Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GameMastery Guide

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Note that some cultures have taboos against harvesting parts from humanoids and monstrous humanoids or certain other creature types. Other societies may view the taking of trophies from intelligent creatures, endangered specimens, or even from plentiful game as abhorrent. Characters might need to be careful to avoid insulting such groups if they don’t want to find themselves in an unnecessary conflict. At the GM’s discretion, harvesting trophies (particularly in the case of trophies taken from innocents, intelligent creatures, or outsiders) should have alignment repercussions. 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. NPC Gear Adjustments: You can significantly increase or decrease the power level of an NPC with class levels by adjusting the NPC’s gear. The combined value of an NPC’s gear is given in Creating NPCs on Table: NPC Gear. A classed NPC encountered with no gear should have his CR reduced by 1 (provided that loss of gear actually hampers the NPC), while a classed NPC that instead has gear equivalent to that of a PC (as listed on Table: Character Wealth by Level) has a CR of 1 higher than his actual CR. Be careful awarding NPCs this extra gear, though—especially at high levels, where you can blow out your entire adventure’s treasure budget in one fell swoop!

Because rogues get skill increases at every level in the standard rules, they also get more Skill Points. Rogues gain double the number of Skill Points listed on Table 4–19. 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.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. 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. This lets you and the player better understand where the character falls, and it allows a player who wants to play a character living on the edge between alignments to see that represented in the rules. This is not meant to be a highly granular system or one a player can exploit by repeatedly making trivial gestures toward a given alignment. It’s meant to indicate the trends of a character’s behavior and foreshadow any alignment change that might occur over time. It’s typically harder to reach the ends of the scale through minor acts, especially for the evil versus good axis. A character who commits multiple minor acts toward an alignment might shift one step, but it would take a truly reprehensible act to shift them fully to evil all at once— and to recover it could take a long-term atonement and commitment to good. At 5th level, you gain a +1 potency bonus to AC. At 11th level, this bonus increases to +2, and at 18th level, to +3. If the story you want to tell is about characters who have started training to become a particular class, you can grant them a small number of additional abilities. An apprentice character is trained in the skill or skills specified for their chosen class (such as Occultism and Performance for a bard) in addition to the skills they gain through their initial proficiencies. They also gain benefits based on the class.

Players using Skill Points have more flexibility to build characters with a broader range of skills in which they’re trained or better than normal, and this variant encourages that flexibility by increasing the cost of specializing. For instance, a 19th-level fighter could use Skill Points to be a master in seven different skills, or to be legendary in three skills. While this makes the variance in skills slightly less predictable, it shouldn’t have a big enough effect on a group’s capabilities that you need to make any significant adjustments when you run the game. Mediator: Just as GMs make sure all of a game’s plots and rules work together to entertain, they must also ensure that the players themselves mesh and cooperate. 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. Affinities A troll’s liver can be used in the creation of any magic item that has a spell of the healing subschool as a requirement. True Dragons Game Designer: Even with the vast range of options available, only GMs know what threats their players might face or powers they might come to control. Just as GMs arbitrate the rules within their games, so can they manipulate, repurpose, and wholly invent new rules to improve their games.In this variant, gear can provide bonuses even if it’s not magical. This is useful for games and settings that set out to give fine, non-magical items the same prominence as magic items. High-quality gear requires the corresponding proficiency rank in Crafting to Craft. Affinities A devil’s tongue is infused with the word of law. It can be used in the creation of any magic item that has a spell with the lawful descriptor as a requirement. Doppelgangers And Mimics

At 8th level, you gain a +1 potency bonus to saves, increasing to +2 at level 14 and +3 at level 20. In Step 2, she starts by determining how many points she has to spend. She gains 2 dedicated Ability Points in Intelligence and Dexterity for being an elf, 2 in Dexterity for being a criminal, and 2 more in Dexterity for being a rogue. She also has 19 flexible points to spend: 15 plus 4 for the two ability scores she voluntarily lowered to 8. At 1st level, a character using the Skill Points variant gains their initial skill proficiencies as described in the Core Rulebook. However, at every level beyond 1st, instead of gaining skill increases, the character gains a number of Skill Points, as indicated on Table 4–19: Skill Points by Level. The character can spend these Skill Points to increase their proficiency rank in various skills, as shown on Table 4–20: Cost to Increase Rank. A character must meet the minimum level indicated on the table to increase their rank, primarily to avoid having a player becoming unrealistically good at one skill early in their adventuring career while neglecting everything else. Characters can save up Skill Points between levels for a more expensive increase later on. Table 4-19: Skill Points by Level Level Playing a dual-class character certainly gives a character more options, and adding additional spellcasting classes can result in a significantly wider variety of powerful spell effects available to each character. Nonetheless, this sort of dual-classing is more likely to increase the party’s longevity than it is to drastically adjust the level of opponents a dual-class character should be fighting. The increases to saving throw proficiencies and Hit Points make characters somewhat sturdier and able to take on slightly higher challenges, but not every fight should be harder, nor should encounters exceed extreme-threat difficulty. Skill feats are indicated by the skill trait and improve upon, or grant additional actions for one of the skills a character is trained in. Some skill feats require that a character be expert, master, or legendary proficiency in a skill before they can be taken. All characters gain skill feats at 2nd level and every even level thereafter, and some classes like the rogues and investigators gain additional skill feats on odd levels.

These two variants massively change how the alignment system works. In fact, one removes it entirely! Masterwork Tools (100–300 gp): This category includes masterwork weapons, armor, and skill kits—see Equipment for more details and costs for these items. Items with skill or Perception bonuses don’t have fundamental runes. If an existing skill bonus item costs less than the listed Price for a high-quality skill item or has a lower level, it likely has a feature such as a limitation, so adjust accordingly. A character in a game with this variant can Craft or buy a non-magical item to boost Perception or a skill using the table below. Table 4-16: High-Quality Skill Item Quality Proficiency without Level changes the fundamental math of the proficiency system to tell stories where being outnumbered by weaker foes remains a challenge and high-level characters are less superhuman.