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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alan Shutko" data-source="post: 5772177" data-attributes="member: 23694">That's an interesting software model, but there are some benefits to the user of a less locked-down delivery model.The first is the widespread usability of the content. Biblical scholarship is a fairly large niche, and there are many companies that you can go to for tools.  Older translations are in the public domain, newer translations can be obtained from multiple publishers who have licensed them. That means that you can be fairly certain that you can find a software package for the platform and needs you have.  D&D isn't nearly as big. I don't think WotC has the resources to produce a tool for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. That means that a lot of people will want to consume their media on their device of choice but will be unable to.  PDFs or DRM-free ePubs can be used on anything, and WotC doesn't need to do any work to make that happen.Even if the official tool is available on your platform, what if it doesn't work the way that you want it to?  Me, I like to manage my campaign with DEVONthink. It lets me store all my PDFs in it and makes them searchable, uses AI to help suggest related items, and lets me store my notes in a wiki form.  That works really well for me, and it's a tool that has been written over many years. Will WotC be able to match it?  And will they make it work as well for 3rd party documents? Probably not: that's a lot more work.The second reason I like more open formats is reusability. I have so many more ways to repurpose content in PDF form than if it were locked in an application. Just in the last campaign, I've:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Pulled NPC images out of the adventure PDF and recomposed them on a handout so that the players could see who they're talking to</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Pulled the image of the map out so I could roughly trace it to create a treasure map</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Copied text from different parts of the adventure so I could create a cheat sheet to help run daily events</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Blown up an encounter map and removed numbers and such to create an ad-hoc battle map</li> </ul>None of these are pirating the work, they're all easily fair use, but they probably wouldn't be possible if the content were locked within a custom-built application. Even if WotC weren't trying to prevent me from doing such things, it's unlikely they'd spend the development time to enable them.</blockquote>

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