D&D General Hey, are we all cool with having to buy the same book twice, or what?

[JiffyPopTart]

Yes, they do. Making content available in an easily-shared format leads to more theft and fewer sales. That is an expense to a company. I imagine WOTC's decision takes this expense into account, along with all of the other legal, ecomonic and technical issues with digital publishing.

A farmer doesn't spend time worrying about the lock on his barn when the doors flew off 4 years ago.

 

[Lanefan]

Often times I agree with you on things Lanefan, but I think you're missing some big pieces here and picking and choosing what you want to be true in bits and pieces.

I don't think so, but I'm wondering if we're talking about entirely the same things here...

Yes, renting is a fine understanding.


But you are not. you might want to be buying, but you are only renting. That's why I said it was so important to read the legal terms when you buy something.

If it's represented as a "buy" - that is, I pay money once, after which I own the product just as if it was a physical thing - then to put it as a "rent" in the legalese IMO borders on fraud.

You're picking and choosing to suite your own desires. And not in accordance with what is actually being offered for sale.

DDB & Roll20 are not offering to sell you a product. They are offering to rent you access to one.

FG is offering you a product to own to use has certain pre-requisites. It is up to you to maintain the hardware needed to run the program and access the content.

You keep referencing these three specific platforms, which while relevant to most here are of no consequence to me. This matters because...

Again, just because you want a PDF doesn't mean one is for sale.

...you then say things like this, which while maybe true on those specific platforms isn't always true on others where pdf's are offered for sale (legally).

Nobody is selling you backwards compatibility.

I know. That's my complaint here.

They sell you a digital product that works on a certain platform. Even a PDF has platform requirements that will someday not be supported. Those games where sold to work on DOS 3.3, Windows 98, or XP, or whatever. If you don't have a platform that runs that o/s then that is your responsibility that you upgraded to a new PC and bought Windows 7 or 10 etc. Or that you didn't buy spares to maintain the hardware.

My take on it is that when things like OSes are redesigned or remade (e.g. the jumps from Windows 7 to 8.x to 10) the designers should be writing backward compatibility into those programs for every previous version; either as a bug-free emulator or by embedding the real thing.

I mean, hell, my Win 8.x machine that I'm typing this on has a fully functional Win 7 emulator baked in, which is what I use about 99.9% of the time. Had this been done for each jump then the software would already be written each time, meaning that my machine would be able to emulate whichever version of DOS/Windows I told it to.

Can you imagine how stiffed the computer and software industries would be if current hardware and operating systems had to be able to run DOS 1.0 programs?

They wouldn't be stiffed at all; other than those less-than-ethical companies* whose business model is built on forcing people to repeatedly buy new versions of things they already have.

* - I'll probably get in hot water with the mods if I start naming any...

You home PC would be stuck in the 80s, your phone would not be 'smart'.

My PC would be just the same as what I have now, only it'd also be able to run older programs just as well. My phone would be just as smart as it currently is...and from what I can tell, android at least has some sense of backward compatibility perhaps due to its open-source status.

Sure, and I worked for a major international company that kept their corporate servers in the basement because it was the least desirable space. No one wants an office in the basement so put the servers down there, they won't complain. Worked great until the city had record rains, and the corresponding flooding. Servers don't work well under 8 feet of water.

Heh, I hear ya - it was a direct lightning hit on the servers' building that got ours.

Decisions have consequences. But at least with a digital product you have options and possibilities for disaster proofing that you can never have with a printed book. After all, what did we lose with the fire in the Alexandrian Library?

In some ways I agree, but in other ways I see anything digital as being far more - for lack of a better word - fragile, or ephemeral, than things I can hold in my hand.

 

[MarkB]

My take on it is that when things like OSes are redesigned or remade (e.g. the jumps from Windows 7 to 8.x to 10) the designers should be writing backward compatibility into those programs for every previous version; either as a bug-free emulator or by embedding the real thing.

It can't work like that, due to security issues if nothing else. The older an operating system is, the more potential exploits have been found for it, and once a company stops supporting that software they're no longer going to be able to patch up the holes - if they even can be patched up, when the software is no longer compatible with current protocols.

If companies built in fully working versions of older operating systems to their current ones, they would be legally liable to keep those legacy systems up to date for both security and hardware-compatibility purposes, at the same time as ensuring that those updates don't break their compatibility with the legacy software products they're intended to support. It would be an increasingly impossible task of exponential proportions with every new version of the operating system that was introduced.

 

[eyeheartawk]

I've spent a fair amount of time in Silicon Valley for work. And let me tell you the only reason SaaS is a thing is to make you spend more money and to make their books look better, also to harvest your data more easily. It's definitely not for our benefit.

To take an easy example. Why buy MS Office once every decade or so, when you could buy a monthly/yearly subscription. They make more money that way. Also, Wall Street loves predictable, easy guaranteed revenue, which is what these subscriptions are. And of course, they then have access to much more data, which they can sell for further money.

 

[slobster]

My take on it is that when things like OSes are redesigned or remade (e.g. the jumps from Windows 7 to 8.x to 10) the designers should be writing backward compatibility into those programs for every previous version; either as a bug-free emulator or by embedding the real thing.

I mean, hell, my Win 8.x machine that I'm typing this on has a fully functional Win 7 emulator baked in, which is what I use about 99.9% of the time. Had this been done for each jump then the software would already be written each time, meaning that my machine would be able to emulate whichever version of DOS/Windows I told it to.

I'm not a programmer myself, though I have done a fair bit of coding back in the day. And I was mostly staying out of the conversation about new conflicting ideas of ownership in the new millennium, but this particular comment jumped out.

The idea of nesting emulations of operating systems within in each other with every new release, like an ever-growing human centipede of machine language, is just not really viable. Emulation is iffy and prone to unexpected failure in the best of environments, looping emulator after emulator for code written decades apart for completely different machines would be a fiasco, a hilarious and gloriously self-destructive fiasco.

It's one of those suggestions that probably sounds reasonable on the surface, and then when the executive in charge of the project suggests implementing it all the engineers in the room wince and the lead software designer goes home and buys a noose.

I mean I get wanting better compatibility, I'm not knocking the desire! But there are several good reasons why it doesn't always happen, cost being just one of them. But in any case that specific suggestion conjured up my programmer friend's many rants about his experiences at work so vividly that it made me smile.

 

[Var]

What official PDF version of the PHB? There isn't one.

Rechecking the PDF I was referring to it's the D&D Basic Rules, referred to as "Player's Basic Rules" top of Page 1 in the PDF whoops.
The current version I found is way better than the old one I had been torturing myself with though, consider that complaint fixed then.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Seems to me if you are really worried about owning instead of licensing, backward compatibility, and server rooms getting flooded, you should....

...just buy a book.

 

[Jester David]

One reason to consider is that PDFs are a fixed size. They look good on desktops with a large widescreen monitor and big tablets... and that's about it. They're garbage on smaller devices.

PDFs are the best way of electronically reading books 2005 has to offer. They don't work with the mobile electronic needs of many, especially younger players whose device of choice is a smartphone.

When you consider 40% of D&D players are <25 (WotC - "D&D's Best Year Yet") and likely rely on someone else's computer or a smartphone, DnDBeyond seems like a much, much better investment than PDFs that don't resize, have those annoying multiple columns, and require the device to load the entire file at once rather than relevant chapters.
And something like DnDBeyond still looks good on a tablet and desktop.

 

[Umbran]

When you consider 40% of D&D players are <25 (WotC - "D&D's Best Year Yet") and likely rely on someone else's computer or a smartphone, DnDBeyond seems like a much, much better investment than PDFs that don't resize, have those annoying multiple columns, and require the device to load the entire file at once rather than relevant chapters.
And something like DnDBeyond still looks good on a tablet and desktop.

And in this, I think you have hit the nail on the head.

 

[Jester David]

And in this, I think you have hit the nail on the head.

Well... even a blind squirrel finds some nuts...