I really hate being forced to pay for the same content over and over and over again.

Take Ptolus: Monte Cook’s City by the Spire, for example. This is a 672 page tome that is, frankly, worth its weight in gold as a gaming supplement. It features gorgeous, detailed cartography accompanied by enough detail that you always feel well-supported when you’re running adventures there, without being so massively over-detailed that there’s no place to make room for your PCs. Plus, Monte Cook has supported all of this detail in the city with enough raw adventure material to fill two or three complete campaigns. And this wealth of material is supported by some of the best indexing and cross-referencing ever used in a roleplaying manual, making it delightfully easy to use. (In fact, I found the cross-referencing so wonderful that Dream Machine Productions has been using a similar system for cross-referencing our Rule Supplements.)

In short, I love this supplement. And I’m currently using it to run a really wonderful campaign from which I’ll probably start posting campaign journals in the near future.

But I’m being asked to pay for this material for the third time, and it’s really starting to annoy me.

First, I was told that only those who pre-ordered the book would receive a plethora of special bonus material. So I made a point of pre-ordering the book at the full cover price of $120 so that I would get all of this bonus material.

… except almost all (if not all) of this bonus material was later released for everybody to get their hands on.

Well, that’s OK. I’m not against supporting a really great product in this little niche industry by paying full price for it. And I did get early access to some of that material, which was kinda neat.

One of the things that comes with the book is a CD full of bonus material, which included — in addition to a lot of original material — free PDF copies of a lot of Ptolus-related products. Among these were Chaositech and Banewarrens. This was a great deal for some people, but since I’d already bought PDF copies of these it was really just a duplicated effort.

But that’s OK, too.

What annoyed me, however, was that this CD did not include the PDF-version of the book which was simultaneously released. The PDF-version was marketed as nine separate PDF products, one of which was given away for free. Total price? $69. I got a 20% discount coupon by buying the book, so that knocked the price down to $55.

(Why would I want a digital copy of content I already own in hardcopy? Because being able to search the text is nice. Also, being able to copy-and-paste text and graphics for handouts and the like is also a nice feature.)

So now I’ve spent $175 for material which, on the day of release, could be picked up from $60 from the discount dealers.

The only disadvantage of these PDFs is that they’re nine separate files, which can make searching a little bit more complicated than it probably needs to be.

Now, however, Malhavoc Press has released an all-in-one PDF “due to popular demand”. They want $60 for it.

“Well, screw that,” I think. “I”ll just pop open my copy of Acrobat, combine all these separate PDFs into one file, and call it a day.” Only I can’t do that because they’ve put a “we know you paid $55 for this, but we don’t trust you” protection scheme on it.

So Malhavoc Press is literally trying to charge me $60 for another copy of material I’ve already paid $175. And it’s not even that they’re offering it to me in a new format. They’re offering it to me in the same format, but in a slightly different configuration. And the only reason I need to pay them for this slightly different configuration is because they screwed me with their copy fascism.

And this isn’t like buying all the Beatles albums on CD even though I already own them on LP: If I wanted to, I could just record the LP and burn it to a CD. The reason I’m willing to pay for the CD is because it’s got better audio quality.

No, this is like a music company charging you $20 to buy a copy of a CD with the tracks in a slightly different order… and thinking they can get away with it because they put copy fascism measures on the original CD which stops you from ripping the tracks and burning a new CD with the tracks in a different order.

I’m not a thief, and I want people to be compensated for their IP. (Since I make my living creating IP, it would be pretty foolish for me to think otherwise!) And it’s not even that I don’t like giving Monte Cook my cold, hard cash: When it comes to Ptolus-related products alone, I’ve spent close to $300. (The big book, the separate PDFs, Banewarrens, Chaositech, Demon God’s Fane, the original version of Queen of Lies, and the Ptolus-revision of Queen of Lies. Plus the Deluxe City Map, the adventure maps, and the sketchbooks.)

But enough is enough.

(And a quick Google indicates that I just coined the term “copy fascism”. Awesome.)