rycanada said:
I'm not even at that stage yet - I know the thing is likely indecipherable if I were to hand it off to run (although I can run it myself with great results). I'm stymied at the stage of trying to get it from notes to rulebook.
Congratulations by the way. 30 sessions running this means it's got to be pretty good and you have some playtest information. I did a similar thing with my house rules a while back and turned them into a home system. Here's what worked for me.
Focus on one chapter/section, first. The best is probably that describing combat or magic. Write out the basic rules. Then go through and edit them down and tighten the text. Give a general outline of how the system works, keep large blocks of text to a minimum. Then in seperate sub-sections in the order in which things appear in your outline describe some details. Highly detailed things like feats, or things that may occur rarely save for later.
In general I'd recommend the following for comabt and spells.
Order of action, who goes first, how long do things take to do.
What you can do and chance of success, number of attacks, how do you tell what your odds are of hitting. Armor may be described here if an AC system. Dogding may be described here if use a defensive/parry roll system.
Results, weapon damage, critical hits, etc.
Applying results. Armor would be described here if reduces damage.
"Special" situations, things that might effect more than one aspect or that are not always happening but common enough, e.g. fighting on uneven ground.
Recovering from damage.
Keep the sections above fairly short, get out your big ideas and the common things. For specifics and details have appendixes, tables, what have you. You want to organize and tabulate more than explain things like combat feats, if you use those. You might also organize your feats, exceptions, etc. based on the rule structure. Things that effect initiative, those that effect chance of success, etc.
If using a broader skill based approach I woudl still do combat and magic first. Then make those ideas a subset of your broader skill approach or just examples of it. I don't think you'll regret having the detailed combat and magic sections.
Get out combat and magic first since you will use these the most and they are often the core of testing. Character definition, e.g., classes if you use such, are not. Resolution determines what your characters can do and how it plays out. Once you have resolution mechanics set, then when you select character definition parameters you'll have an idea of what is weak or powerful under your system. In addition, the character definition section can be time consuming to balance if you have any sort of character progression built in. So I would actually avoid doing character creation rules first even though they may eventually be the first chapter in your rules.
This about covers the basics, knowing more about the general approach I could make some more refined suggestions.
