Guest Post by Kalzazz
One of the things that has always seemed a bit peculiar to me is that the Quick and Dirty rules for Charms make it rather difficult to have quirks, and especially, much more difficult to quirk a spell than to botch it entirely. Further discussion on that here.
Now, for those of us who love seeing what kind of suffering quirks bring from the twisted mind of the DM (or enjoy being said DM), I offer a simple rules tweak. When using Quick and Dirty Charms, the first roll is as normal. However, the second roll is either as normal, or versus a target of 14 minus the bonus to the first roll, whichever is worse for the caster.
With effective skill 21 (+0 charm lab, +3 grimoire, lower of his two paths involved is 18) his Safe Threshold is 75. Using his 18 pool (from Magery 6) he needs to accumulate 288,
288 is over 3 times, but less than 4 times his safe threshold.
So Bob rolls 3d+3 and tries to get a 15 or less to see whether he casts the spell, or if it Critical Failures.
Now, the next step is to check for quirks. Under the normal rules Bob must roll against his effective skill (21) minus the penalty for exceeding safe threshold (so 21 – 3 = 18) as a skill roll. So he gets a quirk on a 17 or 18.
So, to avoid critical failure Bob wants to roll a 12 or better. Under the normal system Bob wants to roll 16 or better, while under this proposed rule 11 or better.
This means that quirks will generally be more common than botches, but still requires the same 2 rolls, and no more difficult of calculations.