Ok, for some reason Ready Weapon just doesn't come out completely clear to me.

Ready weapon is a simple action, and represents drawing your pistol, drawing your sword, unslinging your rifle, or nocking your arrow. Basically it's the universal 1 simple action "payment" to get your weapon into play. Correct?

Quick draw is basically a fancy way of saying "you don't have to 'ready' your weapon." Attack without spending a simple or free action. Right?

Ok, Krav Magra (probably misspelled it). It allows you to ready a weapon as a free action. So that means that, if you take the bonus, you can ready (draw, nock, unsling, etc) any weapon that you have, in what amounts to no significant amount of time. Without a check of any kind.

So, besides that you might want to use your free action for something else (like aiming for free), any gunslinger, sword adept, or general runner would really want to get this super nifty, universally useful bonus. Right?

Granted, it's 5pts as opposed to Iajitsu for 2pts or Quick Draw for .5 (5bp) magic points. But it comes without a check.

Did I get that all right?

It still takes up a Free Action, of which you only get one during each Initiative Pass. So no, you can't call a shot, eject a clip, intercept, or do any other Free Actions in the same pass that you use said ability. Well, at least not without sacrificing another action to do so.

Quick Draw is a related but different ability as you noticed. It requires a check because it's letting you perform a similar task through a different method and for different costs.

Pretty much. You get to ready a weapon (GM's call as to what weapons work with what styles, per the books) as a free action with no test for 5 BP, as opposed to getting some other advantage and taking Iaijutsu to quick-draw (reaction + weapon skill vs threshold 3 test) for 2 BP, or the adept quick draw power that lets you do it with a threshold of 2 for 5 BP.

The key here is semantics, though. With Krav Maga you ready a weapon as a free action, with Iaijutsu and the Quick-Draw power you ready, and attack with the weapon using the same action it usually takes to attack with it. Nice GM's might let you fudge that (mine has) but by RAW you have to attack when you quick-draw or Iaijutsu, no getting your gun out quick and not using it.

It might not come up often, but if you need to whip out a gun and hold it on someone, or draw two swords in the same IP, it becomes important.

Especially in that last case: Say you want to play a dual-wielder and use the off-hand training and two-weapon style maneuvers to get constant full parry without using an action or splitting your dicepool. Iaijutsu and quick-draw both say you can only draw one melee weapon at a time this way, so if you want to get your other sword out for the cheap full defense, you also need Krav Maga to let you draw it as a free action...

...and to convince your GM to let you use the martial arts advantage with swords. Not too hard--just change "Krav Maga" to "Random Sword School" that trains you to quick-draw blades instead of guns.

Bingo. Logically being one of those guys who tries to use the Krav Maga ready weapon bonus to draw a sword is blatantly ignoring that Krav Maga practitioners are training for close quarter combat and would abhor the use of a sword. Now a knife on the other hand...



Don't forget to pay real close attention to this last sentence here. While you lose your one free (forgive the redundancy) free action per your combat turn, you still have either a complex action or two simple actions to perform. By the rules, you can transform either simple action into any free action (or both simple actions if you wish), and turn that complex into two simples, two frees, or a simple and a free.

also note that if you use those other options, some of them count it as part of the action of firing the weapon, and therefore do not use up your free action at all, so you do get something out of your test to see if you succeed

Cool, thanks you guys. Glad I was on the right track.