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What we try to do is have a comprehensive set of helpfiles and then list which ones would be most useful to newbies. The help files are broken down into 21 sections with each section having from a few to as many as 50+ help files. Not everything is part of the main help structure though. Except for overviews of the skills (each of which may have as many as 60 individual abilities/spells in them), all the individual ability and spell info is not accessible unless you're part of the class that has the skills those abilities/spells are in.
I'll tell you what can be really useful to newbies though, at least in our games: Help files that can be written by players and apply (and are accessible) only to members of a particular organization. For instance, guilds and cities in Achaea can compose help files that contain everything from directions to important places in the city to promotion requirements for that guild to the legal code of a city, and so on.
Another thing we do that has proven to be reasonably effective is provide searching mechanisms. shows you what I mean. The major functionality is there but one feature that's missing is the ability to just view a listing of all available help files, or all help files in a section, via the web.
We also provide a .pdf manual for players that can be found here:
As you can probably guess, I believe that the more ways there are to communicate how to play to players, and the more ways they have to look up that information, the better.
--matt
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