1 hour ago, WolfRider said:

EotE Beta was a pdf. I still have it on the HD I use to saves things from my PC's HD. It's that pdf I used to start playing EotE 6 years ago.

Did you have to pay for it? As I understand it, they licencing issue covers selling electronic games, it doesn't say anything about giving them away. That's why FFG can give away pdf adventures, like the follow-ups to the beginner games.

This may be an unpopular idea but has anyone who has been dying for a pdf just up and outright made their own. I'm not sure on the legality of it all but I imagine as long as you don't share them you should be fine. I too prefer pdfs of my rpg books, and just scanned them all. It didn't take as long as it would seem and there's so many ways to do it now. You can use a photocopier if you have access to one, which I know many do not, but the scans come in surprisingly great quality. And a lot of scanners now have the OCR option that can be turned on where it recognizes text! Before that I would use a scanning app for phones called scanner pro that basically takes a photo of each page of the book and straightens it out for you and compiles it into a single pdf. Before that even, in my early days, I would just use a computer scanner.

It's been great having pdfs of all my books to flip though in bed without a mountain next to me and at the table I just pass my players my ipad and they can flip through a core rulebook that weighs under a pound lol. Again I must emphasize, DON'T SHARE THEM! We want FFG to make money, so they make us more books!

I'm just saying, one could put the work in if they wanted them bad enough...

I always wondered if I was alone in doing this?

@Drig I bought a scanner because of this game, a long time ago.

@Donovan Morningfire Adobe creative suite now costs $600 a year on a subscription service including their type library instead of an $1800.00 every two years, because I and others told them their software was to expensive in a focus group.

Apple built out a version of their operating system to the exact wishlist I sent them on a customer survey.

Google earth with topographical, map, and streets, and gps, exists because I gave the inventor of a medical graphic format a better idea to use his file format for in a meeting I had with him when I worked at a dot com in the 90’s. Hundreds of millions of people use that every day.

Sometimes for prophit companies listen to their customers, and pick up on good ideas, but only occasionally.

1 hour ago, Dafydd said:

Did you have to pay for it? As I understand it, they licencing issue covers selling electronic games, it doesn't say anything about giving them away. That's why FFG can give away pdf adventures, like the follow-ups to the beginner games.

That, and what they’ve released digitally - characters, follow-up adventures, even the dice app - are completely useless as stand-alone products, and don’t include any additional rules, etc.

Under a Black Sun has all the dice mechanics included.

4 hours ago, WolfRider said:

EotE Beta was a pdf. I still have it on the HD I use to saves things from my PC's HD. It's that pdf I used to start playing EotE 6 years ago.

What you have is a pirated copy, and not a legally available version, as no such thing existed for reasons discussed in this thread. The only PDFs from the EotE Beta (or any of the Beta) were rules updates.

50 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

Under a Black Sun has all the dice mechanics included.

And it slipped under the radar as a "non-profit supplemental enhancement," which is the same legal loophole that WotC employed to publish errata updates, free adventures, and even a few web supplements for their various Star Wars games, a fact confirmed by Rodney Thompson, who at the time was the guy in charge of the Saga Edition line.

It also doesn't have full character creation rules, or even character advancement rules, so unless folks are fine playing static characters that don't get to improve or are willing to bend over backwards to create their own character advancement rules (which even then are going to be quite limited in comparison to the full rules).

2 hours ago, Drig said:

I'm just saying, one could put the work in if they wanted them bad enough...

I always wondered if I was alone in doing this?

You're not, as a friend of mine bought all the Saga Edition books, then pretty much tore them apart to make PDFs for his own personal usage. So long as the PDFs aren't shared, anyone is free to follow that same process and make their own electronic media versions of the books.

But that doesn't address the complaints of those folks that are demanding the PDFs in the first place, as that requires them to 1) pay full price for the hardcover and 2) do the hard work of making the PDF themselves, which ultimately circumvents the whole ease-of-accessibility factor (as well as generally reduced cost) that having PDFs for sale offers.

25 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

What you have is a pirated copy, and not a legally available version, as no such thing existed for reasons discussed in this thread. The only PDFs from the EotE Beta (or any of the Beta) were rules updates.

And playtester copies.

Any word on what new ships might be appearing in this? I'm hoping for some FFG created ships to fill in the smaller warship inventory but I would be happy even if we jjust got the canon ships becaisr I'm sure some will be sil 7 and thus useable to fill in the shortage of rebel likely sil 7 fighting ships in Age of Rebellion. Why they forgot the Assault frigates when making that gam I'll never know.

4 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

And playtester copies.

Which with the corebooks stopped (at least regarding a more finalized version) after some dipwad decided to fileshare the Force and Destiny pre-Beta about the day before the F&D Beta would have gone on sale at GenCon that year, which from what I'd heard was pretty much the F&D Beta without most of the artwork.

I'd asked Sam Stewart if our playtest group was going to get a finalized version of the F&D rules much we'd gotten when doing the playtesting for Stay on Target (as the AoR final rules hadn't been released yet), and his answer was no due to the incident I just mentioned.

What playtesters get is effectively just a rough draft text-only version of the product, which even then might not have everything; case in point, my group did playtesting for Keeping the Peace, and all of us were surprised to see the armor-crafting rules in the final product, as nothing in the playtest materials made mention of said rules, to say nothing of a bunch of gear in the playtest that didn't make the final cut (some of which did show up in later products with some heavy revision).

6 minutes ago, RogueCorona said:

Any word on what new ships might be appearing in this? I'm hoping for some FFG created ships to fill in the smaller warship inventory but I would be happy even if we jjust got the canon ships becaisr I'm sure some will be sil 7 and thus useable to fill in the shortage of rebel likely sil 7 fighting ships in Age of Rebellion. Why they forgot the Assault frigates when making that gam I'll never know.

Sadly nothing, other than "hey, did it appear in the prequels or TCW, but isn't in any other FFG book? Then we might see it!"

The only folks that know more about what's in the book are either FFG staff or are folks that signed an NDA agreeing not to spill the beans on the book when they were writing it or playtesting it.

I miss the days when FFG created new ships instead of just using Legends or Canon designs.

3 hours ago, RogueCorona said:

I miss the days when FFG created new ships instead of just using Legends or Canon designs.

Problem is that you've got a vocal portion of the consumer base asking/requesting/demanding stats for ships from the existing lore. And with only so much space per book to put new ship stats into, it's a matter of which do they pick? New ships that nobody's really asking for, or existing ships that people are asking for? And let's be honest, there's a whole mess of existing lore with regards to ships to draw from, so there's a pretty good chance that a new design is going to run so parallel to an existing design in the lore that the question comes up of "why didn't you just use the existing design?"

I would prefer a mix of new ships, old ships never statted out, and old ships but definitely want the first two types more. I love the Starbolt and Kossak, both FFG created designs. And there are tons of designs mentioned but never statted out, often never even named they could add.

It's also harder for groups that like to use minis to supplement their game (I'd really like a 1/270 scale Darvros Class Light Freighter mini, for example), but the chances of plasticrack in those forms is decidedly lower to non-existent, than a ship from pre-existing lore.

18 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

What you have is a pirated copy, and not a legally available version, as no such thing existed for reasons discussed in this thread. The only PDFs from the EotE Beta (or any of the Beta) were rules updates.

Perhaps it's a pirated copy. There isn't any arts inside, less than 300 pages, chapters not numbered the same as the final version, for differences I can remember. But I don't care it to be pirated or legal. It's because I was able to play with this pdf that I bought the final and full EotE corebooks. At 60€ I would have thought twice if I didn't know I liked that game system ad much as the setting. I never bought Star Wars D6 or d20 or saga because I didn't like those systems.

1 hour ago, WolfRider said:

Perhaps it's a pirated copy. There isn't any arts inside, less than 300 pages, chapters not numbered the same as the final version, for differences I can remember. But I don't care it to be pirated or legal. It's because I was able to play with this pdf that I bought the final and full EotE corebooks. At 60€ I would have thought twice if I didn't know I liked that game system ad much as the setting. I never bought Star Wars D6 or d20 or saga because I didn't like those systems.

While it’s a given that it didn’t exist back during Beta....

It would be awesome if FFG were to produce some sort of Introductory Set For New Players. Something that included dice, and pregens, and an adventure, and an abridged rulebook. And maybe charged half the price of the Core Rulebook. It would be great for people curious about the game who didn’t want to plunk down that full price of the CRB and wanted to check it out.

Nah, that’s crazy. They’d never do something like that. 😜

3 hours ago, Nytwyng said:

It would be awesome if FFG were to produce some sort of Introductory Set For New Players. Something that included dice, and pregens, and an adventure, and an abridged rulebook. And maybe charged half the price of the Core Rulebook. It would be great for people curious about the game who didn’t want to plunk down that full price of the CRB and wanted to check it out.

At least they come with a set of dice, and one of them has a map.

20 minutes ago, Eoen said:

At least they come with a set of dice, and one of them has a map.

Why, that kind of talk is just as crazy as the idea of the Introductory Set For New Players. I mean, everything I listed above is obviously ridiculous fantasy, but you just had to go too far and suggest including maps, too.

Next you’ll suggest they would do four different sets.

*sigh* Some people just take things too far.

😜

I see my Genesys core rulebook pdf had an errata update today, yet another reason why Hollywood contract lawyers suck.

1 hour ago, Eoen said:

I see my Genesys core rulebook pdf had an errata update today, yet another reason why Hollywood contract lawyers suck.

The reasoning for no SWRPG PDFs aside...it’d be nice if FFG offered two versions of hard copy RPGs that do have PDFs - one regular, and one for a slightly higher price, shrink-wrapped with a digital redemption code inside to allow access to both with a single purchase.

4 minutes ago, Nytwyng said:

The reasoning for no SWRPG PDFs aside...it’d be nice if FFG offered two versions of hard copy RPGs that do have PDFs - one regular, and one for a slightly higher price, shrink-wrapped with a digital redemption code inside to allow access to both with a single purchase.

I agree that would be sweet to have a bundle. I've noticed that pdfs are released around the time the books hit retail shelfs in Europe.

On 2/1/2019 at 12:23 PM, Lorne said:

On 2/22/2019 at 5:53 PM, themensch said:

What he said...