From Brian

 * Player concerns trump character concerns.  The characters lives may suck, but the goal is that the players are having fun.  It's lots of fun to play a character fighting the battle of his life, for example, or slogging through tremendous adversity and deprivation.

 * The party is designed to be loyal to each other, but this is enforced by klugite: this doesn't mean you have to go save Dargo after he blows away the cops, but it does mean you don't con the party into working with Saeder-Krupp just so you can fulfill your private plot.  You shouldn't often hit the klugite walls, because your character's designed to work well with the others — but they are there.

 * Every character has some plot hooks: if you show me what you want in the game, I'll try to give it to you.  More importantly, every character has goals that can spawn adventures: stuff you want to go out and do.  If I'm not throwing plot at you, at least one character should *always* be able to say, "I know!  I've been wanting to work on my side project, and could really use all your help.  Let's go..."

 * Every character has a "Party Brain Theme": McCoy is the wise, down-home one.  Kirk is the impetuous adventurer.  Spock is the rational but curious scientist.  Scotty is the reliable one.  It's the schtick-level characterization of the party, how you fit into the whole.

 * The Netherworld is **dangerous**.  Not just to characters, which it can kill, but to the game: it's a plot device.  Consider it to be used on about the same level as the warp-at-the-sun-to-time-travel trick in Star Trek.

 * To get places, you have to do stuff: to find out what the Conspiracies are up to, you have to do more than web search.  Decking's a great place to start to find out the first layer of information (Tell me you want to hack around, looking for a shipping address of a secret base, for example).  Then you've got to go there, sneak/blast in, and look around.

 * If you paint your character into a corner regarding intra-party conflict, I'll ask you to retire the character.  Alpha, Thwak, E'leia, Dargo have all been in this category; we're skipping enough time that I don't mind them being written out of that corner and back into a playable state.

 * Most of the time, action will be taking place in one location at a time.  If you're going to go off and do a quick decking run, astrally project, or talk to a contact, please describe the whole encounter to me at once: leaving, what you do, that you come back, and *then* ask me for the information you got.  This saves us going off into a corner, builds party trust, all kinds of good things.

 * Something from the above is worth emphasizing: bigger descriptions are better.  Don't tell me, "I go to the supermarket.  *Then what?*  I look for the bread aisle.  *What do you do now?*  I read some ingrediant labels."  Just tell me "I go check out the market, looking for occult involvement, then come back.  What did I see, physically and astrally?  Any suspicious people by the register?"

Gleaned from Others'

 * It will be relatively clear what role most NPCs have.  Betrayal won't totally go away, but when it does happen it'll be clear that it's a betrayal of the usually straightforward existence.

 * There's a Staredown/Argument mechanic.  It's klugy and annoying, especially if a character specializes in being able to win Staredowns.  Nevertheless, it's better than hours of bickering.  If an argument isn't important to you, and you wouldn't have fun playing it out, go use the Staredown mechanic and abide by its results.  If others ask you to use it, you're probably ruining there fun, and should seriously consider mechanicking the argument or reducing vocal stress levels.

 * NPC groups shouldn't suddenly decide they hate the party.  This won't help you if you kill off a handful of their members, of course, but nobody meets the party and decides within twenty minutes that they have to be bumped off.  Almost every situation is repairable, with sufficient work (public kow-towing, gifts, favors).

 * The game framework is intrigue, conspiracies and high weirdness.  There's an explicit episode/adventure frame within that.  Individual episodes involve solving a particular problem or fulfilling a particular goal, which is usually at least somewhat evident near the beginning, or grows out of problems evident at the beginning.

 * Killing people is a Big Deal.  Most of the universe changes how it thinks about you if you murder.  Most people use nonlethal weapons initially.  The SINless and slaves are an exception to this: most people don't care what happens to them.  It's assumed that most mooks taken down with less than entirely overwhelming force (i.e. guns but not BFGs) survive if not explicitly killed.  This contradicts the next point.

 * The party will have either a small network of "Safe Patrons" or "Safe Havens" or a safehouse/base.  This *isn't* for day-to-day operation, and if it's used for such, it'll become vulnerable to plot attacks, but it's someplace to go between runs. 

 * Characters live in a universe; before they do something that ignores information they'd reasonably have, the players should get a warning that this might not be a good idea, and why.

Explicitly stated by Others

 I've got nothing here because I'm only me — go ahead and add stuff, but please sign it.

* on a player-level: people should know their mechanics and not have to spend more than a few minutes during run figuring how their mechanics work.  the exception to this is "I just picked up the bad guy's gun, what does it do?" and "I just got a nifty new power and want to use it, how do i?" and the like.   -merry

* I much prefer the assumption that killing people is a big deal, and most people taken down survive.  If you're in a world with stunner technology, use it! --jesse cox.

* characters
 should be built (especially the "come in at the middle" ones) with a notion of "realize
 what the party is going through now, and bring in something that you will enjoy playing with
 that restriction". --trhyne