Rifts vs Spore Friends
Compare Rifts and Spore Friends side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Rifts | Spore Friends | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Post-Apocalyptic, Scifi, Fantasy, Horror, Superhero | Fantasy |
| Tags | Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Crunchy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gonzo, High-Power, Mana Points, Mecha, Superpowers, Tactical | Cozy, Collaborative, GM-Less, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, Family-Friendly, Experimental |
| Core Mechanic | Combat and saving throws use a d20 plus bonuses, with high results overcoming a target number or opposing roll. Skills use d100 and succeed when the result is at or below the character's percentage. | Players drop 10 confetti spores onto a printed target; at least one spore inside or touching the circle succeeds. Being Good At or Really Good At the task adds four or eight spores, while a complication halves the pool. The group agrees on the pool before the drop and chooses a fictional setback after failure. |
| Dice | d20, d100 | Diceless |
| Complexity | Very High | Very Low |
| Accessibility | Medium | Medium |
| Runnability | Very High | High |
| License | All Rights Reserved | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | Noncommercial only — Palladium Books Internet Policy limited license | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | $$ | $ |
| Publisher | Palladium Books Inc. | Ultimate Hyper Games |
| Year | 2005 | 2026 |
| Best For | Groups who want long-form science-fantasy campaigns that move from a ruined Earth to other dimensions. The game suits tables whose GM will decide which parts of the broad setting a campaign uses. | Mixed-age groups seeking gentle collaborative adventures built around a tactile resolution ritual. |
| Highlights | Occupational and racial class packages assign distinct abilities and advancement tracks, giving each archetype a different role in the party. Mega-Damage places many supernatural creatures and war machines on a separate durability scale beyond the reach of ordinary Structural Damage Capacity attacks. Rifts and ley lines make dimensional travel a standing feature of the setting, letting campaigns move between devastated Earth and other worlds. | Spore Challenges turn resolution into a physical target drop, making uncertain actions a shared table event. Open-ended Good At traits reward players for explaining how an unusual strength applies to the current problem. Adventure prompt sheets convert scattered spores into scene ingredients, allowing play to continue without a prepared scenario. |
| Considerations | Character creation combines rolled attributes with extensive skill selection, making first-time preparation lengthy. Combat asks each player to track an action economy, active defenses, and which damage scale applies. Magic and psionics use separate point pools and power procedures, adding class-specific rules to the shared system. | Physical setup is required: confetti, a target, and enough room to drop spores from 50 centimeters. Core judgments depend on consensus, and the rules give no numerical fallback for unresolved disagreements. Setbacks can remove a Good At trait, but the rules provide no advancement procedure for gaining new abilities during a campaign. |