Knights & Knaves Alehouse

I'd be very interested in seeing the quality of the scan -- if it is one and not a badly OCRed version. I'll withhold comment until someone in the OCR community can review these POD reprints.

Well, it will be the same as the PDF, i.e., the same as the 2012 Premium Reprints — at least, for those books that had Premium Reprints. Perhaps someone who has bought the PDFs could check if they have incorporated fixed the errata yet.

The PDF was last updated 7/13/2015. I downloaded a fresh copy, and found Dwarves still have 7HD. So, the PDF is not error-free.

I do not know if they use the same source document for print on demand, and sorry, but I'm not dropping $25 to find out.

EDIT: I posted something on the page for the MM. Doubt I will get an answer. dtrpg/rpgnow can only distribute what WotC gives them.

Here is a video I found showing a POD of Dragonlance Adventures, which has been available for several weeks:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/BECMI/p ... 251474616/

Just so you can sort of get a sense of the quality.

For the MM1-PHB-DMG, I wish they could feature the original covers.

Very cool that these are available, but also very lame that WotC has zero apparent interest in fixing the typos they introduced, even though doing so should be pretty trivially easy. It's also a little dubious that they're charging $24.99 a pop for these, even though the Dragonlance Adventures book, with the same pagecount as the PH and higher pagecount than the MM, is priced at $17.99. At those prices second-hand copies are probably still a better option.

All qualms involving typos, art and whatnot aside, having these available for POD is far better than NOT having them available for POD.

It's frankly something that was essentially unimaginable under WotC just 8 years ago given their then completely dismissive - often running towards hostile - attitude towards OOP editions of the game and the people that played them.

All it took to change their attitude was Sean K. Reynolds (was it foresight, naivety, carelessness?) and his OGL, a lot of hard work from guys like Matt and Stuart to pave the way for real competition in the market, and an edition finally bombing so bad that it permanently split the fan base amongst all the various editions, all fully supported to the extent that the market would bear it. D&D belongs to the fans now. If WotC won't provide the D&D that the fans want, the fans can just get it elsewhere. So WotC doesn't really have the choice to ignore the fact that people still want access to the older editions of the game.

Falconer wrote:Well, it will be the same as the PDF, i.e., the same as the 2012 Premium Reprints

Very sad to hear that. I had a brief flicker of optimism, hoping that Wi$bros would finally do the right thing. Silly me.

Correcting a PDF is the type of thing that can happen if enough people ask for it. The harder obstacle is getting POD up for sale in the first place.

I think it's a positive development - more fundamental in some ways than the one-off 2012 reprinting. AD&D will never again be "out of print".

It also underscores the value of the Black Blade OSRIC book.

If they're going to have errors in the PDF, the least they could do is put on something better than those fugly ass covers.

Their only concern is to dredge up what amounts to free money. They won't spend $10K to make $20K when they can make $15K without doing anything.

Landifarne wrote:Their only concern is to dredge up what amounts to free money. They won't spend $10K to make $20K when they can make $15K without doing anything.

If they had just scanned the text at relatively high res, printed it, and bound the whole thing it would have been more cost-effective than OCRing the text (obviously without subsequent editorial oversight), scanning the artwork (hamfistedly) and commissioning new, lousy cover-art.

Scanning at any res would never be great quality. It's all going to be 5th or more likely 6th generation by that point, which is why the art suffered in the reprints (as most of the originals were destroyed).

1st Gen: the original paste-up
2nd Gen: the paste-up is shot as a single piece (may possibly be skipped situation dependent)
3rd Gen: a negative is made
4th Gen: a press plate is made from the negative
5th Gen: the printed pages

Any scan of a finished product just adds less clarity. OCR was the proper move, as it allows for the insertion of errata that was never made, and offers a clean slate from which to work (as well as being cheaper than having the whole thing re-typed). But, it definitely should have been checked against the original material. They seriously dropped the ball on that point. And they still do not seem very concerned with fixing things, either the new errors or the old.

Scanning at any res would never be great quality.

I very respectfully disagree. For us who look at the core books as objects of veneration (no hyperbole here), a facsimile edition is far preferable to an OCR'ed -- and consequently reformatted -- product. Thanks to WotC's disregard/lassitude, EGG's Holy Writ got scrambled.

OSRIC has tons of misspellings. It's "armor" not "armour"!