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I am setting up a new campaign, and since I am an inveterate tinkerer, I have a raft of house rules. I have been vacillating on the choice of just writing up a house rules document or taking the LL text document and kit bashing together a unified rules set in digest-size and having it printed.

Of course, going for just writing up a house rules document is the fact that I can just pass that out. However, I plan to incorporate some parts of AEC and even a few things from RoCC, so they still won't have the whole picture in their hands necessarily. Also, since I plan to allow for casual drop-in gamers, I'd probably need a couple copies of LL at the table, and that gets expensive after a while.

Alternately, if I put together the rules into a cohesive whole, I could print out more of the sections on character generation and spells, and just one of the adventuring and combat rules for everyone to share. I could alter the sections I am interested in, and probably mark in the margins which parts are altered from the original rules. Since I have a duplexing printer and long-reach stapler, I can do the bulk of the printing at home and save some money. However, it seems less "legit" having it all DIY, and doing all the edits and layout for a unified set of rules is somewhat labor-intensive so that is a bit of a turnoff, plus I can't just distribute rules to people to look over before their first game because I don't feel like combing the whole of the document for product identity and making sure the OGL is followed.

Any thoughts on which way you have handled or would handle it?

How about downloading the LL and AEC free versions, (is there one for ROCC?) alter them to your taste reorganize them into a mew Word Doc. then burn the what you have created to a CD and hand it out to the new players. That they would have a copy of "your" rule set to look at at their leisure and then you could print out the Game handouts like you were talking about for use around the table.

Yes, that's basically what I was contemplating. The thing with giving them a digital copy is that, like all things digital, it ends up in distribution eventually. I want to avoid that.

I've always printed my own PHB and it's been wonderful to have all the rules and house rules in one place without stickies all over everything. You can pick up a comb binding machine at any office supply store starting (I think) around $20. Comb binding allows you to replace a single sheet in an existing bound document which makes it extremely convenient.

I've been experimenting with doing a digest layout and it's not too bad. I do have one question, though: does anyone know how to strip the styles out of the document but keep the formatting? (In other words, I want bold and italics and font sizes, etc., but I don't want the associated style setups so that if I change one thing it gets juiced everywhere else with that style.) It's giving me a fit.

Edit: from reading up, it appears this isn't really possible in any reasonable way. I am contemplating other possibilities.

My feeling in general that a house rules doc is a lot more useful than a full all-out rules rewrite. Rewrites consume a lot of time and I don't think in general you get much value out of it.

I would prefer (as a player) to have a short doc that has a few key charts and tables, maybe spell lists and equipment lists, and some details about how your game is different from the traditional one. Try to keep the whole thing down to a dozen pages or so, kind of like the old "reference sheets" in the OD&D boxed sets in the 1970's.

Heck, as a DM I like to have just the key rules in a small doccument as well. The last thing I really want to do is thumb through a full rulebook during play trying to find a rule that I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere. I've played in those games and to me they're pretty boring.

Just my two cents.

I am working on a house rules document now instead. So far, it's seven (digest-sized) pages. I will do separate digest-sized books of character classes and spells, since I plan to make some substantial changes across the board to both of those. Thanks for everyone's input!