably care more about this than most!) 2) not editable/savable/reusable (sad!) and 3) I've never been very impressed with high tech pdfs.

If they do anything worse, DRM or anything above password protected or watermarked, I shall be sad. And if they use anything other than pdf, there's a good chance I won't be able to use it at all (which is why I don't think they'll use anything other than pdf )

 

[Raloc]

Honestly, that's exactly what it sounded like to me, and that's unfortunate. The d20srd.org is SO much faster than looking in books, can be pasted from (good for online games) et cetera. For me, a lot of the fun comes from looking at the art of the books to get my imagination going, so I'd probably never just use the SRD unless I was stranded with nothing but a primitive HTML reader/printer of some sort.

It's a shame.

Perhaps WotC will release something like it for all their books (hint hint nudge nudge) for people with DDI. I know I wouldn't feel so bad about paying for it if it had something like that*.

* - Mainly because of the possibility that they'd be doing a physical minis based model of having "boosters" of virtual enemies and possibly having them only allow you to field as many as you've gained some sort of pointless virtual copies of (will have to have DRM to keep the most adept 5 year old from altering the memory address that holds the variable for "number of minis for mini x" unless they're making it a serious web app or something, but that may be vulernable to Javascript or XSS attacks.... Hell you could probably download the site, alter any scripts to do what you want (say if they're using Prototype, just intercept the data) and have it point to the WotC URLs for its data and GET/POSTs). But that's another thread entirely I guess.

 

[Sir Brennen]

From the Unofficial Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Info Page here on ENWorld:

Digital Offerings (DND Insider: collection of online tools for DMs, character creation, editorial game content, online expanded content for books, behind the scenes content for books, designer commentaries -much of this was analogous to the second disc in a DVD box set: every physical product will have a code which can be entered into D&D Insider which will unlock the product's digital version for you online, along with extra content).

This'll probably be a suitable replacement for a searchable document. Granted, DDI is required, and it's not clear if you need to be online to use it.

Edit: Apparently, DDI isn't even required: http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=13534906&postcount=360

 

[Charwoman Gene]

I'm hoping the big change is removing the info from the SRD.
It may not stop someone from retyping an HTML SRD.

 

[Voss]

Eh. If they aren't willing to put up a (large?) chunk of content, they'll almost certainly go after anyone who does publicly post that chunk of content. Its their stuff- anything that they don't make open or public content... isn't. Posting that material would be actionable, unless they are some really convoluted laws involved, and rules text tends to be worse than useless if paraphrased or summed up.

 

[Deverash]

Perhaps WotC doesn't like the fact that one can play a satisfying game of DnD without buying a single one of their products.

Well, since the original OGL was intended to drive sales of the PHB while opening up the d20 system to other publishers, I'm not sure why this comes as a surprise.

Am I just being silly and wrong here, or does it look like the SRD will be basically useless?

It will be useful for it's (new) intended audience, publishers who want to know what they can/can't put in their books. As someone else pointed out, the electronic versions of their books will very likely be searchable.

My hope with all of this is that 3rd parties won't be limited to the PHB, MM & DMG for everything, but we'll see.

 

[The Little Raven]

My hope with all of this is that 3rd parties won't be limited to the PHB, MM & DMG for everything, but we'll see.

Well, with the SRD changed to an index of what content is considered to be Open Source from 4th edition (and therefore, able to be referenced in 3rd-party products), it will probably be easier and faster for that to get put out than the current SRDs, which require someone to strip out the rules, and verify that no IP is present, which probably takes more time.

 

[heirodule]

So like, the grapple rules (just for argument) from the PHB will be declared to be open source. You won't have the full text of the grapple rules in the SRD, just a note that Grapple rules are Open.

So can an enterprising person rephrase the grapple rules in his own words and publish them in an Open (OGL?) format?

Could a 3rd party do their own version of the Rules Compendium, with their own "take" on the PHB rules?

 

[Firevalkyrie]

So like, the grapple rules (just for argument) from the PHB will be declared to be open source. You won't have the full text of the grapple rules in the SRD, just a note that Grapple rules are Open.

So can an enterprising person rephrase the grapple rules in his own words and publish them in an Open (OGL?) format?

Could a 3rd party do their own version of the Rules Compendium, with their own "take" on the PHB rules?

I'm fairly sure this is the case. No publisher wants to be encouraging plagiarism, especially of their own publications.