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This, for me, is the key thing. I generally find rules for drawing weapons to be effective when they mostly stay out of the way, but can still organically complicate ambush situations and force interesting tactical decisions. For example, I like the D&D3 rules because you generally don't have...

When you pretend that you know my personal gaming experience better than I do, that's called "Hobo is easily ignored".

Most people who talk about fudging being a good idea talk about using fudging to "increase the fun". But I've discovered that fudging usually does the exact opposite of that: It removes the memorable and unique experiences and replaces them with whatever prepackaged experience the GM was...

But the devil is in the details. The different handling of firing modes between the two systems is actually a good example of how EP streamlines the SR4 system down in almost every single aspect. When you break down SR4's firing modes, for example, you discover that there are 11 different ways...

I'm actually unclear on exactly what he's talking about: The whole article comes across as very vague, unfortunately. At one point he's talking about plot hooks. But then he's talking about nudging players into action when they get bogged down in debating what they're going to do next. And then...

Take your own advice. I've tried to be very patient and very explicit in stating that "only the last few hit points count" was a workable explanation of the rules (albeit not the explanation supported by most editions of the game). It makes me a little sad that the people subscribing to that...

In 3E, all damage taken was physical damage. Period. No exceptions. In 4E, some damage is actually just being winded or low on morale. This is evidenced by the healing abilities that, for example, restore your hit points by boosting your morale. But here's the catch: There's no way to know...

It's an over-simplification. EP's core system is clearly based on the SR4 system, but the changes are more significant than just changing the dice pools to percentiles: All of the key systems (combat, hacking, rigging/jamming) have been simplified and streamlined.

This is one of the things that made DMing 4E just an endless pain for me. One of my particular strengths as a GM is describing combat in visceral and exciting detail. But 4E completely disrupted my ability to do that because the system doesn't actually tell you what type of wound a person...

I'd have to agree. It does. But that's not the sense in which the word "dissociated" was being used when I coined the term "dissociated mechanics". The dissociation of a dissociated mechanic is not describing some "feeling" or psychological condition that a person has while using the mechanic...

What mechanic are you thinking of?

It's a ton of fun, but it can be a tough nut to crack because it requires early player buy-in for them to really "get" the setting. It helps if your players are already familiar with transhuman ideas. My suggestion if you're looking for an easy on-ramp into the setting: A gatecrashing campaign...

I started gaming in the summer of 1989: A brief period of BECMI followed by an almost immediate leap into 2nd Edition. So I'd pretty much the definitional poster child for this "Lost" Generation. But I think the reason no movement or "voice" has coalesced around this generation is that it's...

(1) The entire BECMI line. Fantastic dragons. Awesome heroes. Best-looking D&D core rulebook covers of all time. (2) The original edition of Shadowrun. Not quite as perfect, but the logo is amazing and the image captures everything that awesome about Shadowrun before you even knew what...

You'll probably want to get rid of critical hits and auto-fail on 1 (since they happen twice as often on 1d10). You'll probably want to keep the auto-hit on 10, though, because it'll help compensate for the big problem (see below). The advantage of this is that you'll have created more...

It does, but not as significantly as the rock tumbling process. And, unlike the flaws created by the rock tumbling process, the sprue is an easily correctable defect.

Awhile back I used Adobe Acrobat to strip out the graphics from the pregenerated characters. Seeing your post, I've gone ahead and posted them over here on the Alexandrian. There's still some color in those files, but based on experience I can testify that printing them in grayscale will give...