Nice looking house rules document. I always appreciated DM's who would format them like this. They are easy to reference and players feel like the DM has his stuff' together. Hence, I've always done my campaign house rules like these.
Here are some thoughts:
63 pages is WAAAAAAY too long. No house rule book should be longer than 10-15 pages. Specifically, you can shorten it up signifcantly by doing the following:
* Just do simple lists for races and classes and list a simple reference to where they can find the material if they want to play one. ALLOWED RACES: Human, dwarf (gold) ~see FRCS...etc.
* For each change, ask yourself this question: "Is this absolutely necessary?" i used to have so damn many house rule tweaks and changes that my players and i couldn't keep up. One day, I got up and made a 2nd house rule document that was titled "nonessential house rules." It was the best thing I ever did. For example, does it really matter that barbarians are still illiterate even if they take wizard as a class? Annoying rules just to have rules do not make the game more fun
* You can shorten up your lists dramatically by telling what's NOT allowed from the Core books. For example, you list about 600 skills from the Complete Warrior. Players tell me that they're more worried about what's NOT allowed and that it's easier to search and reference that way. Now, for RACES and CLASSES, you should list which ones ARE allowed, simply because these lists are short already.
You should make your general text two columns. It will shorten your page count DRAMATICALLY as well as make your information easier to reference because you will ahve more information on one page. IN addition, you should drop your FONT size by two points for each paragraph style. I've found that 10 point works great for general text, unless you have a bunch of players over 45 who are simply blind as a Faerunian bat.
Weapon categories: Face it. Players only use 1-2 weapons ever throughout their careers anyways. There's no point in having a cool new system unless you really want to have it for the sake of having it.
ASK YOUR PLAYERS: We created a yahoogroup discussion group for our campaign. I went over each rule one by one and asked the players what they thought. I ended up cutting out HALF of my little dumb tweaks because the players told me that they were, well, dumb little tweaks for nothing. If they didn't enhance the campaign or fun, we took them out.
Your religion rules do not include Pantheonic worship. For example, I worship the Drow gods depending upon my need. This type of worship makes more sense than only worshipping one type of god anyway.
New Characters need to know how much G.P. they start with. See the DMG (wealth chart).
Housekeeping: You could have made this entire page into one paragraph. Personally, I detest players who skip multiple sessions and do not 'allow' them free x.p. I've updated my house rules (today because of seeing yours) to say that they earn no x.p., but that no player may fall more than one level below the lowest character level in the game (of the regular folks). I had one guy who worked a lot of overtime so he missed a lot of games. When we ended our most recent campaign, everybody was 14th..but he was 6th. Pathetic. Even having him listed as part of our group took up a seat for someone that I could have otherwise had a good, regular player. Something should be noted in your house rules about this type of situation too
New Spells:
These should be kept out of the House Rule book and only handed out during PLAY (e.g. the group finds a spellbook or ancient religious text). Only rule changes should go into the house rulebook.
Hint: the #1 thing that helped my game was to add 1-2 levels to ALL raise-dead type spells. It's a simple change that did a lot of good.
jh
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