Why no index is new WotC books? *Update: Received "official" answer... kinda...*

[Bodmin Moor]

I host an online index of virtually every WOTC product, as well as a number of products from other D20 prublishers. It currently contains over 18,000 entries including spells, feats, magic items, classes, prestige classes, materials, poisons, races, etc, etc. I'm currently in the process of adding class features, rules and variant rules.

Anyway, take a look. Hopefully you'll find it useful:

www.juicymango.co.uk/dndindex

Bodmin Moor

 

[Romnipotent]

they didn't include it because they didn't want to? thats like saying "I didn't check the grammer or spelling because I work here..."


I think I just stumbled on something

 

[JoeBlank]

I host an online index of virtually every WOTC product, as well as a number of products from other D20 prublishers. It currently contains over 18,000 entries including spells, feats, magic items, classes, prestige classes, materials, poisons, races, etc, etc. I'm currently in the process of adding class features, rules and variant rules.

Anyway, take a look. Hopefully you'll find it useful:

www.juicymango.co.uk/dndindex

Bodmin Moor

Very handy, thanks!

 

[reveal]

they didn't include it because they didn't want to? thats like saying "I didn't check the grammer or spelling because I work here..."


I think I just stumbled on something

Speaking of not working there... I wrote to Keith Baker asking him if he knew why they didn't include indices and he said no since he didn't actually work for WotC.

 

[MerakSpielman]

It takes a lot of time to make a good index. You can make a computer list every page every single word appears on, but that kind of index is useless. An actual person has to go through each word of each page and make a decision whether the index should refer to that word.

And then you have to wonder - when somebody wants to know about how much light lamps shed, are they going to look under lamps, vision, lighting, shadowy illumination, or what? The index has to not only be complete and concise, but useful.

It's considerably harder to make a good index than it looks. I've done it. Computers have made it SO much easier, but it's still a menial and time-consuming task. You have to be 100% certain that there will be no editing and changes after you make the index, or things get really weird. My company (a tech writing firm) has had instances where a customer requested an index for a document and this literally doubled production time and labor cost.

Granted, one can make a BAD index in a much shorter time, but often those aren't worth the paper they're printed on, and you'd better off just reading the table of contents and manually flipping through the chapters that seem most relivent to your query.

 

[reveal]

Thanks for that info, MerakSpielman. Unfortunately, that doesn't make me feel any better about WotC's decision to disclude them. In fact, it makes me more upset. It's almost as if WotC decided to "just get it out the door" rather than make sure it's done right. But then, according to complaints I've read about errors in the new books, this seems to be their new company slogan.

 

[Bagpuss]

The Designers probably thought they could drop the indexs since so many folks are using Bookmarked PDF's of the books anyway.

 

[reveal]

Here's the e-mail I sent to Keith and his response.

In a message dated 2/2/2005 8:54:55 AM Mountain Standard Time, reveal writes:


--Do you have any idea what the "official" line is as to why no indeces are being included with the new books?--


Not a clue. I'm not a WotC employee and have no input into those decisions. Sorry!

-Keith

 

[KaintheSeeker]

Probabaly already said, but if they didn't verbatim post the class features for every NPC in the book, they'd have LOTS of room for Indexes (and possibly a couple more adventure seeds for books like Sharn City book)

 

[bolie]

While indexing a Word document might be relatively easy, many professional desktop publishing suites do not include indexing functionality. I'm assuming that WotC uses a desktop publishing suite, since professional desktop publishing software is almost neccesarry in order to format text and graphical elements in printer-ready form.

The fact that making an index is hard isn't really a good excuse for not making one. Lots of books out there have good indeces. Steve Jackson Games, which is a lot smaller than WotC, does extremely good indeces. WotC has no excuse. It's a poor cost-cutting decision, IMHO.

Bolie IV