In Episode 2 of my G.A.S-inspired Blueprint Gameplay Ability System series for Unreal Engine 5.4, I pick up right where we left off—now that activation is working and we’ve already debugged the “try to activate while one is active” blocking behavior. This time I focus on the parts that make the system feel like a real framework: deactivating abilities, canceling abilities, and handling queueing so input doesn’t just get eaten when something is blocked. A big chunk of this episode is me filling out the Gameplay Tag Manager Component. I’m not just adding/removing tags—I’m stacking tags with quantities using a Map (tag → stack count), because gameplay tags don’t natively track quantity. That’s huge for status effects, damage states, or anything where you want multiple instances of the same tag. From there I wire tag changes into ability activation/deactivation (activation grants/removes, deactivation grants/removes), and I also show how I keep things clean by making helper functions private. Then I build out an ability event pipeline: I can broadcast events by gameplay tag (like OnLanded), subscribe abilities to only the events they care about, and debug the whole thing with prints so you can actually see what’s happening. Finally, I move Jump into the system, use OnLanded to deactivate it, and demonstrate how that unlocks clean interactions with other abilities like Sprint.