Major Retailers: The Safe Bets
DriveThruRPG for PDFs. Amazon for physical 5e books. Your FLGS for everything else — they need your money more than Bezos does.
DriveThruRPG is the largest TTRPG digital marketplace. Nearly every publisher sells PDFs here, and the Print-on-Demand program lets you order physical copies of books that are out of print. Sales rotate weekly, and the "Deal of the Day" is often 50-70% off. If you only bookmark one store, make it DriveThruRPG.
Amazon typically has the lowest prices on in-print D&D 5e books (30-40% off MSRP), but the shipping quality is inconsistent — books often arrive with dented corners. Your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) sells at MSRP but provides play space, organized play, and community. If you play at a store, buy from that store.
Rare and Out-of-Print: eBay, Noble Knight, and the Hunt
eBay for bargains if you are patient. Noble Knight Games for guaranteed quality. AbeBooks for truly obscure titles.
Noble Knight Games is the largest used TTRPG retailer. They grade condition accurately, ship well-packaged, and have a searchable inventory of tens of thousands of out-of-print titles. Prices are fair but rarely cheap — you pay for reliability. eBay is where deals happen if you set saved searches and wait. A complete Planescape box set that is $200 on Noble Knight might appear on eBay for $80 if you check for six months.
For truly obscure titles (1970s wargame-adjacent RPGs, foreign-language editions, convention-only zines), AbeBooks and used bookstores are your best bet. The community also recommends the RPG Auctions Facebook group and the r/rpgtrade subreddit for peer-to-peer sales.
Is It Worth Buying? How the Community Evaluates TTRPG Products
Read the 2-star and 4-star reviews — never the 5-star or 1-star. Watch an actual play before buying a campaign. The core book PDF is almost always worth it.
The community has developed reliable heuristics for evaluating whether a TTRPG product is worth your money: (1) Check if an actual play exists on YouTube or podcast — seeing the game played reveals more than any review. (2) Read the 2-star and 4-star reviews — 5-star reviews are often hype, 1-star reviews are often axe-grinding. (3) Search the product name on Reddit (r/rpg, r/dndnext) — real player experiences surface organically.
For Kickstarter and crowdfunding: back for the PDF tier first. You can always upgrade later. Check the creator's delivery history — a first-time creator with no track record is high risk regardless of how good the campaign page looks. The community's rule of thumb: only back at a level you are comfortable losing if the project never delivers.
Digital vs Physical: The Honest Tradeoffs
PDFs for reference at the table. Physical books for reading cover-to-cover. Both for the games you actually run.
PDFs are searchable, portable, and often cheaper. They are better for looking up rules mid-session (Ctrl+F beats flipping pages). But reading a 300-page rulebook cover-to-cover on a screen is miserable — most players report significantly lower comprehension and retention from PDF reading compared to physical books.
The community's compromise: buy the physical core book for reading and the PDF for table reference. Many publishers offer PDF + Print bundles (DriveThruRPG's "Bits and Mortar" program, Paizo subscriptions). If a publisher does not offer a bundle, the community consensus is that buying the physical book entitles you to a downloaded PDF — but legally, this is only true if the publisher explicitly says so.