Rules
Topic: Games
I used to play a game called Star Fleet Battles quite a bit. I really liked this game, and I still have all my stuff packed away somewhere. The rules were manifold, with a book thick as a dictionary. It didn't have to be, but it was in a 3 ring binder that was 3" thick. The reason for this? It changed.

Time would pass, and someone would decide, through tournaments and playtesting, that phasers did too much damage at a certain range. Or someone would find a way to abuse the mechanics in their favor. Once, just because there was a tournament to be held on April Fool's Day, a tiny rule was snuck in by a game developer, that said that on April 1 only, photon torpedoes were as accurate from across the board as they were from right next to the enemy ship; effectively making them deadly 3 seconds into the game, and making any ships without them sitting ducks to ships that had them. So far as I know, this rule is still active.

So, when the rules changed, rather than having a person draw lines in their game books as they scribbled out one rule and pasted in another, the game publisher* would publish and sell an addendum, reprinting the pages with changes on them. You'd take the old pages out of the binder, put the new pages in, and your rules would be tournament-ready!

Time passed, and games evolved. Trading card game rules change now and then, but their rules are so brief, they just have to put a tiny pamphlet in the expansion decks. That or they just print a whole new rule book for the expansion, with a note describing what changed.

Role playing games have gone through revisions, and they just sell a new rule book, marking it "Revised Edition." Dungeons and Dragons has had several incarnations, including the most recent Version 3 and Version 3.5 rules. Each time, a new book, 1 to 2 inches thick, was printed and sold for more than it needed to be sold, and people lined up to buy it.

Nowadays, they make strategy guides for computer role playing games. But the games change a lot... new content is added, old content is changed, and the strategy guides have to change too. Sometimes, an addendum is sold, which covers that expansion. Sometimes they just print a whole new guide, covering the entire game, with up-to-date information.

Recently, I was in a computer game store. I saw a binder that said, on the side, "City of Villains." It turns out that it was a strategy guide. But it sold the guide in a binder, with 3 holes punched in it, so you could just put any new addendum in the binder along with the old information, and make your changes like that... just like Star Fleet Battles did 20 years ago. There was a similar binder for World of Warcraft. Someone, somewhere, may have remembered the method, or perhaps they reinvented it. Regardless, I'm pleased to see the strategy guide people have made it possible to keep up with the ever-evolving games.

I may buy the guide for City of Villains. I hope they do the same thing for Everquest 2.

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*Amarillo Design Bureau