Anyone have cunning ideas for best integrating clarification/notes/&c. into the rule book?
While this forum provides most excellent answers to rules-uncertainty, I can’t always access the forum during a game—and even if I can, finding a suitable thread and locating the answer within it stalls game momentum. So, it would be convenient to have those things to hand.
With errata &c. for other games, I’ve tried:
Printing the notes out and tucking that document into the front of the book, but checking something in the rules then checking the printout to see if it has changed both increases time needed and can lead to missing things;
Writing notes directly into the book, but that suffers from there being limited space;
Writing each note on a sticky note and adding it to the appropriate page, which did allow for both greater space to detail the change and the ability to replace a change with a newer one, but also resulted in existing rules often being hidden by a note.
Potentially, there isn’t a way that doesn’t involve compromise between strength of connection and textual clarity; however, has anyone developed any cunning ways of having these glosses immediately obvious when opening the relevant page without making the rules harder to read?
I’d annotate / write directly into the book, and maintain a GoogleDoc for anything else (which I can then print and add to the book, along with cross-references, if appropriate).
Personally, I’ve not (yet) found the need to do so, and play RAW from the table’s agreed edition (with brief table-discussion if anything crops up).
(disclosure: @DaveHiggins and I know each other, and I demoed The Sword to him yesterday)
If the margins aren’t enough space, then I’d try a half-sheet of paper (or a sheet from smaller notebook, etc) tucked in like an additional page, so your corrections/notes/whatever are opposite the actual rules. Depending on how you handle the books, yeah, it could fall out. It’s usually fine, though.
Tipping in a sheet for all the corrections on a page is an interesting thought: it wouldn’t make it instantly obvious a rule particular rule was glossed, but it would highlight that it might have been and—even for something with a high rule density, such as the lifepaths—the time to skim changes for just that the page probably wouldn’t be much.
You can always mark up the actual page with an * or something if skim time is an issue. Or draw arrows on the loose leaf toward the rules they modify. Just adding some kind of visual connection between the two gets rid of that problem.
What I did with my Mythras 2nd printing for 3rd printing notes was to write the text (if it was short) or reference the changelog or updated version with an asterisk.