>>16844929that's right. practically speaking they're extremely easy to find illegally reposted even without resorting to torrents or sketchy websites, but officially you've never been able to get the books or the content within them for free
to start playing you'd need a dungeon master's guide, player handbook, and monster manual to start which are $50 a pop physical or $30 per for PDFs. i believe most virtual tabletop systems include those books in your subscription, but that's still not free
that's also not including all the supplementary books that have been published over the years and worst of all the adventure modules that are books filled 75% of the way with a prewritten campaign and 25% of the way with new items, monsters, spells, etc
