House rules for the Reposition action

[A Butter Idea]

You declare how you want to reposition the target. You must choose a path for the target that's 5 feet. The proposed movement must keep the target within your reach.

Make an Athletics check against the target's Fortitude DC. If you choose to move the target into or through an obstacle, you take a -4 circumstance penalty to the check (or greater, up to -10 at the GM's discretion). If you choose to move the target into your space, you take a -4 circumstance penalty if the target is your size or larger, a -2 circumstance penalty if the target is one size smaller than you, and no penalty otherwise.

Critical Success: You move the target as you declared. You then choose to either Stride 5 feet as a free action or move the target an additional 5 feet; during this movement, the target must remain within your reach and you can't move it into your space or into or through obstacles.
Success: You move the target as you declared.
Failure: The target chooses whether or not it moves. If it allows you to move it, you move the target as you declared. It can then move you up to 5 feet as though it successfully Repositioned you, but it cannot move you into its space or into or through obstacles. If an ongoing effect originating from a source other than the target has you grabbed or restrained or is otherwise restricting your movement, the target can't move you unless it spends a reaction; if it does, it makes an Athletics check against the effect's DC.
Critical Failure: As failure, but the target can move you even if it chooses not to move itself.

At the end of your Reposition action, if a creature or object is in your space and you can't share a space with it, you move into the nearest unoccupied square; this is forced movement. If several unoccupied squares are tied for the nearest and the target is a PC, the target chooses from among those squares; otherwise, the GM chooses.

If your target is an ally, you can forgo the Athletics check and choose to automatically critically fail instead. This lets two allies swap places with a single Reposition action, allowing hardier fighters to interpose themselves between enemies and their squishier comrades in cramped quarters. It also lets allies help each other out of precarious situations even if it's not their turn, such as pulling up an ally dangling from a cliff.

[Teridax]

I like the idea behind this change, though I think it would help to clarify the statement of intent with it. From what I'm seeing, it seems like the intent is to let Reposition be used to exchange places with creatures, in particular allies, which could always be special-cased into the action unless the aim is to also enable this on enemies.

[A Butter Idea]

Yes, I do want all these rules to apply to enemies as well. I like the idea of Reposition being more than just Shove with a different kind of direction; it should carry a certain extra risk where you lose a little bit of control even on a regular failure.

One scenario I imagine this could be used is, the hero and the villain are having one last brawl right next to a steep cliff. They're both on their last legs and down to their last melee weapons. One or both of them are trying to drive the fight toward the edge of the cliff to end it once and for all, but rather than having each failed Reposition attempt do nothing, every single attempt brings them both closer to their doom, until at last one final, decisive success sends the loser plummeting to their death.

[Ascalaphus]

I like the overall idea, but somehow it reads a bit complex to me. Maybe that's just in the phrasing though. But we don't want to get back into 3.x stereotypes of a 2-page flowchart to explain grappling, when it actually wasn't quite so dramatically complex if you understood it.

Maybe the initial paragraph should do more to explain what you're trying to do and what will sort of happen, instead of having to reconstruct it from the success/failure entries. I realize that IS Paizo's style for writing these things, but I think that works best only for really simple effects. For something a bit more involved like this, it can be obscure.

For something that doesn't come up very often, but can be life-or-death when it does, you really want the rules to be easy to intuit on a quick reading. Otherwise it'll (at best) kill the momentum of the scene.