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Important Notice:
At present, this is a workspace, not a rules system. Nothing here is solid, not yet. It's the collective space we're using to centralize ideas for each other. If you see something you utterly despise, please don't panic. Or at least, don't panic yet. There's a lot here and we're getting through it as fast as we can without sacrificing quality.
Pre-RFC FAQ is available here.
Some Opening Thoughts
This is the start point for Rules. Everything you need to know to play your character should be here eventually.
It's a lot. We're aware. As time goes by, it'll probably get more added and then it'll be even more of a lot. We've taken specific pains to see that you don't have to know all of this to play the game successfully and have fun doing it. The basic principle we've been using to minimize what any one person has to know is Cognitive Load. If we've done this right, you should never be required to know anything other than the things on the Classes page that apply to your character and things on the Effects page that apply to all characters. You may elect to go into Races, or Everyman Skills, or Production skills, and then you'd need to know the bits of those things that apply to your character too, but that should never be mandatory. It's not perfect yet. It may never be. What's important is that you don't feel overwhelmed at the raw volume of information available. Classes, for the most part, pretty well describe what they do in general terms, so you can go through the ones that appeal and make some decisions.
There's one overarching principle, a sort of metarule under which all other rules operate.
Don't be a jerk.
When we say that, what we mean is don't use the rules here to make the game not fun for other people. All of Staff has struggled with rules systems that intend to eradicate undesired behavior. Not one of those has even gotten close. One of them trained some of the worst rules technicians in the country. You can't legislate sportsmanship, although it's been attempted. The kind of behavior you target with those rules always has a way out from under and I'm not guessing. You also (by self-obvious definition) can't prevent cheating by adding rules. There's a lot of room for honest misinterpretation and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a lot more room to push rules in ways we never saw coming and that's okay too, until it starts stepping on someone else's game.
This applies everywhere. Players usually take the brunt of this, but Plot is just as capable of jerk behavior as anyone else. It's worse when Plot does it, because the impact tends to be a lot more broad, and because Plot is tasked with playing antagonists and making things tough on characters. There's still a line between "challenging encounters" and "punitive measures" and if Plot steps across it, we're just encouraging it by example. Tensions run high in combat and everyone eventually gets carried away, Plot included. It's frustrating to see people struggle with something that's intuitively easy for you. It's frustrating to have your planned epic battle get kneecapped by Batman carrying a weapon you forgot existed. If Plot's running painfully difficult meat-grinder modules, that's part of the job. If you feel like Plot is being a jerk and ruining your game, please let Staff know. If you're not comfortable, for whatever reason, telling me my monster was stupid and no fun to fight, you can and should escalate it through the Player Reps. There are a few that are overcome with joy at any opportunity to remind me I'm not as good as I think I am.
Most of us that are prone to this are very keenly aware of when it's happening. It's a design goal, frequently as an escalation response.
Please don't.