DMsGuild: D&D Style-Guides give a unique insight into the game

[MechaPilot]

I wager its because they don't work with digital offerings like D&D Beyond or the virtual tabletops. It also solves problems with later editing.

My bet would be because it takes less work, thus requiring less labor hours, thus requiring less wages to be paid, thus increasing the gross profit percentage for each unit sold. Which, in turn, lowers the break-even point and reduces overall risk.

Or, ya know, because they just didn't want to. Which would be fine if the indices weren't so bad.

 

[Azzy]

My bet would be because it takes less work, thus requiring less labor hours, thus requiring less wages to be paid, thus increasing the gross profit percentage for each unit sold. Which, in turn, lowers the break-even point and reduces overall risk.

Or, ya know, because they just didn't want to. Which would be fine if the indices weren't so bad.

To be fair, making sure you get the page numbers right is a pain in the ass... Just did that for a project I was working on a couple days ago.

 

[pukunui]

To be fair, making sure you get the page numbers right is a pain in the ass... Just did that for a project I was working on a couple days ago.

And if the content somehow ends up on a different page, it's even more of a pain to have to go through all the other products that now refer to the incorrect page.

 

[MechaPilot]

To be fair, making sure you get the page numbers right is a pain in the ass... Just did that for a project I was working on a couple days ago.

And if the content somehow ends up on a different page, it's even more of a pain to have to go through all the other products that now refer to the incorrect page.

Granted, to both of you. I have a couple of homebrew setting documents that use page references. They're nothing that's been published, and I don't have any pages of both art and text in either work (just full page maps, with easy to manage page breaks). So, I know that making sure page references are correct takes a considerable amount of effort.

Also, before the inevitable piling-on by people who misread or misconstrue what I said (it wouldn't be the internet without the ever-present threat of that) I never said they were bad people, or that they were lazy, for choosing not to use page references. Just that it was frustrating not to have them when the books have poor indices.

 

[GothicEmperor]

This is what the style guide says about it in full, and it lists pretty much everything mentioned above:

Page References
We avoid page references as much as possible. They are labor-intensive (they must be added by hand during galley review), and they invite error.
A page reference is usually superfluous if it points to text in an alphabetized section (a monster in the Monster Manual, for instance).
Referencing a particular page in another product is especially ill-advised; that product’s pagination could change in a reprint or a new edition.
Include a page reference only if the text you want to reference doesn’t appear in a product’s index and can’t be referred to by chapter or subsection.

Their indices have gotten a lot better over the years, so at least they're getting a bit more internally consistent.