Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Review--QAGS

Q. A. G. S. (Quick Ass Game System) HEX 6000 Published by Hex Games www.hexgames.com 8 ½ x11” Perfect bound softcover, black and white interiors. MSRP $15.95.

Gameplay The cover, showing an athnromoprhized die with a smirk on its face, gives you a pretty good idea of the snarky attitude towards RPGs found in QUAGS.. Character creation is pretty flexible. The GM decides how powerful they want the players, then givens each player a number of points, called Yum Yums, to build a character by allocating Yum Yums to the three basic statistics, or Words, of Brain, Body and Nerve, as well as jobs, gimmicks, skills and health. The book doesn’t give a set number of points but 100 appears standard and works best with the game system.

The system is pretty straightforward. The player declares an action,, and, after applying modifiers from skills, gimmicks, etc., to the appropriate Word, rolls a d20, needing less than the modified Word total to success.. The roll can further be adjusted by factoring in a difficulty number from Dumb Table #3, which makes the task harder by giving the player a range which the roll has to hit in order to succeed. If the player, for example, wants to pick a lock, a Tough task, the GM sets a difficulty number of 10. After modifiers, the Brain score is 16. The player must roll between 10 and 16 in order to succeed at picking the lock. Yum Yums can be expended, or eaten if using M&Ms or something similar, to modify the score as well. Then, of course, there is a statement in the book that all of the rules are optional, should not get in the way of the game and can freely me modified or ignored by the GM to keep the game moving along.

Presentation QUAGS says on the cover it is for mature readers and the insides do not belie that warning. There’s no problem with the art, which ranges in quality from “eh” to pretty good, though some of it appears recycled from other Hex Games, especially M-Force. However, obscenities are sprinkled throughout the book, especially in the examples. Everything is cleanly laid out, with a one page TOC but no index, about a dozen one page campaign settings, eleven appendices and a whole mess of character and campaign worksheets. There’s even a cartoon explaining how to roll and read dice and a page describing other Hex Games products. Not a bad deal for $16 and 96 pages.

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