Organizing game books is for suckas

Reading an interview with David "Zeb" Cook over at Grognardia tonight reminded me of another great value of wikis for RPG presentation, which also applies to any technical document.

Role-playing game manuals must do two, often contradictory things. They have to present information sensibly for the new user, and they must serve as reference manuals for the experienced user.

So when you organize, you usually lean toward making them reference books, because they'll only be introductory material once, but reference material dozens of times (you hope).

Along comes hypertext, and your linear need to organize like a reference manual is dead as a dot matrix printer. Now, feel free to organize the whole manuscript for the noob. A decent site map will make your hypertexted wiki rule book completely accessible for in-game reference purposes.