Do you give free and purchased products the same weight in choosing for your game?

[Kichwas]

When choosing what use for your d20 / DnD game do you give free downloaded products the same weight as something you bought?

Think about this long and hard. Not how you'd like to believe you would judge it; but what actually ends up happening.

Do you give a free product you've grabbed the same 'time and consideration' you give something that's been put together into a commercial package, marketed, and sold to you?


Do you assume the free book has been equally playtested, worked over, and thought out?

 

[Crothian]

I give them equal consideration, but I don't havea good color printer of a laptop, so pdf's in general get less use, much less use, then print products.

 

[Sir Osis of Liver]

I'm more interested in quality than price, if i pay 5.oo for a PDF or nothing it's the same to me as if i pay 20.00 + dollars for a print product. As long as it is usfull and interesting i'm happy.

 

[reiella]

Some free products, but typically I do perfer the purchased material...

Just some sense of ... accountability I guess from a purchased product.

Although that said, I'll typically perfer 'free' rpg utilities (CharGen etc) to pay products.

 

[Black Omega]

Othger, price makes no difference on if I'll use a game. I was given Chill for free at Gencon, but I've never played it.

 

[Ace]

Intriguing poll Arcady. When it comes to free products I give rate them on a sort of sliding scale.

While they may not have had the same potential work in layout and editing the quality still matters.

Bad product is bad product.

whether I use it or not depends on how good it is.

OTOH I download everything regardless fo qualty, usually there is always something worthwhile in the product and Ihave a buddy I share distrubutable files with.
he is way less picky than me

 

[kenjib]

I'm assuming by free you are referring to fan material like the FanCC netbooks, the ENWorld affiliated worlds, etc. rather than free products from publishers since the ones from publishers are usually lead ins and enhancements.

In all honesty, if something is free I generally assume that it is not playtested as well. I also assume that, were it good enough quality to be in print, it would have had a chance of being picked up by a publisher. Nyambe and the Creature Collection are two examples. They were, in my opinion, two of the best free products out there (the main other one I can think of really approaching those two is the netbook of witches and warlocks) and they got scooped up by publishers. Because of these factors I will admit that I have a bias against free products - unfair as it may be.

 

[Aitch Eye]

While we're using very little so far, everything that we have incorporated or that is under serious consideration is from free products. (Just so it's clear, I'm not counting promotional excerpts of published books here.) The downloads I've purchased have been more out of curiosity, I've seldom expected to use much.

This is mostly because it's the smaller, more niche stuff that we can easily work into the games here and there (at this point), and it's less likely to show up in a themed PDF book than, say, an issue of Asgard or on someone's website. Also, there aren't many areas where we're actively looking for some type of material. It's more a matter of just running into something that strikes us as intriguing, quirky, cool, or useful -- which gives the free stuff an advantage.

While I might guess that a some free products got less playtesting than products from some publishers, how well it's been "worked over, and thought out" is an impression generated by reading it.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I look at free or purchased material on its merits when deciding whether to use it in my game.

edited to clarify: good ideas are more important to me than the implementation, since I almost always need to modify things for my campaign anyway. If there is good implementation so much the better, of course!

Cheers