Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GameMastery Guide

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If you’re playing these characters for more than a few sessions, consider advancing them to 1st level using the fast advancement speed (800 XP). If your group wants a longer experience at level 0, start the group without the apprentice benefits, then level up to apprentice (gaining those benefits and the apprentice adjustments for their class), and then level up to 1st level. Story Awards: Feel free to award Story Awards when players conclude a major storyline or make an important accomplishment. These awards should be worth double the amount of experience points for a CR equal to the APL. Particularly long or difficult story arcs might award even more, at your discretion as GM. Favorable Terrain for the PCs: An encounter against a monster that’s out of its favored element (like a yeti encountered in a sweltering cave with lava, or an enormous dragon encountered in a tiny room) gives the PCs an advantage. Build the encounter as normal, but when you award experience for the encounter, do so as if the encounter were one CR lower than its actual CR. The initial implementation is fairly straightforward: the proficiency bonus just becomes +2 for trained, +4 for expert, +6 for master, and +8 for legendary. We recommend giving an untrained character a –2 proficiency modifier instead of a +0 proficiency bonus. Intelligent: Give an item a spark of intelligence to make it more intriguing. Certainly, the player characters are used to intelligent weapons, but what about an intelligent folding boat? Once an item is imbued with intelligence, its use can no longer be taken for granted, instead requiring a diplomatic encounter or battle of wills. Can the PCs convince the boat to unfold? If so, can they then persuade or cajole it to allow them aboard to make their journey? Using an intelligent item can prove problematic if the PCs don’t appease it in some way—and woe to the adventurer to whom it takes a disliking.

Ad Hoc CR Adjustments: While you can adjust a specific monster’s CR by advancing it, applying templates, or giving it class levels, you can also adjust an encounter’s difficulty by applying ad hoc adjustments to the encounter or creature itself. Listed here are three additional ways you can alter an encounter’s difficulty. Certain spells are natural to your character, typically coming from your ancestry or a magic item rather than your class. If you have an innate spell, you can cast it, even if you aren't a spellcaster or it's not of a spell level you can normally cast. You can't use your spell slots to cast your innate spells, but you might have an innate spell and also be able to prepare or cast the same spell through your class. You also can't heighten innate spells, but some abilities that grant innate spells might give you the spell at a higher level than its base level or change the level at which you cast the spell. Alignment traits don’t exist, and anything that has those traits loses them. Effects that require the traits to function, like protection, don’t exist. If you’re using the no alignment variant, remove or replace aligned damage (chaotic, evil, good, and lawful damage), which requires significant adjustments for creatures like angels and devils that were built with a weakness to aligned damage. One option is to replace them one-for-one with new damage types like “radiant” and “shadow” that don’t have any moral assumptions. Another option is to simply change the damage type needed for creature weaknesses to some other damage type on a case-by-case basis. A third option is to remove the weaknesses, reduce the monsters’ maximum Hit Points, and call it good. No matter what you do with creatures, you’ll also have to replace abilities like the champion’s that deal aligned damage in a similar way, or remove those abilities.

Class Abilities

Abstract XP: Simply add up the individual XP awards listed for a group of the appropriate size. In this case, the division is done for you—you need only total up all the awards to determine how many XP to award to each PC. Magic Item Variants contains rules deconstructing the magic item bonuses, allowing you to progress them automatically or via craftsmanship to more easily run a lower-magic game. If you want to keep parts of the existing alignment system, you can use either of the following variants to make changes without entirely removing or replacing alignment. Alignment-based effects still exist in both of these variants, but they might not be as useful as in standard Pathfinder. Affinities Scales harvested from a protean seethe with pure chaos and can be used in the creation of any magic item that has a spell with the chaotic descriptor as a requirement. Qlippoth

Gems: Although you can assign any value to a gemstone, some are inherently more valuable than others. Use the value categories below (and their associated gemstones) as guidelines when assigning values to gemstones.

If you grew up with no family, you had to learn to survive on your own. Add a Strength ability boost and a Constitution ability boost to your options. Though Stamina Points and Hit Points function similarly when a character takes damage, a character recovers them differently. A heal spell restores Hit Points, not Stamina Points, and the actions described below (like Take a Breather) restore only Stamina Points, not Hit Points. A character regains all their Stamina Points after a full night’s rest. Hit Points still determine whether a character remains conscious—a character at 0 HP is unconscious, no matter how many Stamina Points they have. In addition to their ancestry Hit Points, a PC gains the number of Stamina Points and Hit Points indicated in the second and third columns of Table 4–21 at 1st level. Both values increase by the same amount at each level thereafter. This replaces the Hit Points a character gains from their class in a standard game. Table 4-21: Stamina and Hit Points by Class Normal Class HP Armor, shields, and weapons have all of the mundane armaments needed for combat, as well as ones made of precious materials or that possess special magical abilities. Due to the increased number of class feats a dual-class character has, you should limit how much of a benefit a character gets from feats that scale based on the number of feats you have, such as Resiliency feats from multiclass archetypes. Typically, the limit should be half the number of total class feats the character has.