Bill Coffin's page

To refuse sale of a former 3.5 PDF, is just disgusting to me, as my family has some familiarity with totalitarians who engage in book-burning. This type of censorship and acts of destruction should galvanize us against those monsters.

I think the high download rates of the Pathfinder RPG have been an encouraging sign in that regard. Plus, the closer we get to the official Pathfinder RPG hitting the stores, the closer we get to this whole conversation becoming a moot point, I think. Especially since I've seen a lot of chatter coming from folks who feel that Pathfinder is a distinct improvement over the old 3.5 corebooks. Hell, I feel that way based on the artwork alone.

*not intending to threadjack, but...*

Bill Coffin, as in Palladium/Septimus Bill Coffin? Hi! Are you a Pathfinder RPGer as well? Glad to have you here.

Yep, that's me. I freaking love the Pathfinder stuff. I intially fell in love with the adventure/sourcebook magazine model, and the content has been top-notch too. I strolled down to the Compleat Strategist today to buy me a copy of the Campaign Setting only to not see it there. My heart, she is broken.

Anyway, to keep this from flying off the rails...I just wish those D&D 3.5 corebooks would have been sold online. Anybody who ever took a peek at RPG piracy would know that those files were flying around a hell of a lot anyway. Wny not put them on the market to sell a few?

BTW, I'm sure this is being talked over in other threads, but I just need to say how much I love Paizo's decision to release the Pathfinder beta and alpha online for free. What a great move that is. Not only do I get to use the book when I'm on my long train ride home each night, but it's also surely sold both a softback alpha as well as that official hardback when it comes out. Nicely done, lads. Nicely done.

Part of that may be they see no real profit in it. Outside of a few monsters (IIRC, the Beholder, Illithid and Thoqqua), the XP and advancement rules and a couple of goodies from the DMG, all of the crunchy bits are online for free as the SRD.

Fair enough, but for those willing to buy a copy, why not upload PDFs of the old corebooks? It's not like there is a serious cost involved and they might just make a few bucks off of it. I know there was a time when I would buy copies, since I preferred paging through the PDFs to looking things up in the SRD. I know that makes me a weirdo, but still, I'm the kind of guy Wizards could have made some money off of.