Chapter 15
Expanded Skills

This chapter provides a more detailed explanation of how skills can be used in Rise. It’s generally not worth the time to reference this chapter during an active game session. Instead, you can just use the guidelines for Standard Difficulty Values when unexpected circumstances arise. Basically, just guess how hard the task seems, choose an appropriate DV, and move on. However, this chapter can be useful for pre-planning adventures, or for resolving important checks where the players might disagree about how difficult it should be.

There are two main types of information in this chapter. First, some tasks are simply so rare or esoteric that they aren’t worth the space it would take to define them in the core book. Most campaigns will never need to know exactly how difficult it is to read someone’s lips at a distance. This book has more space to go into detail about infrequently used rules.

Second, the core rules are sometimes vague to allow room for reasonable interpretation. Your game will inevitably run into situations outside the scope of what can be defined ahead of time in a book, so the core rules have to be flexible. This chapter provides additional examples and context to help you choose reasonable modifiers for specific or unusual circumstances. Listing those examples here emphasizes that they are guidelines instead of hard rules.