el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
I was adding tabs to my second player's handbook (I keep one in my office and one down in the game room) to help navigate it more quickly (dang, the 5E PHB index is garbage!) and thought about how I have modified my game books not just just for D&D but lots of games I either play a lot of and/or later found errata for.
So for example (as in the pic above), I have stick on tabs on my PHB and my copy of Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Looking through the 3.5 PHB recently I remembered that I had sharpied an asterisk on every spell we had house ruled for the setting (which were a lot). My 1E Monster Manual has my 7th grade scrawl under or above the stat block for most frequently used monsters that lists XP value since that was not added until later books (1E Fiend Folio was the first time I remember seeing that) and you had to look at the 1E DMG to know it back then. In the Manticore example I attached, I just straight up changed how much damage it did for some reason and wrote down the hps for one example.
One of my several Car Wars rulebooks had so many printing errors and the like that I went through and corrected them all in pen.
My copies of Dungeon Mag and old modules have tons of marginalia and like 75% of magical items just straight up crossed out (in pencil usually, but not always) to keep them in line with my sense of how often to award magical items, and how many and of what type. My copies of Amber Diceless Role-Playing also has a ton of handwritten notes, highlights (another thing I do to most of my gamebooks) and decades old post-its.
Heck, back when I first bought the 1E Unearthed Arcana it was in an era where the bindings on TSR hardcovers were notoriously bad. Not long after getting it, when pages were in danger of falling out, I just tore it apart carefully myself and punched holes in the pages and put it in a binder (allowing me to add other relevant print-out of house rules and Dragon mag articles with available options). This form also made it a lot easier to run the whole book through a copier at my summer job at the time and make copies of the book for all my players. (I just wish I had kept a copy when I purged gaming stuff a decade ago).
It maybe my love for study and scholarship, but I tend to write in most books I own (one of the reasons why I prefer print), I just do it in game books more because of how they are engaged with.
So tell me, do you modify your rule books at all? Write in them? Cross stuff out? Stick in inserts? Do you maybe purposefully print out PDFs so you can write on them without "defacing" the actual book? Do you treat them like slabbed comics?
So for example (as in the pic above), I have stick on tabs on my PHB and my copy of Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Looking through the 3.5 PHB recently I remembered that I had sharpied an asterisk on every spell we had house ruled for the setting (which were a lot). My 1E Monster Manual has my 7th grade scrawl under or above the stat block for most frequently used monsters that lists XP value since that was not added until later books (1E Fiend Folio was the first time I remember seeing that) and you had to look at the 1E DMG to know it back then. In the Manticore example I attached, I just straight up changed how much damage it did for some reason and wrote down the hps for one example.
One of my several Car Wars rulebooks had so many printing errors and the like that I went through and corrected them all in pen.
My copies of Dungeon Mag and old modules have tons of marginalia and like 75% of magical items just straight up crossed out (in pencil usually, but not always) to keep them in line with my sense of how often to award magical items, and how many and of what type. My copies of Amber Diceless Role-Playing also has a ton of handwritten notes, highlights (another thing I do to most of my gamebooks) and decades old post-its.
Heck, back when I first bought the 1E Unearthed Arcana it was in an era where the bindings on TSR hardcovers were notoriously bad. Not long after getting it, when pages were in danger of falling out, I just tore it apart carefully myself and punched holes in the pages and put it in a binder (allowing me to add other relevant print-out of house rules and Dragon mag articles with available options). This form also made it a lot easier to run the whole book through a copier at my summer job at the time and make copies of the book for all my players. (I just wish I had kept a copy when I purged gaming stuff a decade ago).
It maybe my love for study and scholarship, but I tend to write in most books I own (one of the reasons why I prefer print), I just do it in game books more because of how they are engaged with.
So tell me, do you modify your rule books at all? Write in them? Cross stuff out? Stick in inserts? Do you maybe purposefully print out PDFs so you can write on them without "defacing" the actual book? Do you treat them like slabbed comics?
