[KaVir]

A fair point. For someone who wants to create a fully playable game from scratch I would generally assume a certain degree of technical skill, and be more inclined to recommend books such as Richard Bartle's , or Raph Koster's .

I think it's very difficult to clearly define something as "gameplay related". The vast majority of features will have some impact on gameplay - even the socket code can impact gameplay in some situations, and the pure content (such as monsters and quests) will always be restricted by the underlying mechanics.