Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 mrpopstar Aug 10, 2014 11:04:05	I brought this with my gaming group, and I thought it might be worthy of discussion here...   Does anyone else find the index in the Player's Handbook to be clunky, and not geared towards swift reference in the midst of gaming? (Page number reference errors are another conversation entirely.)   Having just taken a class on indexing as a professional service, I view the following approach to be maddening:        *flip through the index to reference improvised weapon and find*             Improvised weapons. See under weapon        *flip through the index further to reference weapon and find*             Weapon, 14, 146-148, 149              improvised, 147-148              silvered, 148              table, 149        *flip to page 147 to access information*   Since the index is meant to be a liaison between the text and its ultimate user, designed to help the reader find information quickly and easily, I'd've approached it thus:        *flip through the index to reference improvised weapon and find*             Improvised weapons, 147-148        *flip to page 147 to access information*   The indexer anticipates that the user might look in two different places for the rules governing improvised weapons: improvised weapons, and weapon, improvised. Just offer answers at both points of reference, don't reference another reference for the sake of being a pedant for concept taxonomy.   #grumblylibrarian
#2 Hortensio_peace Aug 11, 2014 10:45:33	If you don't mind me asking, what have you done as a professional indexer so far?  That sounds very interesting!
#3 tallric_kruush Aug 11, 2014 10:52:02	This same sort of thing is present within the text of the book itself. I first noticed it while reading the Basic Rules. I think it was concerning spell focus, but I do not recall definitively. Whatever it was, I was referred to a section of the book for more information, turned there, and was promptly referred to a another section. (I believe it was starting point to equipment to spellcasting, or something similar).   It is definitely an annoyance, and something I hope isn't repeated in future books. It seems like an artifact of early design that wasn't cleaned up in editing.
#4 Elfcrusher Aug 11, 2014 11:07:26	Applying Codd's Normal Forms to an index is a bad idea. It seems to be optimizing for the convenience of the indexers (i.e. only have to make one change to the index if the layout changes), not the readers.
#5 malisteen Aug 11, 2014 11:16:02	When classes mention spell focuses, they reference the equipment chapter.  Not the page, mind, the entire chapter.  In a book where chapter numbers are not marked on the pages anywhere.  So you flip page by page through the equipment chapter looking for the spell focus to see what it's rules are, and what do you get when you finally find it?  A reference to the magic chapter.  Again, not to a specific page, but to the entire chapter.   So yeah, references to references, when it would have been quicker and easier to reference directly, is definitely a problem in this book.  In the index, it's especially annoying, because "Improvised Weapon: see Weapons, Improvised" and "Improvised Weapons: pgs whatever" take up exactly the same amount of lines in the index, so the index writer is making you do busy work for absolutely no reason.   These kinds of minor formatting issues (references to references, no chapter numbers on pages, no indication of which spells are in which schools in spell lists (particularly for the wizard list where that really matters), no mention in spell descriptions of what classes have access, forcing a lot of back and forth flipping) are really starting to wear down my initial positive impressions of the 5e PHB.  It is first and formost a game tool.  It can be as pretty as it likes, but if it's inconvenient to use at the table, then it's not doing it's job right.
#6 mrpopstar Aug 11, 2014 11:37:53	Hortensio_peace wrote:
#7 Marandahir Aug 11, 2014 12:52:07	Nah, there's always the 2nd major printing, after there's significant errata to update the books.  They said they won't do this until it's really significant, though, because they don't really want to invalidate our purchases.