Creating a Rule Set from the bottom up

[corinos]

Hey folks,

My friends and I have been playing a homegrown d100 superheroes game for about 25 years. It's been a growing, living document that contains lots of critical and fumble tables as well as tables for various super powers and much more. I'd love to be able to create it in FG!
I've done a pile of googling and digging in the forum and have come to 2 conclusions. The first is that most people create Adventure modules, not full rule set modules, so it's harder to come across a rule set creation guide. The second is that the easiest way to start playing a custom system would be to use the CoreRpg system, create a char sheet template and go from there. That leave me with a couple of questions.

First, should I just start by importing my full pdf and have it readable by my players, no automation? Is that possible? If it is, it would be best if I could embed bookmarks, a table of contents that's clickable, etc. Is that something possible?
Next, if I get that done, I'd ideally like to start adding the content in modules and build some automation for them. Is there a guide somewhere for something like that? Things like, Agility gives me a +10 to hit, so link my agility to my attacks so I get my mod without having to manually enter it. Another example is, if I roll an attack roll and get a 97, that should trigger a roll on my Moderate Crit table and spit out the results.

I really appreciate the help, and am happy to share my finished product!

Thanks!

[Zacchaeus]

Hi, Corinos, welcome to FG.

As you have discovered if you want to build a ruleset then the advice is to start with CoreRPG (or MoreCore). The ruleset is the rules which make the game you wan to play work. So your examples of FG knowing that when you roll a certain number something happens or that an ability score allows you to hit harder needs to be built into the ruleset. In that case you would build a ruleset layered on CoreRPG with the additional functionality that you want in your ruleset. So that requires programming in lua and xml.

Modules on the other hand are things like adventures which contain stories, encounters, treasures and mass etc or are rulebooks which contain information on how to do things, build characters, use skills etc. Modules do not bring any functionality to your game - that's what the ruleset does,

You cannot import a pdf into FG; you'll need to copy/paste the text into it or create a module directly in xml. In fact to create a reference manual you'll need to do it in xml or use the Author extension to create it.