How do you tab your PHB and other books?

[kiznit]

Pointless new book gloating and clutching in this thread, so please ignore if this disgusts you.

Edition stance aside, flipping through a brand new Player's Handbook is a deeply enjoyable, gripping experience. It holds so much potential for excitement, thinking about the characters you can create, the gaming you'll be doing, the situations you can get into, and so on.

Something I never really did with my 3.5 PHB is put post-it or sticky tabs to mark oft-referenced pages. Partly because I was so familiar with the 3.0 PHB at that point that despite the page differences I sort of already "knew where everything was".

However with the new 4ePHB, I've noticed that while sharing a book with my brother and making new characters for fun; with so many pages devoted to each character class it seems to be quite a bit trickier to find the specific class abilities etc. you're looking up. The edge-bleeding chapter designations are somewhat visible, and WotC was nice enough to 90° turn each class name along the margin edge for flipping through page after page of ability, but this wasn't enough for me.

So pretty much the first thing I did after I got home was to go through and tab the first page of each character class in vertical descending order along the outside of each page. Obvious, right?

This isn't meant to be a pointless show-off post (okay, maybe it is a little), because I was wondering what other pages people recommend having tabbed? How do you like to prioritize what you want easily accessible? Do you prefer only a few tabs, or as many as possible?

In comparison this is what I've got so far (13 tabs in all)
[sblock]p.29 - Character Advancement Chart
p. 60, 75, 89, 103, 117, 129, 143, 156 - Classes
p. 196 - Feats
p. 218 - Weapon Chart
p. 277 - Conditions
p. 289 - Combat Actions[/sblock]

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't tab.

For the stuff I don't actually memorize or memorize a page # for, I use a kind of "photographic memory" technique, by which I memorize what a page looks like- visualizing the info & its location on a page. Then I skim the book until I find the page I'm visualizing.

 

[Propagandroid]

Post-It arrow tabs are the bomb.

 

[nerfherder]

I was thinking of doing exactly the same thing after my girlfriend gave me some post-it tabs

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

I tabbed my Hackmaster books and it was very helpful. I plan on doing the same for my D&D 4e books.

I'll probably print out my own small tabs for the Monster Manual so that I can have all 26 letters of the alphabet visible at once, with "Monster name to Monster name."

It'll be pretty tiny printing, but I'm ok with that.

 

[blargney the second]

With a new game, I play it for a while and make a list of the things we've had to look up repeatedly at the table. Those items get stickied.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

What Propagandroid said.

 

[Evilhalfling]

My 3.5 PHB tabs
Classes
Wizard
Feats
Weapons
Armor
Actions (table of action in combat/AoOs)
Carry (& overland movement)
Cleric (spell list)
Wiz (spell list)
Detect
Summon

I haven't really used the 4e books, as I'm between campaigns.
Races(some), classes (at least 2), heroic feat table, multi-class feats, weapons and magic items; are where I would put tabs at the moment but I will wait and see what gets used at the table.

 

[buzz]

I tabbed my 3.5 PHB after I saw someone else do it at Gameday. I stuck with the default chapter headings, and used removable Avery printable tabs. Worked great.

I'm tempted to do the same with my 4e PHB, but then it won't fit nicely in the slipcase.

Thankfully, the 4e PH is already sort of tabbed, i.e., the chapter numbers on the sides of each page.

 

[Armadillo]

Tabs can be useful for quick references, particularly when you GM. I use post-it notes.

Tabs for the 3.5 PHB:
- Skill list
- Feat list
- Weapon list

Tabs for the Solomon Kane RPG:
- Char Gen summary
- Equipment list
- Damage and healing
- Combat summary