Phase (PSR Supplement)

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Variant Rule: Stricter Phases

In adventures where tracking daylight becomes important, your narrator might employ a more specific length of time for each phase. This may be preferable for compatibility with 5e content, which can sometimes be stricter with the passage of time.

During periods of exploration or preparation, it may be helpful to divide time into phases—in a similar way to how encounters are divided into rounds. Each phase is meant to be an ambiguous length of time somewhere between 10 and 60 minutes. Characters in this world likely don't wear clocks or otherwise track time by the minute, after all. Phases might reasonably be longer in some circumstances than others, like exploring miles-long labyrinthine caves versus exploring a single house.

In some cases it can become important to count phases. For example if you discover a pirate raid is imminent, your narrator might announce you only have 3 phases to prepare the coastal town's defenses. While exploring a huge dungeon, you might be slowly working through on a stock of resources like torches or water that deplete with each phase.

During each phase, each player describes what they're doing with a phase action. Phase actions are deliberately more open-ended than encounter actions. Often you and your narrator will improvise what your character does. Some relatively codified phase actions include the following options.

• Attune. You establish attunement to an item.
• Break. As detailed on the break page, you rest to recover hit points.
• Help. You aid an ally of your choice in their phase action. Once during this phase when that ally makes an ability check, just before they make the roll you can decide to give them advantage.
• Improvise. You attempt to improvise an action you describe to your narrator. Your narrator determines if the action is possible and what kind of d20 roll—if any—you must succeed to perform the action.
• Influence. Just like during an encounter's Influence, you make a Charisma check to affect the attitudes or behavior of one or more creatures. The longer time scale may make success more likely, but generally you can’t repeat the Influence action multiple times — you only get one chance per creature per day to make a significant impression.
• Search. Just like during an encounter's Search, you make an Intelligence or Wisdom check. The longer time scale lets you make a check to search an entire room at once, or gain insight into an entire group of creatures.
• Sort. You manage a group of Items. For example you sort through all the bodies on a battlefield for any material goods, recover an array of dropped items, or take potions from your mule’s bags and hand them out to your allies. You can activate dozens of items that normally require a Use action.
• Repair. If an object is damaged but not destroyed, you can restore its hit points with a successful Intelligence check made using the right artisan's tools if you're proficient with them. If the check result is 10 or higher, the object regains a number of hit points equal to the result.
• Ritual Cast. Cast a spell as a ritual, as detailed under spells.
• Travel. You change to a different room or area nearby, such as a bar down the road, or the next room in a dungeon. Difficult travel might require an ability check to make progress or to explore a new area. You can sneak as part of this travel, as if taking the Hide action, though in some instances this may force you to cover less distance.