Rulebook Editor

Most rulebook problems aren't rules problems. They're writing problems wearing a rules costume.

This skill runs your draft through a fixed diagnostic (the same seven failure modes, every time) before it touches a word of your text:

Terminology drift. Is your "token" the same thing as your "marker," and does the reader know that? Forward reference without foundation. Does rule 12 assume the reader already understands rule 30? Phantom conditions. Rules that say "if X happens, do Y" without ever saying what triggers X. Implicit permission gaps. The rulebook never actually says whether a thing is allowed. Exception burial. The one exception that matters is sitting mid-paragraph where nobody will find it until it costs them a game. Setup/teardown gaps. Could a stranger set up your game correctly using only the setup section? RAW/RAI divergence. What the rule says versus what you obviously meant when you wrote it.

You get a diagnostic report before anything gets rewritten, sorted into critical / major / minor / missing, so you can see what's actually broken instead of getting a wall of edits with no context. Nothing gets silently changed. Anywhere the fix would alter what a rule means, you get both versions side by side and a reason, and you decide.

From there it runs structural passes (is your rulebook in the order a player needs to read it, not the order you designed it in), a line-level clarity pass, a terminology audit that catches every synonym you didn't notice you were using, and can generate a glossary or a one-page player reference card from the finished text.

Built separately for board games, wargames, and RPGs, because a wargame rulebook and a TTRPG rulebook have almost nothing in common structurally. This skill knows the difference and asks which one you're working on before it starts.

What it won't do: design your game mechanics for you, or lay the thing out as a print-ready PDF. It's an editor, not a designer or a typesetter. If the rule itself is broken, it'll flag that as a design question rather than quietly rewriting around it.

Good for: designers with a first draft that playtesters keep getting confused by, anyone splitting a rulebook into player-facing and GM-facing documents, and anyone who's been told "the rules are fine, I just don't understand them" one too many times.