Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Revised Index

Download the PDF here.

Why?

My buddies and I play D&D. We have since first edition. And as much respect as we have for the creators of each edition, the index of the Fifth Edition Player's Handbook is just terrible. What do I mean? Take this example, where we want to look up listening at a door:

• Look up listening. We find:
  • listening. See Wisdom: Perception
    • See also conditions
• Okay.. let's try conditions. We look that up and get:
  • conditions, 290-292
  • Well that.. might be it. We look that up in the book and find three pages of conditions. The closest to listening in there is the Deafened condition. Well that's not it.
• Back to the index for listening. Let's try Wisdom: Perception:
  • Wisdom, 12, 178
    • Animal Handling, 178
    • checks, 178
    • Insight, 178
    • Medicine, 178
    • Perception, 178
    • Survival, 178
  • So we look up Perception, 178: Ah! That's it!

So to find the page we wanted we needed to look up the index, look up a page, read three pages before realizing that wasn't what we want, go back to the index, then back to another page.

What it the index was better? What if the listening section looked like this:

• listening
  • defeaned, 290
  • Perception (Wisdom), 178

There! Now it shows us both things we may be looking for with a single page number.

Even more annoying are entries like this (it's on three lines because that's the way it wraps in the narrow index columns):

Destructive Wrath (cleric). See
      under Channel Divinity cleric
      options

Wouldn't this be better?

Destructive Wrath (cleric), 62

Just tell me what page it's on! Don't make me look up something else AND take two extra lines to do it!

Anyway, we were annoyed enough that I decided to fix it.

WHAT I'VE CHANGED

• typed out the original 5e PHB index, retaining a copy as a starting point
• made a copy ("Improved") and improved the following things:
  • looked up every "See X" reference and added the actual page number (and expanded the reference where it made sense)
  • added abbreviation expansions where they were missing
  • added a page number to the start of the section every time it references a section (like Classes)
  • added a number of entries that users of previous versions might look up, with their 5e references: Holding your action.

NOTES

• Fonts: http://rpg.brainclouds.net/2014/11/24/the-fonts-of-dd-5th-edition/

TO DO

See https://github.com/copperdogma/dnd-phb-5e-index/issues