If you were to purchase a Player's Handbook, how important is it to have an index or table of contents?  From a design prospective they are extra print pages, but I know they are a help from a reader's perspective.

Quote from: rway218;1127347If you were to purchase a Player's Handbook, how important is it to have an index or table of contents?

Extremely important. The old WoD books only had a vague, lazy kinda table of contents listings only the three main sections in their fluff-filled manuals where divided into, and I absolutely despised them. A good table of contents listing each chapter and sections within each chapter is crucial to finding information in a tabletop RPG, especially when referencing rules or spell descriptions in the middle of a game session.

Index and ToC are pretty important, and the importance is proportional to the book size.

This is one of the main reasons I use LaTeX for my own projects. It does ToC and Index (or even a couple of different ones!) automatically, so I don't have to worry about keeping page numbers right and such.

Quote from: rway218;1127347If you were to purchase a Player's Handbook, how important is it to have an index or table of contents?  From a design prospective they are extra print pages, but I know they are a help from a reader's perspective.

Very important for reference as you will need them to look stuff up.  Not having them would be a major impediment.  In practice, they are only a few pages long, so you really are shooting yourself in the foot if you omit them.  If you really have to cram the book into a specific page count, drop the text size by half a point, the leading by 1 point, and adjust the tracking to -5 or -10.  Then get ruthless about re-writing paragraphs with orphans, which will pull a bit of space out.  Then re-write some of your more verbose content to be more concise, cutting down the word count.  Pull out artwork if you need to.

On a shorter works of (say) 50 pages or less you might be able to omit the index, but anything bigger than that really needs indexing.  Never omit the table of contents.