Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GameMastery Guide

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Affinities Swaths of skin harvested from a doppelganger or mimic can be used in the creation of any magic item that has a spell of the polymorph subschool as a requirement. Elementals 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.

Each creature has six ability scores that represent their raw potential and basic attributes, with higher scores representing more potential. Ability scores for ordinary folk range from as low as 3 to as high as 18, with 10 representing average human capability. High-level characters can have ability scores that range much higher than 18. When you and your group are deciding which variant rules to use, think about the types of stories you want to tell together, including the genre, themes, and characters, and use that information to choose which variant rules might be the best fit. If different players think different variant options would work best for the game, let each of them make their point, but ultimately you as the GM make the final call. Critical Failure The ally takes 1d8 mental damage, but this can reduce only Stamina Points, During your childhood, you were influenced by a significant event that helped shape the person you became. Roll on the table below to determine the type of event that shaped you. Table 4-7: Major Childhood Event 1d20 If you grew up with one or two family members, your closeness to them made you highly aware of their feelings, and you. Add an Intelligence ability boost and a Wisdom ability boost to your options.All of a character’s ability scores start at 10. If the PC’s ancestry has ability flaws, decrease those ability scores to 8. A player can also voluntarily lower any ability score to below 10 to gain more Ability Points to use in Step 2. They gain 1 Ability Point for lowering an ability score to 9, or 2 Ability Points for lowering a score to 8. Patron: While GMs constantly confront their players with all sorts of dangers, they also serve as the source of every reward the PCs ever gain, from each experience point to treasures of legend. Success You can continue encouraging your ally for a total of 10 minutes. If you do, they can spend 1 Resolve Point to regain all their Stamina Points. To make your mark on the world, you'll need to have the right equipment, including armor, weapons, and other magical and mundane gear. All items can be found under the Equipment tab on the sidebar, divided into different categories and subcategories.

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 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. Affinities Residual material harvested from a slain elemental can be used in the creation of magic items that have spells with specific descriptors, as summarized in the table below. No-Limit StaminaIf you want a fast-paced, almost superheroic game, you can skip the Resolve Point component of this subsystem and simply make Taking a Breather and Rally free. This gives the characters a lot of staying power, meaning that the group will typically keep adventuring until they run out of spells for the day, rather than having the additional pressure of running out of Resolve Points. If you use this approach, omit the Steel Your Resolve feat, as it’s too powerful if there’s no cost to use it! Alternatively, if you want to keep it, you can require a character to Take a Breather before they can Steel their Resolve again.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.

At 3rd level, choose a single skill. You gain a +1 potency bonus with that skill. At 6th level, choose a second skill to gain a +1 potency bonus. At 9th level, choose one of those skills and increase its potency bonus to +2. At 13th level, increase the potency bonus of your second skill to +2 and choose a third skill to gain a +1 potency bonus. At 15th level, increase the third skill’s potency bonus to +2 and choose a fourth skill to gain a +1 potency bonus. At 17th level, choose one of your three skills with a +2 potency bonus to increase to +3, and choose a fifth skill to gain a +1 potency bonus. Finally, at 20th level, choose one of the two skills with a +2 potency bonus to increase to +3, choose one of the three skills at a +1 potency bonus to increase to +2, and choose one new skill to gain a +1 potency bonus. You can spend 1 week to retrain one of these assignments at any time. Class: Your character's class provides an ability boost to the ability score most important to your class, called your key ability score.

Table 2–12: Area Damage

Combining Variant RulesIf your group is playing a game with themes that call for it, you might wind up combining multiple variant rules together, possibly applying several options at the same time. For instance, in a gritty, low-magic, survival-horror game, you might start the PCs as 0-level characters, remove alignment to allow more shades of gray, alter the proficiency bonus progression to remove level, and remove magic items—all at the same time. In general, the variant options in this chapter are sufficiently self‑contained, with explanations of how they change the game, that you should be able to combine them without trouble. When you design your own variant rules, be on the lookout for places where new rules might have unexpected overlapping effects on each other and the game.

The following rules for harvesting trophies from creatures and monsters should augment the classic method of dispersing treasure and rewards, but they are not intended to increase the expected wealth by level at your table. If you use this system for trophies, you should make sure to reduce the amount of other treasure and rewards by an equal amount to the harvested components. The alignment system has a long history in roleplaying games, and it helps define several aspects of Pathfinder’s worlds and characters. Yet it doesn’t work well for all games or groups. Altering or removing it offers new opportunities for your game. When designing a combat encounter, you first decide what level of challenge you want your PCs to face, then follow the steps outlined below.

Jewelry, Minor (50 gp): This category includes relatively small pieces of jewelry crafted from materials like brass, bronze, copper, ivory, or even exotic woods, sometimes set with tiny or flawed low-quality gems. Minor jewelry includes rings, bracelets, and earrings.