Bootleg role-playing games are unauthorised copies of game instructions and gameplay rules of role-playing games. As with the music and video industries, the business of RPGs changed markedly in response to high-tech methods of illegal copying.

Unlike many other types of games, RPGs are nearly entirely text-based, requiring few non-standard components other than books. Because both the price and complexity of RPG books rose in the 1990s, a cottage industry grew around copying and distributing many copies from a single purchased copy.

Hard copying

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Since the first Dungeons & Dragons pamphlets were published, players made copies, sometimes as simply as jotting down the rules in a binder. It becomes bootlegging when the user copies large parts of the whole work via Xerox or other such methods. This method is losing popularity quickly, but it still occurs, particularly in areas where public libraries stock RPG sourcebooks.

The game industry came to live with this method of bootlegging, as it was untrackable and predominantly non-impactful. One copy could make another copy, but only through the same tedious process of copying the first one.

Electronic copying

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The game industry could not ignore the rise of another method of bootlegging, namely scanning the entire book into the computer in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. From there, it can be easily distributed over the internet with a file-sharing tool like LimeWire or Kazaa. In the course of a week, someone with a relatively fast broadband connection can bootleg over $200 worth of d20 system core books and supplements this way.

The problem of RPG bootlegging from a developer's standpoint is very hard to stop, particularly with most bookstores' loose attitude towards people reading in their establishments. However, it seems to be a problem best left unchecked, since those that bootleg are likely to buy some of the publisher's products eventually, and might leave their chosen system for one of the many free RPG systems available online if the publishers were to crack down on bootleggers.

Responses to bootlegging

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In response to bootlegging and other economic issues of RPGs, Wizards of the Coast released an Open Gaming License adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, known as the d20 System. This system allows players to acquire a copy of the core rules of any d20 system game (such as D&D) for free. The result allows anyone to participate in such games without having to pay the high cost of acquiring a printed copy of the rules, or risk the legal and ethical ramifications of acquiring them through illegal means.

Steve Jackson Games has also released a 32-page PDF containing the core rules of their GURPS system, titled GURPS Lite.

Supplements to these games, of course, are not free.

Role-playing game terms