While the idea does sound very good and useful, I suspect you can already tell what the major hurdle would be.
Most free games are designed to be low-size PDFs, but they remain something that in large quantities would take up a lot of space, not to mention potential traffic.
The vision is noble, though, and I would love to see a site like that come around, expand and thrive.

I think this idea would be worthwhile. In fact, I’d be surprised if it weren’t done before.

It would be trivial to track the number of downloads with any free FTP server. Setting up the site itself would probably be the most challenging task.

If a free RPG site/store/archive were available, I’d definitely use it.

Hosting would be a major issue. But I have already thought about how you could avoid that issue. While it’s handy to have one central site where people can browse, rate and review free RPGs you could have the files themselves hosted on Google Docs, various share hosters etc.

Perhaps rpgnow could be convinced to set up rpgfree?

RPGNow is that site. I want my games to be where people looking for games can find them, not somewhere that people have to be looking specifically for free games before they stumble on them. Particularly since a bunch of the latter folks are probably going to go looking at torrents first. Why reinvent the wheel, particularly when your new wheel is going to be HO scale?

I always felt that http://www.1km1kt.net/ was supposed to be the place to go and look for free role-playing games.

I would love to see that sort of thing. Most folks I know have had to ditch unnecessary expenditures, like hobbies, due to the economy. I’ve even had to stop with the 1-5$ a week purchases I used to make picking up 3rd party adventures.

Yeah, 1km1kt isn’t very user friendly for finding games. It needs better tagging, searching, and browsing (and probably rating too).

It’s interesting you bring this up, because I’m working on a non-RPG-related project where the client uploads & maintains a vast quantity of file resources. The infrastructure would be well-suited to a project like this.

An awesome idea! I used to release free e-zines supporting 4e, but they were difficult to find on RPGNow unless you had a habit of searching the entire 4e database.

The trick, as already mentioned, is making it sustainable but I think it’s equally important to set up such a site as a resource for up-and-coming designers and getting feedback is crucial. What if you can set up a consumer account and download X number of PDFs for free, but for every review or comment posted, you unlock access to more freebies. Encourage feedback and reward with more perks, allowing publishers like myself details on how well received a product is. It’s the one thing lacking (and I admit, I’m just as bad) in free downloads.

Actually the major cost would be bandwidth right? Why not use bittorrent to distribute the files? You could set up the sever to ensure there is always one seed (The server) or more (Super Seeding), but for popular games that are getting a lot of downloads the other users would pay a lot of the bandwidth costs.

Sure, it would be slower, but hey, free.

Herr Wolf, we’re going to have to have you killed. You have stumbled onto something not ready for human consumption.

There is a secret project codenamed … errr… I can’t tell you*, OUR GLORIOUS BENEFACTOR would have me shot. I can’t tell you any more about it except that it solves all the problems outlined here (and some problems specfic to free RPGs in general). Including space – OUR GLORIOUS BENEFACTOR (he who makes the hard drives whirrr) has plenty of it. And bandwidth too.

The only bottleneck is me. I have a HUNDRED different projects on the go at the moment! During the day I’m an enterprise level web team lead, so know my POSTs from my PUTs. Also, no-one has been asking for it (except the 1000 monkeys) so I’ve not had a lot of drive to complete it.

I expect that’s changed now.

When it’s stable enough to show what it can do then we’ll be doing it agile/open beta/public test/etc so that its direction can be steered.

* It’s codenamed 2KM2KT

This idea is great indeed. We have such thing in Poland, but it’s only for LARPs (http://larpbase.boo.pl), with no tabletop RPGs. I guess you could always add advertisements to this website, so it can generate some money that could be used to pay for hosting. Also there’s some apps that allow users to pay voluntarily, if they can and are satisfied with the content of the site.

If the RPGs are CC-licensed or public domain, archive.org could be a spot to host them. If someone wanted to curate getting 50+ items, a collection could be made for them. I’m currently uploading all of my podcast files to archive.org.

So, if it’s bandwidth, there are options. Now, the store front-end is another matter entirely.

I tried to do something similar with the OSR Conservation Process ( http://ocp.no-ip.org/ ) , but the aim is different.

Bandwidth and cloud space are cheap nowadays, so such a site could be easily hosted and maintained on a very small budget.

Torrents are an easy delivery solution too.

I think this is more than a worthwhile project, and if you need help count me in.

Theoretically a good idea – I think it would need to be watched pretty thoroughly though, to prevent people putting up PDFs that weren’t free. A lot of RPG games turn up illegally on sites like Scribd and it does get tiresome when you’re trying to make a living writing games.

I don’t understand. So what if RPGNow is there to make money? What is bad about using it for free RPGs?

Conversely, I can see plenty of things going wrong with a seperate RPGFree.Now.