A few mortals stumbled upon the secret denizens of the World of Darkness, things man was not meant to see. They encountered scheming vampires, raging werewolves, reality-subverting wizards, the restless souls of the dead, and many other horrors. It was almost as if some outside force guided these people, subconsciously directing them to the world's hidden horrors. The forbidden knowledge drove them mad. But it also enlightened them, and revealed to them a horrible truth: the world was full of horror and pain.
Rather than committing suicide or finding numbing solace in drugs, these brave men decided they would try to fix things. They would do all they could relieve all this hurting and mental anguish. They believed that there is a finite amount of suffering in the world, and that by concentrating it amongst themselves and deserving others, they could lessen the pain the rest of humanity must endure. They would, in essence, bring immeasurable suffering upon themselves to prevent others from hurting. A few brave pioneers started the movement (and even got their own shows on MTV), though many others have taken up the yoke and are doing their parts to help.
And while they should be lauded as heroes, none know the sacrifices they make for love of mankind. Others just call them Jackasses, and these brave souls have taken this moniker as a badge of pride. Every baited coterie of Belial's Brood intent on hunting and killing a Jackass is one less pack tormenting other mortals; every Raging werewolf that rips into a Jackass isn't attacking a camper; every enraged wizard trying to melt a Jackass into primordial goo isn't experimenting on a broke college student. So let others mock or deride them; Jackasses will still selflessly throw themselves off buildings, kick each other in the groin, break bones, launch themselves into lakes by means of giant catapults, and mutilate themselves -- all for love of the world.

Jackasses of Note
While every Jackass is a powerful force of chaos and fame is no indicator of Balls, there are several exalted beings that have near-deific status in the Jackass community. For they were the first Jackasses, and through their antics they have inspired many -- first dozens, now hundreds -- to take up the good fight. Their very names resonate with power. They are: Johnny Knoxville, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Bam Margera, Wee Man, Ryan Dunn, Chris Raab, Brandon, Dave England, Ehren McGhehey and Rick Kosick. (Much props to you guys; you're the inspiration for this.)

If It Needs To Be Said...
... becoming a vampire, undergoing the First Change, or Awakening will cause a character to lose all benefits of being a Jackass. Jackass: the Agony is crazy enough; don't cheese out with it, okay?

Character Creation and Development
Basics: Determine your concept and background and stuff.
Attributes: Choose Primary (5), Secondary (4) and Tertiary (3). (Hint: go Physical Primary, and buy up Stamina.) A high Resolve might be nice, also.
Skills: Choose Primary (12), Secondary (7) and Tertiary (4). Choose three specialties.
Apply Jackass Template: Distribute points among Urges (7); characters start with a rating of zero in each Urge. Nerve and Balls ratings start at a base of 1 dot, and have maximum ratings of 5 dots.
Advantages: Pick your Virtue and Vice, already. Record derived stats (Willpower, Speed, Health, etc.). Morality starts at 7.
Advantages: Spent Merit points. Buying extra dots of Urges and Balls costs 2 Merit points per dot. Jackasses receive the Quick Healer and Unseen Sense Merits free of charge, but are never allowed to take the Common Sense Merit.
Experience: Urges cost [new rating x3] experience points to improve. Balls isn't improved with experience, but through accumulation of Nerve (see below).

New Specialties

Exhibition (Expression Specialty)
Dice Pool: Presence + Expression
This Talent allows you to draw the attention of onlookers to whatever stunt you're about to perform. Exhibition is a useful Skill, as the more witnesses you have, the more Nerve you can draw from the event. Greater degrees of success attracts more witnesses (assuming they're around).
Specialties: Humiliation, Nudity, Self-Mutilation

Operate Thing (Crafts Specialty)
Wits + Crafts
With this Skill, you can use almost any machine or device, mostly through intuition and luck. While this Skill doesn't offer reliable control, it's usually sufficient to perform a stunt (with the end result usually including damage to, or destruction of, the device). The player makes a roll, with each success granting a dot of Crafts, Drive, Firearms, Weaponry or whatever's appropriate; this "phantom" Skill rating may be used only for for a few turns.
Operate Thing can't be used to operate any single device any more than once per scene; if you want to do a lot of car stunts, for example, then it'd be a good idea to pick up Drive.
Possible Penalties: The difficulty is based on the complexity of the item you're trying to control, though a penalty is almost accrued when using Operate Thing (due to the Skill's wide potential applications). Piloting a golf cart (-1 dice), firing a gun you just picked up (-3), threading a thin racing boat into a drainage pipe (-5).

Rig (Crafts Specialty)
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Crafts
With Rig, you can construct all types of items on the spot out of available materials. You can McGyver catapults, skateboards, slings, explosives and gliders. However, you're limited to the materials at hand. For example, you can use Rig create an armored sled out of a shopping cart, dishwasher and duct tape, but not a car. The difficulty is based on the complexity of the desired device.

Urges
You gain Nerve (see below) whenever you engage in dangerous or truly disturbing activities or stunts. Whenever you perform a stunt (and if you survive), you may spend a point of Nerve and roll [Attribute] + Urge (with the appropriate Attribute and Urge determined by the emotional or mental state of the victim). Each success on the Urge roll grants you a point of Nerve; one success give you back the point of Balls you just spent, and more successes awards more Balls. A failure causes you to lose the Nerve you spent to no effect. A botch means you lose all your Nerve, and you must spend Willpower or wait one day to regain one point of Nerve. (You may still perform stunts, of course, but you won't gain any Nerve from the activity.)

Annoyance
Dice Pool: Manipulation + Annoyance
You make checks involving this Urge when you aggravate the living shit out of someone. Ways to go about doing this include grinding against passers-by, singing in a high-pitched voice in a theater, waking someone up by slapping him, urinating in a Pure Tribe pack's locus, running off a vampire's herd, and holding an all-night rave in a communal haunt. Note that the subject can't be a willing participant to the activity; that defeats the purpose of annoying them, and will net you no Nerve. While knocking someone out with a rubber bat or launching his father's urn into a lake with a catapult is bound to bother him, it doesn't count; your initial intent, and the result of your stunt, must be to provoke aggravation from the subject. (So the best Urges for the previous two examples are Sadism and Horror, respectively.) The difficulty of the Manipulation + Annoyance check depends on how much you've enraged the victim:
Victim is nearly livid, but won't attack you (-1).
Victim is so angry she attacks you with the intent to injure or run you off (no modifier).
Victim is in a killing rage (+1).

Horror
Dice Pool: Presence + Horror
As Jackasses push the boundaries of all common sense, reason and sanity, they provoke dread and fear in others. While some Jackasses inflict physical harm through Sadism, Horror is more insidious. While broken bones will knit and scars fade, for months to come your victims will have nightmares of your impaling yourself, vomiting worms, french-kissing a Nosferatu, or licking a cadaver's nipples. When you set out to offend, terrify, nauseate, unnerve, gross out, or otherwise emotionally violate others, you may regain Nerve through a successful Presence + Horror check. (While this might seem like the Jackass is adding to the emotional pain in the world, this is a short-sighted view; those so tested gradually become inured to such grotesque spectacles, and become mentally stronger people.)
Victim obviously wants to get away from you, but otherwise isn't bothered (-1).
You force the victim to run away in fear or disgust, but he maintains his composure (no adjustment).
The victim is scared witless and runs screaming, or reduced to puking (+1).

Inanity
Dice Pool: Wits + Inanity
Almost nothing a Jackass does is smart, but some acts are especially dumb, even for them. Inanity is a sort of catch-all Urge that covers stunts that other Urges don't. When you want to do something new just to see what's going to happen, but you have no reasonable expectations for a particular result, Wits + Inanity is the Urge check you make. For example, if you jump off a cliff, barring an act of God, you're going to fall and suffer; thus, as stupid as this act is, the Inanity Urge wouldn't apply (but Masochism probably would). However, attempting to launch yourself through an open window by means of a spring-loaded catapult can have any number of effects: you may fall short of the mark and hit the ground; you can miss the window and hit the wall; or, you might actually make it through the window and into the kiddie-pool full of vegetable oil. Thus, Inanity applies nicely to this stunt. Other Inanity stunts include attempting to steer a shopping cart going downhill by means of a cardboard sail, driving a church bus full of Bible-thumping Pentecostals into the local Elysium, periodically sniping a meditating Bone Shadow with a pellet gun, dropping a dose of acid in a cop's coffee, or seeing if passers-by freak out when you leap out at them wearing a gorilla suit (ala Night Monkey). As the range of activities covered by this Urge is so broad, Wits + Inanity checks are usually made against a difficulty of -1 or -2.

Masochism
Dice Pool: Resolve + Masochism
When you intentionally perform a stunt that can injure or kill you, roll Resolve + Masochism to gain Nerve. Masochistic acts include jumping off cliffs, running in front of cars, testing out a weird-looking weapon taken from what you're pretty sure is an alien on yourself, ramping off a moving semi truck with a skateboard, slapping a Gangrel, or swimming in shark-infested waters while wearing nets full of chum. While a different type of stunt may result in your being hurt (such as the use of Annoyance on Blood Talon, or an Inanity stunt that results in choking on baby snakes), you may only make checks involving Masochism when you go into an activity expecting to hurt and your expectations are met.
The base difficulty of a Resolve + Masochism check is -1, but each box of Health lost in performance of the stunt restores one die to the pool; three or more points of damage offer bonus Urge dice (bonus equal to damage inflicted minus three). Stunts that cause you to suffer intense agony but inflict no actual damage (like snorting red pepper, rubbing down one's genitals with Ben Gay, or purposely enduring paper cuts) allow a check at -1.

Sadism
Dice Pool: Composure + Sadism
Sadism is the joy of sharing pain with others. However, it's not that easy. First, Sadism stunts should only be applied to "deserving" victims; the idea is to redistribute the world's omnipresent pain to deserving targets, not create more innocent victims. The "deserving" category is open to interpretation, but includes criminals, most supernaturals, and (of course) other Jackasses. However, it definitely doesn't include random mortals on the street or hapless animals. You'll gain no Nerve for capping some old lady with a baseball bat, though thwacking an elder vampire a good one is worthy of a Sadism check (and will probably net you several nasty scars along with Nerve). Also, the objective of a Sadism stunt is to inflict pain, not to kill; a death nets you no Nerve, no matter how cool it looked when the subject died.
The base difficulty of a Composure + Sadism check is -1, though each Health point of damage you inflict reduces the difficulty; just as with Masochism, three or more boxes of damage grant you extra dice on the Urge roll. Stunts that inflict lots of pain but cause no health level damage allow a check at -1; pepper spray, cattle prods and fire ants in the urethra are great for this sort of thing.

Urge Check Modifiers
The following modifiers apply to all Urge checks:
Vulgar without witnesses (stunt performed by yourself, with no one around): -2.
Vulgar with Jackasses (stunt performed with no one but other Jackasses around): -1.
Vulgar with some witnesses* (stunt performed in the presence of one to nine non-Jackasses): normal die pool.
Vulgar with a crowd* (stunt performed in the presence of ten or more non-Jackasses): +1.
Jackasses must always attempt new and more clever stunts; doing the same thing over and over gets old and dumb. Attempting the same stunt two to four times forces the Jackass to roll against -1 difficulty when making Urge checks; attempting the same stunt more than five times imposes a die penalty of 2 or more.
* Cameras and other recording mediums don't count as witnesses, though the person holding the device would.

Balls and Nerve
Balls is a mystic combination of stubbornness, courage and lack of sense, and serves as the "power stat" for Jackasses. A Jackass character may spend Nerve to perform stunts, and thereby gain more Nerve to perform yet more stunts, ad nauseum. A character has a Balls rating (in permanent dots) and a Nerve track (temporary points); Balls is rated on a 1 to 5 scale. A character can have more Nerve than her Balls rating, but only for short periods of time (excess points bleed off every number of hours equal to the character's highest-rated Urge, so it should be spent quickly). Nerve recovers only through performing stunts (see above).
And yes, lady Jackasses have Balls, too. Just not balls... normally.
Improving Balls: Jackasses can't spend experience points to increase Balls. This can only be accomplished through the expenditure of Nerve. When a character accrues a 10 points of Nerve through stunts, the player spends those points and makes a [Composure + Resolve] check, with the character's Balls subtracted from the roll. Success increases the character's Balls rating by 1; failure indicates the loss of all that Nerve to no effect. A dramatic failure on this roll imposes a -2 to all Urge checks for the rest of the day.
Using Balls and Nerve: Balls and Nerve grants a Jackass the following advantages:
♦ Balls can be used to resist supernatural powers (in the same way Blood Potency, Primal Urge and Gnosis do for other World of Darkness denizens).
♦ A point of Nerve may be spent to ignore wound penalties for a number of turns equal to the character's Composure.
♦ Nerve can be spent like Willpower to add three extra dice to a pool (though this doesn't stack with dice offered by Willpower); no more than one point of Nerve may be spent this way in a turn. However, Nerve may only be used on rolls that involves a foolhardy stunt. So spending a point of Nerve to leap from a moving train to a car is fine, but Nerve can't be spent to make an impressive speech or figure out a puzzle.
♦ Nerve may be spent to restore a character's Health. Each point of Nerve spent heals a box of bashing damage; every two Nerve spent heals a box of lethal damage; and a Health box lost to aggravated damage may restored for three Nerve. A Jackass can never spend more Nerve to recover Health than her Balls rating per day, and he can't spend Nerve while unconscious or Incapacitated.
♦ Balls adds to Composure and Resolve rolls, including attempts to resist supernatural control; if Composure and Resolve are rolled together, then Balls is only added once. (The exception to this rule is when the character rolls [Composure + Resolve] to increase his Balls, as above.) In addition, a Jackass's Balls is added to his permanent Willpower to determine his reaction to Uratha Lunacy (and supernaturally-induced madness or fear); a character with a [Willpower + Balls] total of 10 or more is immune to such effects. A Jackass successfully targeted by mind- or emotion-manipulation powers automatically flips out and will uncontrollably harass and attack the source of irritation until the Jackass loses sight of the trigger, is knocked out or otherwise restrained, or is slain. (This means the normal rules for those powers is ignored. Screw with a Jackass at your peril.)
♦ Jackasses may add Balls to their Stamina rolls to remain active when the rightmost Health box is filled with bashing damage.
♦ A Jackass may spend Nerve to ignore death... at least, temporarily. A character reduced to Incapacitation can spent a point of Nerve to prevent further Health loss (just as if someone successfully rendered medical attention). Every time a character is reduced below zero Health by lethal or aggravated damage, he may opt to spend a point of Balls (the permanent rating). This will restore the Jackass to Incapacitation and prevent the loss of further Health.
A Jackass so reduced to zero Balls is no longer a Jackass, and she loses her Balls and Urges forever. (On the bright side, this will probably substantially increase the character's lifespan.)