Rifts vs Unknown Armies

Compare Rifts and Unknown Armies side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Rifts	Unknown Armies
Genre	Post-Apocalyptic, Scifi, Fantasy, Horror, Superhero	Horror, Modern
Tags	Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Crunchy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gonzo, High-Power, Mana Points, Mecha, Superpowers, Tactical	Urban Fantasy, Weird, Noir, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Character-Driven, Sandbox, Worldbuilding, Freeform Magic, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy
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.	Roll percentile dice against an identity or ability rating and succeed on a result equal to or under it. Doubles make a matched success or matched failure, 01 is a critical success, and 00 is a fumble. Rolls with an identity tied to a character's obsession can be flip-flopped, swapping the two dice so that 54 reads as 45. Each relevant passion normally allows one more flip-flop per session.
Dice	d20, d100	d100
Complexity	Very High	High
Accessibility	Medium	High
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	All Rights Reserved	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Noncommercial only — Palladium Books Internet Policy limited license	Noncommercial only — Atlas Games Fair Use policy
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Palladium Books Inc.	Atlas Games
Year	2005	2017
Languages	English	English, Spanish
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 occult horror in the present day, where each character's obsessions and trauma and the cabal's shared goal drive the campaign instead of a prepared plot. It suits tables comfortable with violence, madness, and transgressive magick, and with building their own local setting together in the first session.
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.	In ordinary play, each hardened notch on the shock gauge moves five points from an upbeat ability such as Connect to its paired downbeat ability such as Struggle. Adepts charge their school of magick through its own obsessive behavior and lose all the charges they are holding when they break its taboo. The cabal pursues a player-chosen objective tracked in percentiles, and intense milestones earn bigger rolls toward it than petty ones.
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.	Violence, madness, abuse, and transgressive magick are core subject matter, so the group needs to agree on limits before play. Many firearms can kill a character with the default wound threshold of 50 in one hit. Twenty-five or more hardened notches normally burn a character out, which shuts off passion flip-flops and avatar identities until the character gets treatment.