D&D 5E (2014) Official WotC 5e pdfs

[Tigris]

Piracy has always been an excuse. The books are pirated anyway. OTOH, a PDF, once bought, is in the hands of the buyer. DDB stuff lives in their enclosed and proprietary format and it can be changed and removed at any time.

Even if its not pirated, from popular RPGs you will find the stuff online for free somewhere, either in a wiki or some other form. (Digital tool etc.).


Sometimes people even first look at PDFs and then buy them (of course this happens less when they suck).


Honestly I would never buy only a book from an RPG ever (and I hope books die soon anyway to allow PDFs to be better and not just book copies...), but I do buy PDFs. And I dont think that the book enjoyer people suddenly stop buying books, because there are PDFs around.


Today even a lot of comics are made for digital formats first (in scrollfriendly formats), and people still buy physical books of them afterwards.

 

[Cergorach]

You're getting me off on my other rant that the whole industry should be publishing in Markdown and EPUB as well...

Heck, we've moved to Foundry VTT as our main way of playing, so when I have legally bought PDFs, but no official FVTT modules, I make my own. But exporting from PDF these days is text with a bunch of linebreaks (a paragraph can be easily split op in dozens of seperate lines). I remember back in the day that certain PDFs had 'text flow', so when you exported, you had nice *.txt file... Now it's a TON of work to get it first into a nice text document...

Those few companies that do provide EPUB besides PDF make my life a LOT easier with making FVTT modules from (rule)books.

I still prefer PDFs for reading RPG books on my iPad though... The only thing I prefer EPUB for reading is novels or longer stories (I think that certain history sections in RPG books would work better as an EPUB for reading).

 

[SkidAce]

Well official starting level now is level 3. Level 1 and 2 are only meant as tutorial for new players. So this "story reason" does not come into play unless you have beginners and then its good to have a simpler complexity.

I re-read the tiers of play and I dont agree. Thre is a line that says you CAN start at 3 if you have experienced players, but its not "official starting level"

Beyond Tiers of Play

 

[Tigris]

I re-read the tiers of play and I dont agree. Thre is a line that says you CAN start at 3 if you have experienced players, but its not "official starting level"

Beyond Tiers of Play

Starting at Higher Levels | D&D 2024 | Roll20 Compendium

Starting at Higher Levels is one of the Rules in D&D 2024.

roll20.net

"It is particularly recommended to start at level 3 if your group is composed of seasoned D&D players."

For me this sounds as official starting level enough. "You can start at any level, but level 3 is recommendet".

If a game "particularly recommends" something for me, this sounds like its the best thing to do. These games still want to be open, and make everything possible, so its not a fixed rule, but I just see it as GM wanting to annoy players, if they force players to start at level 1 at this point.