D.4 Alternate Play Styles

D.4.1 Being Surrounded

Normally, exact positioning doesn’t matter that much in combat. This makes it easier to play without a grid, or to just spend less time worrying about the details of everyone’s positions on a grid. With this optional rule, you can make positioning more important in combat, increasing tactical depth for melee characters. This generally has the downside of making movement more complicated, however, as combatants try to surround others and avoid being surrounded themselves.

If you play with this alternate rule, when you are being attacked by multiple foes at once, you are less able to defend yourself. If every space adjacent to you either contains an enemy or is adjacent to an enemy, you are surrounded. A creature that is surrounded takes a -2 penalty to its Armor and Reflex defenses. When determining whether you are surrounded, ignore any enemies that are sharing space with you, and ignore any enemies that are at least two size categories smaller than you.

Any effect that makes a creature immune to being partially unaware (50% miss chance, -2 Armor and Ref), such as the foresight spell, also makes that creature immune to being surrounded.

D.4.2 Complex Cover

Normally, cover is a binary effect. You either have cover or you don’t. If you want to make cover and tactical positioning more important, you can use more subtle variations of cover. This variant uses four cover variants:

• Quarter cover: You have approximately a quarter of your body behind an obstacle. Quarter cover grants no defense bonuses. However, if you would be affected by a glancing blow or an attack that deal half damage on a miss, the obstacle takes damage instead of you.
• Half cover: You have approximately half of your body behind an obstacle. Half cover grants a +2 bonus to Armor and Reflex defenses. It also grants the same protection as quarter cover against glancing blows and misses.
• Three-quarters cover: You have approximately three quarters of your body behind an obstacle. Three-quarters cover grants a +4 bonus to Armor and Reflex defenses. It also grants the same protection as quarter cover against glancing blows and misses.
• Total cover: You have your entire body behind an obstacle. Total cover blocks line of effect, which makes most attacks impossible (see Line of Effect).

Normally, asymmetric cover means that one target has cover while the other doesn’t. With this variant, asymmetric cover will often mean that one target simply has better cover than the other, but cover is relevant for both targets. For example, hiding behind a tree might grant you half cover from a target, but they might also gain quarter cover from you.

The downside of this optional rule is that it requires more ad-hoc rulings from the GM about subtle differences in the environment. To keep the pace of the game moving, players have to resist the urge to argue with potentially arbitrary rulings. Complex cover is generally only meaningful if you are already using battle maps rich with detail or improvising substantial elements of the environment on the fly.

D.4.3 Critical Failure

Normally, there is no explicit penalty for catastrophic failure built into the rules. Even if you fail at a check by a large amount, it doesn’t leave you worse off than when you started. Sometimes, it may be narratively appropriate to punish significant failure more severely, at the GM’s discretion. For example, attempting a difficult Persuasion check and completely botching the execution might leave the target feeling more hostile than if no Persuasion had been attempted at all. A good threshold for critical failure would generally be failing a check by 8 or more. For specific tasks, it may make more sense to have punishments for failure at lower thresholds as well.

This is considered an optional rule because it generally makes trying silly ideas or extremely difficult tasks more dangerous, which isn’t appropriate for every game. It also depends heavily on GM discretion.

D.4.4 Easy Magic Item Reforging

The Craft Specialization feat allows characters to transfer magic item properties between different items. For example, if the players find a magic meteor hammer that none of them could use, they could reforge that item as a magic battleaxe so they could use its property. With this optional rule, skilled item crafters capable of this action are assumed to be common in major cities or towns. The typical price to reforge an item in this way is two ranks lower than the item’s rank, to a minimum rank of 1.

The advantage of using this optional rule is that it makes magic items more likely to be useful to the party. Without this rule, you may be forced to have the party “randomly” only find magic items that they are coincidentally proficient with, or the party may frequently find magic items that they can’t use. On the other hand, this rule assumes a more magical and highly developed civilization. It also may require the party to frequently return to town to reforge useless items into items that are useful for them. Either of those requirements may not match the intended tone of your campaign.

D.4.5 Expanded Insight Points

Normally, insight points can only be used to learn new special abilities from your class, or from a small number of feats. This alternate rule allows you to spend insight points to gain a wide variety of other proficiencies and benefits. This makes character creation more complicated, but it also allows you to personalize your character much more precisely.

If you play with this alternate rule, you can spend insight points in any of the following ways.

• You can spend an insight point to gain an additional trained skill.
• You can spend an insight point to gain proficiency in an additional usage class of armor (light, medium, or heavy). You must be proficient with light armor to become proficient with medium armor, and you must be proficient with medium armor to become proficient with heavy armor.
• You can spend an insight point to gain proficiency in all non-exotic weapons from one weapon group (see Weapon Groups).
• You can spend an insight point to learn two common languages or one rare language (see Communication and Languages).

D.4.6 Exploding Checks

Normally, checks do not explode. There are practical issues with allowing explosions on retryable actions. In theory, a character could simply try an otherwise impossible check a thousand times to guarantee a sufficiently high result on the exploding die. With this optional rule, checks can explode, but only in tense or time-limited situations where the check is not indefinitely retryable. Narratively, this could represent adrenaline helping people reach superhuman feats in times of stress. This requires GM interaction to identify situations where checks can be reasonably retried. For example, even a check that is normally indefinitely retryable, such as unlocking a door, could explode if unlocking the door quickly was important in a combat situation.

D.4.7 Longer Rests

Normally, characters can take a short rest in ten minutes and a long rest in eight hours. With this optional rule, a short rest instead requires eight hours of rest, and long rest requires a week.

This dramatically slows down the narrative pacing of the world, and makes the world feel much more brutal and unforgiving. Characters will often be forced to start a combat while missing damage resistance or even hit points, and taking vital wounds can be crippling.

D.4.8 Obscure Magic Items

The base rules of Rise make it fairly easy to identify magic items. This keeps the pace of the game up when players find magic items frequently. However, you may choose to treat magic items as being more rare and mysterious. If you do, make the following changes:

• The identify item ability from the Craft and Knowledge skills provides no information about how to use a magic item’s properties or what they might be. It can still be used to identify whether or not an item is magical.
• The Knowledge (items) Knowledge skill is removed entirely.
• Magic items are more rare, and therefore more valuable. Calculate the prices for all magic items as if they were one rank higher than they actually are. Rank 7 magic items cannot be bought for any price - they are simply too rare.
• All spells with the Attune tag require an additional attunement point to attune to. If magic items are hard to find and use, spellcasters gain a powerful benefit, since their personal attunement spells are still reliably available. This change ensures that spellcasters still gain a benefit from their personal access to magic, but they are not drastically more powerful than characters who depend on finding useful magic items.

You may also want to add complex or unintuitive activation conditions to magic items. For example, boots of speed may only function while hopping on one foot, or while you are not wearing socks. This can encourage players to experiment more with magic items to figure out how to use them.

D.4.9 Rage Accuracy

Normally, a barbarian’s rage ability provides a +2 accuracy bonus. With this variant, raging barbarians instead gain no accuracy bonus, but roll 1d12 instead of 1d10 for their attack rolls while raging. The attack’s explosion target is reduced by 3. A barbarian’s overall accuracy and damage output with this rule essentially equivalent to the normal rule, but they are more likely to get critical hits or completely whiff on important attacks.

This variant can be more fun for people who like big hits and big misses, and for RPG veterans who naturally associate a barbarian with a d12. It is considered a variant rule because not everyone owns a 12-sided die, and you shouldn’t need to buy one just to play a barbarian.

D.4.10 Restricted Archetype Order

Normally, when a character in Rise levels up, they can freely choose which of their class archetypes they want to rank up (as long as they don’t exceed their maximum rank). However, this means that most levels require making a choice that may be confusing for newer players. The process of leveling up can be simplified if each player chooses an order for their archetypes.

With this variant, each character has a primary archetype, a secondary archetype, and a tertiary archetype. This choice is made at character creation. Whenever they increase their maximum rank, they increase their rank in their primary archetype. In their next level up, they increase their rank in their secondary archetype, and then finally their tertiary archetype.

D.4.11 Sleeping While Encumbered

Normally, characters can sleep in their armor without any penalty. This is unrealistic, but it can be time-consuming to make everyone track how their sleeping statistics differ from their waking statistics. Being ambushed while sleeping is very rare in most games, so it’s generally not worth the hassle. However, if you want a more realistic game with more punishing night ambushes, you can use this alternate rule.

If you play with this alternate rule, resting in armor is difficult. If you take a long rest while you have encumbrance, you finish your rest with a fatigue level equal to the value of your encumbrance. In addition, only half the time you spend sleeping while you have encumbrance counts as sleep for the purpose of determining your fatigue (see Sleep and Fatigue).

D.4.12 Tap Out

With this optional rule, whenever you gain a vital wound, you can “tap out” to guarantee that you survive while taking yourself out of the fight. If you tap out, you treat the result of the vital roll for that vital wound as a 10, regardless of any bonuses or penalties you would normally have to the vital roll. However, you fall unconscious immediately, and you cannot regain consciousness by any means until you finish a short rest.

This optional rule significantly reduces the likelihood of character death, and makes fights less likely to impose long-term consequences on characters. However, it also makes vital wounds more likely to entirely knock characters out of a fight, which can increase the risk that the entire party is defeated.