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JAGS-2 is, for lack of a better description, a GURPS Heartbreaker. It has some good ideas, but at times the implementation falls flat, or it copies some of the problems GURPS had making the good ideas somewhat irrelevant.
First of all, JAGS-2 uses an interesting dice rolling mechanic. Like GURPS, it's roll under. Unlike GURPS, it's 4d6, and all the 6s are counted as 0s. That's right, I said interesting, not innovative. First of all, one of the big advantages of a d6 system is you can use any dice you have. Here, you have to remember that 6 = 0, but 1-5 = 1-5. I guess if it's the only game you play this might not be a problem, but every other d6 based game I've seen has 6 = 6. I'm also puzzled as it doesn't seem to make things any easier than 4d6-4, and GURPS did perfectly fine having results go from 3-18 instead of having to do 3d6-3. It's an unnecessary complication and it doesn't add anything. Second of all, it's roll under. Roll under isn't a bad system for a specific type of game, but a system that's supposed to scale from normal people to superheroes just doesn't work too well with roll under. I would have expected that by 2004 this would be obvious to anyone designing a genreless system.
A perfect example of this, is that out of a 65 page PDF, 4 pages are devoted to handling different situations that crop up with a roll under system, that are all solved by a roll over system. Sometimes the implementation just doesn't work period. The solution they propose for contested rolls, is look at the lower of the two numbers first. If it is under 20, you take the difference between the lower and higher number and subtract it from 10. So if you have 19 vs 31, the difference is 12. 10-12 = -2. There's simply no chance in winning. Bump both numbers up by 2, and the system changes. If the lower number is over 20, you use a common denominator, preferably getting one of them to 10. So you have 21 vs 33. Here, instead of going to 10 I'll do 11, since it works nicer. It ends up being 7 vs 11. The difference is 4. Now you take 10, subtract 4, and have 6. So, with a simple increase of 2 in both numbers, you go from having no chance to needing to roll 6 or less on 4d6-4 to succeed. Did they even playtest this? Seriously, 4 pages to detail a system that just doesn't work?
OK. So it isn't all bad. They have an a good run down of what a failed roll can mean. General overview is that if you fail a roll, it can be due to factors that are out of your control, not that you actually failed in the most absolute sense.
In the neutral category, it has drama rolls. Drama rolls are to create tension, instead of having 1 roll succeed, you have to roll multiple times on something to succeed. Mechanically, this just serves to have a much more granular bell curve. 10 rolls of 4d6 is pretty much just 40d6, overall the results will be pretty centred. As for the drama part, it does add some tension if there is a time to complete something in, and you have to keep rolling until you suceed, it works alright. It creates the tension. On the flip side, once you realize that it just centres the results, it takes the tension out of it as it becomes much easier to predict whether you'll succeed over the course of the rolls.
We're about to get back to the bad, but I have to preface it with a good part. It has a 3 by 3 stat system, similar to nWoD, that should cover most questions that come up. Here's the bad part with the stats. The point buy system is just like GURPS 3e. 10 is average and costs 0. 11 costs 5. 12 costs 15. 13 costs 30. Each level up it costs 5 more than the previous difference. It doesn't do this on the way down though. 9 is -5. 8 is -10. 7 is -20. It doesn't go below this. 7 is essentially being crippled and unable to do anything. Somehow I don't feel that the odds of rolling under 7 quite match this description.
The elevating stat costs are, in themselves, not such a bad thing. JAGS-2 however gets the same problem that GURPS 3e had with racial templates. If you add additional characteristics in, you get the same bonus for much cheaper. For example, you take Big which costs 10 points. You get +1 Strength and +3 Build, among other things. Straight off the bat that would cost you 35 points. If you have bought both up to 13, for 30 points each, +1 Strength and +3 Build would cost you an additional 95 points. That's 85 free points there, pretty much a min maxer's dream. It also makes me wonder why on earth it uses a point buy system. Ostensibly character points are there to ensure character balance, but here we have 70 points in one character having more benefit than 155 points in another character. You could do some very similar breaking in GURPS 3e with racial templates, but it wasn't nearly this bad.
Back to the good (well, mostly good), where JAGS-2 gets a leg up on GURPS is that it has 2 options for buying skills. One, you can buy a skill rating for a flat cost, so it's not tied to an ability. The other way is the same as GURPS, it's tied to an ability. Even has the PITA .5 character points option. Umm... if you're going to have something cost .25 or .5 character points, multiply the cost of everything by 4. It also gets confusing in that while it has a great description of what each of the 4 ranks of an ability is (ie, Chemistry at Rank 1/Beginner is someone who was top student in Chemistry in high school, so if you don't have the skill it doesn't mean you can't do anything with Chemistry, it's just average), you can pretty clearly buy more than 4 different difficulty rolls. You can buy 12 if you're doing a flat cost buy and potentially even more if you have the derived stats. It's got a weird duality in that the roll to succeed at a skill isn't tied to the level of your skill. So you could have 1 character who's a master in Chemistry but has to roll 12 or under to succeed, and another who's a beginner who has to roll 16 or under to succeed. Also, it has combat skills costing more than non-combat skills. It's something of a one step forward, two steps back in the direction of BESM's genre based skill costs. At least it doesn't have GURPS' mental hard, physical easy, etc. cost differentiation. This is one of the heartbreaker parts. Good idea, but weird in implementation, and it's fighting hard to poke its head out from the rest of the system.
The combat system is another heartbreaker part. It has a really cool aspect of actions costing a certain number of reaction points, and you can do actions that cost up to your reaction score in a single round. It's easy to extrapolate into having a cost that would take several rounds. I really like this part of the system. I like it better than systems like d20 that have actions split up into various types, I like it better than GURPS and EABA that have rounds split into 1 second segments. It's more intuitive than the former and there's less niggling bookkeeping than the latter. It's a shame that this shows up in a game that has a broken point buy system and overly complified and broken roll under system. It has the standard combat actions that you would expect in a combat system, including a grappling system that's too detailed to have the idiosyncracies explained away as an abstraction, but not detailed enough to actually model grappling.
Also, it has a weird damage table. You roll 4d6-4 + any modifier. Look on the table and multiply the base damage by the result on the table. It goes from .1x > .25x > .33x > .5x > -3 > -2 > -1, etc. It should be pretty obvious where this is going to be a problem. Unlike the screwed up resisted rolls system, the designers actually saw this. There's a note that if a lower roll mathematically produces a higher number, to take that number. They also say that -3, -2, -1 etc. are short hand for -30%, -20%, etc. With .5x being -50%, this isn't a problem, except that when you're working with small amounts of base damage, you're not getting a difference between -10% and -20%, they both round up to the same thing. You're only supposed to use the % interpretation when you're working with numbers over 10. OK... Here's the real case of Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. ??? They obviously recognised that the table didn't work, why on earth did they not take the time to redesign the table so that it does work?
Overall, the math in the system annoys me. I don't have a problem doing math in my head, in fact I quite enjoy it. What I don't like is when a system is created with apparently arbitrary mathematical calculations where I'm expected to do the work every single time I make a roll that the designers should have done to begin with so I don't have to.
To finish on a good note about the system, there's one part about the point buy that I really like. JAGS-2 has Standard Points and Archetype Points. Standard points are for buying normal abilities. Archetype Points are for buying supernatural abilities. This is of great benefits to GMs in being able to predict what kind of characters they'll get. They can say "we're playing a gritty superheroes game, 100 standard points, 12 archetype points, go wild", and not get some completely incompatible characters back that could happen in GURPS if you say the same thing with "gritty superheroes, 150 points, go wild". It does some of the work for the GM so that they don't have to approve every character in detail.
Content wise, JAGS-2 is a mix of good ideas that seem to actually work, and good ideas that are realized in a horrible fashion. If there ever was a poster child for "GURPS Heartbreaker", JAGS-2 is it.
Layout wise, it's very good. It has a faded border design that doesn't intrude at all. It has white space that's usually used for extra sidebars, and the side bars don't go off on their own requiring you to flip back and forth through pages to read the side bars and the main content. Readability was also quite good, I had no problems reading through the system, although after a certain point of realizing that it simply wouldn't work very well I didn't try reading through it with a fine toothed comb. Still, it was written in a fashion that didn't put me to sleep. The art was a bit odd. It consisted mainly of pencil drawings of Tarot cards. I wasn't sure what to make of them, but the art in the cards was good, so I'm happy with them.
