2009
04.12

I’ve enjoyed the game of AD&D for quite some time.  Specifically, I’ve enjoyed AD&D 2nd Edition.  This edition went out of print some where back in the late 90′s.  As a gamer, I saw no reason for this other than that they wanted to piss me off.

Shortly there after, 3rd got canned for 3.5, and now 4.0 is on it’s way.  Myself, I’m still a fan of 2nd, and for a while, I was able to get the books that I wanted in PDF format via Paizo.com.  Now however, Wizards has decided that they nolonger want their products to be available via PDF anymore, or at least, they don’t want others to be selling their products.  There is a good article here about why this does nothing but hurt their customers, so I won’t go into this here, instead, I’m just going to bitch angrilly to the internet…

I loved Planescape.  It was my favorite setting, and it got canned.  The most that I could get was The Manual of the Planes, which wasn’t as good IMHO, and a couple of books about demons and devils.

And if that weren’t bad enough, Hackmaster, the game that I got into because it was everything that I liked from 2nd, only made better, and with some good humor thrown in, got their license pulled also.  This means that not only am I not able to get out of print products anymore thanks to them, I’m also denied in new products based on their out of print rules.

Kenzer and Paladium are now the two companies that I will probably be doing my business with.  Both because I like their attitude, and because when they release a new eddition, they do it right.  When the new edition of Rifts came out, it wasn’t a whole new game, it was pretty much the exact same thing.  The differences between the old and new?  Well, they updated the art work, made the book a higher quality, and included new stats and storylines from the suppliments that came out.  Otherwise, it’s basically the same thing that they have been selling.  It works with all the other books that they have had with no problems converting, because it’s still the same.

Now, I’m not buying your products out of spite.  You almost pulled me in with a couple of the books.  Almost.  You were so close to having me walk down to the counter at NDC with the a couple of your manuals, but now, I’m probably just going to ignore your section of their shelves entirely…

  • jamijo

    Brad has a bunch of Rifts and other Palladium stuff… he’d probably be geeked to have someone to talk to about it at work, and would probably be willing to bring a book or two or ten in for you to peruse if you’d like. :)

  • http://www.thegamertraveler.com Daniel M. Perez, The Gamer Traveler

    Thanks for the link to my post for further info on the WotC decision.

  • http://www.diablosdominus.net Ben

    I likes White Wolf’s response to WoTC’s pulling PDFS, they gave Exalted 2md Ed. away for free @ DrivethruRPG