Rifts vs The Quiet Year
Compare Rifts and The Quiet Year side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Rifts | The Quiet Year | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Post-Apocalyptic, Scifi, Fantasy, Horror, Superhero | Post-Apocalyptic |
| Tags | Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Crunchy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gonzo, High-Power, Mana Points, Mecha, Superpowers, Tactical | GM-Less, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Fiction-First, Map-Drawing |
| 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. | No dice, no GM. A deck of playing cards drives play: each suit is a season, each card a weekly prompt. On your turn, draw a card, answer the prompt, and choose to Discover Something New, Start a Project, or Hold a Discussion. Draw on the shared map to represent changes. Projects take multiple weeks to complete. The Contempt Token signals when a player feels unheard. The game ends when the Frost Shepherds arrive (King of Spades). |
| Dice | d20, d100 | Diceless |
| Complexity | Very High | Very Low |
| Accessibility | Medium | Medium |
| Runnability | Very High | Low |
| 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. | Buried Without Ceremony (Avery Alder) |
| Year | 2005 | 2013 |
| Languages | English | English |
| 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. | Groups who want to collaboratively build a community's story through map-drawing: 52 weeks of discoveries, projects, and tensions before everything changes. |
| 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. | Card-driven structure (one card per week across four seasons) paces the narrative through 52 turns, map-drawing produces a physical artifact of the session, Contempt Token mechanic signals when a player feels unheard, works as a standalone game or worldbuilding tool for other campaigns |
| 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. | Contempt mechanic can create genuine inter-player tension, no way to revisit or undo earlier map decisions, map quality depends on group comfort with drawing, limited replayability with the same group |