TheRaven said:
Reading it through? Come on, be serious. The contest was/is about layout and presentation. I surely don't want a SRD where the creator has edited and changed the content. Such a work would go instantly to my recycle bin. Reviewing one of the submission, if seriously done, takes about a half up to a whole hour.
Yep. And in order to get a decent presentation, you're gonna have to reorganize and edit a bit. The D20SRD is horribly organized, and poorly explained, just like the D&D core books it's based upon. On top of this, it has the inconsistencies of 3.5E vs. psionics, some editing gaffes, and even-more-bizarre division of content. (Why, pray tell, is an incomplete list of special abilities presented in one document, while a more-complete but less-well-explained set of the special abilities is mixed in with two other kinds of content in another?) Thus my comment that just putting the files into a nice layout, IMHO, is only doing half the job. You can look at my incomplete version (link is further up the thread) to see what i mean--and if you look closely at what i put together, you'll see that i rewrote about 2 [non-rules] sentences in the entire SRD, in order to make things flow better. But i moved a lot of stuff around. And added some bits (clearly delineated as sidebars). So part of the question should be: "is it better to have the bonus power points table in the Psion class description or in the Abilities section (with the bonus spells)?" Things like that that might take a closer reading to decide.
Now, if i were *really* the editor on this project, i'd demand a lot more consistency. Why are some groups "subtypes" (angel, archon) while others aren't (devil, demon, elemental)? Why do some subtypes have a distinct entry in the monster descriptions (dragon, elemental, angel, demon), while others are scattered all about (undead)? Why are some monsters listed in a fashion to match alphabetizing ("angel, solar") while others are backwards ("blue dragon") and still others are just bare ("pit fiend")? Why are "greater" versions of spells pulled out of order, but "true" and "improved" versions aren't? Why is weapon specialization a "feat" that fighters get as a class ability at a specific level, and which only fighters can take at all, while skill mastery is a "class ability" that rogues get at a variable level, and which only rogues can take at all? Why are magic items alphabetized--except for weapons & armor? The list goes on and on. And that's without even delving down to the level of the rules themselves--that's *all* presentation issues. If i wanted to address the rules directly, we'd have another pile of inconsistent decisions (such as the divisions between feat, class ability, and skill--just to start with). But i set out to do this project with nothing more than cut-n-paste, both to save myself the headaches and because, as you said, it'd defeat the purpose of it if it wasn't a [near-]verbatim reproduction of the content of the revised D20SRD.
Anyway, rant over. You're probably more right than i am on the timeframe--an hour or two should be plenty of time to flip through 800pp and at least get enough of a feel for the presentation (including organizational elements) to make a decision. But that doesn't change the fact that, IMHO, to do this well involves a lot more than just layout. Also, the decision part may be the hangup--what if you look through them all, and one has a really nice look, but another is really well organized, and a third is the most optimized for printing? Which is likely to be the case--both due to personal proclivities and inherent conflicts between various goals, you are unlikely to see one version that is the best in all possible categories and for all possible uses.
