Category: Cussin' In Tongues Created on Friday, 15 January 2016 Written by Steve

For those of you who follow my non-gaming stuff, I just added a store section to the Brainfart Press website. I've only got the print version of Obscure Early Bluesmen (Who Never Existed) in stock right now, so you can mostly just get PDFs, but I'll be getting print books in sooner or later (and you can always order them from Amazon). Also, I figured out how to make the fixed-format books work in Kindle format, so all the Brainfart books are now available through the Kindle store.

Last week, I talked about some more design goals for QAGS 3E (and later Cinemechanix). When I started, I had several ideas for how to fix the problems and make things better, which eventually led to this version of the Q3E rules. There are a lot of changes here from Second Edition, but the big changes are to how the different Words work. The target number for every roll is now either Body, Brain, or Nerve and the target numbers are never modified. Some of the other Words give you extra dice, others modify the result if the roll succeeds, and some do both, but you never roll against Job or Gimmick or anything but Body, Brain, or Nerve.

When we playtested this version of the rules, it kind of worked and the new rules made more sense in terms of how the different stats worked together. Unfortunately, the game wasn't much better in terms of playability. Most of the things that confused people about earlier editions of QAGS were still there, and a few of theme were more confusing because of the different ways the stats worked.

I decided to look at each remaining problem individually. Since they were first on the character sheet, I started with Body, Brain, and Nerve. The biggest problem with the Words themselves is that they cover a lot of different aspects of the character that gamers are generally used to having finer control over (especially in terms of Body). Most gamers don't want, for instance, agility and physical strength tied to the same number. In QAGS, the only way to get around the connection is by using your Gimmick or Weakness (or maybe Skills and Flaws) to define the discrepancy.

Since one of the things I wanted to do with the new rules was get rid of things that were only there because they're things that games have, I started thinking about whether Body, Brain, and Nerve were even necessary. The more I considered it, the more I decided they weren't. In fiction, all characters are slightly above average in all the characteristics measured by Body, Brain, and Nerve (except for physical attractiveness; most TV and movie characters are far better-looking than real people). If a character is notably stronger, more agile, clumsier, smarter, or whatever, that's usually part of the character' shtick. The idea of getting rid of Body, Brain, and Nerve and just assuming that all characters are slightly above average (and really pretty) unless the character has some specific trait to indicate otherwise was starting to grow on me.

The main problem with getting rid of Body, Brain, and Nerve was that now I didn't have a number for players to roll against. at first I thought of just setting a default target number for all rolls, but then it occurred to me that the best bet might be to get rid of the idea of a target number entirely. Instead of rolling against something, you just roll a d20. For most QAGS rolls, you've already got a Difficulty Number (either one set by the GM or an opponent's roll) that you've got to beat to succeed anyway, so you've still got a way of determining success or failure. The rolls that don't work are ones with no DN and nobody opposing the action, but if it's not difficult and nobody's trying to stop the character, why are you even rolling? Since a lot of misunderstandings about the QAGS system are rooted in the roll-under mechanic, getting rid of it entirely seemed like a good idea.

The big question about getting rid of Body, Brain, and Nerve and the roll-under mechanic was "is this still QAGS?" During an earlier discussion of the integral things that made QAGS QAGS, both the specific Words and the roll-under mechanic came up. I might be able to cut one and still call it QAGS, but cutting both probably made it a different game. Still, the idea seemed to work much better than the QAGS fixes I'd come up with, so I decided to abandon the idea of a QAGS 3rd Edition in favor of creating a whole new system.

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