Chapter: Game Mastering
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54 rules
| Name ▲ | Page | Description | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game Mastering | 483 | Chapter 10: Game Mastering | Game Mastering |
| Planning a Campaign | 483 | A Pathfinder game is typically structured as a campaign—a serialized story that focuses on a single party of characters. | Game Mastering |
| Campaign Length | 483 | The length of a campaign can range from a few sessions to many years. Two main factors determine campaign length: how much time you need to complete the story, and how much time players want to devote to the game. | Game Mastering |
| Themes | 484 | The themes you choose for your campaign are what distinguish it from other campaigns. | Game Mastering |
| A Welcoming Environment | 485 | The role of Game Master comes with the responsibility of ensuring you and the rest of the players have a rewarding, fun time during the game. | Game Mastering |
| Character Creation | 486 | At the outset of a new campaign, the players will create new player characters. Part of that process involves you introducing what the campaign will be about and what types of characters are most appropriate. | Game Mastering |
| Preparing an Adventure | 486 | An adventure is a self-contained collection of story elements, characters, and settings that become the basis for the story you and the other players tell. Think of the adventure as an outline for your own story. | Game Mastering |
| Published Adventures | 486 | Prewritten adventures include background information and nonplayer characters needed for the story, plus all the locations, maps, and monster groups necessary for both exploration and encounters. | Game Mastering |
| Creating Adventures | 487 | Building your own adventure is much more challenging than using a published one, but it lets you express yourself, be even more creative, and tailor the game directly to the players and their characters. | Game Mastering |
| Building Encounters | 488 | The most common type of encounter is a combat encounter, where the PCs face other creatures. | Game Mastering |
| Running a Game Session | 489 | A campaign happens over a series of sessions. Each session is usually several hours long, with multiple encounters, some exploration, and possibly downtime. | Game Mastering |
| Running a Session | 490 | During a session, you’re in charge of keeping the game’s action moving, managing the different modes of play, fielding questions, and making rules decisions. | Game Mastering |
| Adjudicating the Rules | 491 | As the GM, you are responsible for solving any rules disputes. Remember that keeping your game moving is more important than being 100% correct. | Game Mastering |
| Pathfinder Society | 492 | Organized play campaigns allow you to play in and run games all over the world with persistent characters. If you want to play Pathfinder this way, you can do so through the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild! | Game Mastering |
| Running Modes of Play | 493 | Pathfinder sessions are divided into three different modes of play: encounters, exploration, and downtime. | Game Mastering |
| Encounters | 493 | Encounter mode is the most structured mode of play, and you’ll mostly be following the rules presented in Chapter 9 to run this mode. | Game Mastering |
| Choosing Adversaries’ Actions | 493 | Players often coordinate and plan to be as efficient as possible, but their adversaries might not. As the GM, you’re roleplaying these foes, and you decide their tactics. | Game Mastering |
| Bypassed Encounters | 493 | What happens if you’ve planned a fight or challenge and the PCs find a way to avoid it entirely? This could leave them behind in XP or cause them to miss important information or treasure. | Game Mastering |
| Ending Encounters | 494 | A combat encounter typically ends when all the creatures on one side are killed or knocked unconscious. Once this happens, you can stop acting in initiative order. | Game Mastering |
| Social Encounters | 494 | Most conversations play best as free-form roleplaying, with maybe one or two checks for social skills involved. | Game Mastering |
| Exploration | 496 | Exploration mode is intentionally less regimented than encounters. As a result, during exploration you’ll be making judgment calls on just about everything that happens. | Game Mastering |
| Exploration Activities | 496 | In exploration mode, each player who wants to do something beyond just traveling chooses an exploration activity for their character. | Game Mastering |
| Adverse Terrain and Weather | 497 | Exploration gets slower when the party faces dense jungles, deep snow, sandstorms, extreme heat, or similar difficult conditions. You decide how much these factors impact the characters’ progress. | Game Mastering |
| Rolling Initiative | 498 | Transitioning from exploration to an encounter usually involves rolling for initiative. | Game Mastering |
| Resting | 499 | Characters require 8 hours of sleep each day. Though resting typically happens at night, a group gains the same benefits for resting during the day. | Game Mastering |
| Downtime | 500 | In downtime, you can sum up the important events of a whole day with just one roll. Use this mode when the characters return home or otherwise aren’t adventuring. | Game Mastering |
| Playing Out a Downtime Day | 500 | At the start of a given day of downtime, have all the players declare what their characters are trying to accomplish that day. | Game Mastering |
| Longer Periods of Downtime | 501 | Running downtime during a long time off—like several weeks, months, or even years—can be more challenging. | Game Mastering |
| Retraining | 502 | The retraining rules on page 481 allow a player to change some character choices, but they rely on you to decide whether the retraining requires a teacher, how long it takes, if it has any associated costs, and if the… | Game Mastering |
| Difficulty Classes | 503 | As the Game Master, it’s up to you to set the difficulty classes (DCs) for checks that don’t use a predefined DC. | Game Mastering |
| Simple DCs | 503 | Sometimes you need to quickly set a Difficulty Class. The easiest method is to select a simple DC from Table 10–4 by estimating which proficiency rank best matches the task (that rank is usually not required to succeed… | Game Mastering |
| Level-Based DCs | 503 | When you’re determining a skill DC based on something that has a level, use Table 10–5 to set the DC. Find the level of the subject, and assign the corresponding DC. | Game Mastering |
| Adjusting Difficulty | 503 | You might decide a DC should differ from the baseline, whether to account for PCs’ areas of expertise or to represent the rarity of spells or items. | Game Mastering |
| Minimum Proficiency | 504 | Sometimes succeeding at a particular task requires a character to have a specific proficiency rank in addition to a success on the check. | Game Mastering |
| Specific Actions | 504 | Several parts of this book, most notably Chapter 4: Skills, state that you as the GM set the DCs for certain checks or determine other parameters. Here are guidelines for the most common tasks. | Game Mastering |
| Rewards | 507 | In Pathfinder, player characters can receive three kinds of rewards for their heroic deeds: Hero Points, which they can use to get out of sticky situations; Experience Points, which they’ll use to level up; and… | Game Mastering |
| Hero Points | 507 | Unlike Experience Points and treasure, which stay with a character, Hero Points are granted and used on a per-session basis. At the start of a game session, you give out 1 Hero Point to each player character. | Game Mastering |
| Experience Points | 507 | As characters adventure, they earn Experience Points (XP). These awards come from achieving goals, completing social encounters, exploring new places, fighting monsters, overcoming hazards, and other sorts of deeds. | Game Mastering |
| Treasure | 508 | As the GM, it’s your job to distribute treasure to the player characters. | Game Mastering |
| Treasure by Level | 508 | Table 10–9: Party Treasure by Level on the next page shows how much treasure you should give out over the course of a level for a group of four PCs. | Game Mastering |
| Treasure and Rarity | 509 | Giving out uncommon and rare items and formulas can get players more interested in treasure. It’s best to introduce uncommon items as a reward fairly regularly but rare items only occasionally. | Game Mastering |
| Different Item Levels | 510 | The levels listed for items on Table 10–9: Party Treasure by Level aren’t set in stone. You can provide items of slightly higher or lower level as long as you take into account the value of the items you hand out. | Game Mastering |
| Treasure for New Characters | 510 | When your new campaign starts at a higher level, a new player joins an existing group, or a current player’s character dies and they need a new one, your campaign will have one or more PCs who don’t start at 1st level. | Game Mastering |
| Environment | 512 | Primarily used during exploration, environment rules bring the locales your party travels through to life. | Game Mastering |
| Mountain | 513 | Mountain environments also include hills, which share many aspects of mountains, though not their more extreme features. The most common disasters here are avalanches. | Game Mastering |
| Urban | 514 | Urban environments include open city spaces as well as buildings. The building information in this section also applies to ruins and constructed dungeons. | Game Mastering |
| Climate | 517 | Weather is more than just set dressing to establish mood—it has mechanical effects you can combine with environmental components to create a more memorable encounter. | Game Mastering |
| Natural Disasters | 518 | Climate and environmental features can be a hindrance or long-term threat, but natural disasters represent acute danger, especially to those directly exposed to their fury. | Game Mastering |
| Hazards | 520 | Dungeons are rife with devious traps meant to protect the treasures within. These range from mechanical devices that shoot darts or drop heavy blocks to magic runes that explode into bursts of flame. | Game Mastering |
| Detecting a Hazard | 520 | Every hazard has a trigger of some kind that sets its dangers in motion. | Game Mastering |
| Triggering a Hazard | 520 | If the group fails to detect a hazard and the hazard’s trigger is a standard part of traveling (such as stepping on a floor plate or moving through a magical sensor while walking), the hazard’s reaction occurs. | Game Mastering |
| Disabling a Hazard | 521 | The most versatile method for deactivating traps is the Disable a Device action of the Thievery skill, though most mechanical traps can also simply be smashed, and magical traps can usually be counteracted. | Game Mastering |
| Hazard Experience | 521 | Characters gain Experience Points for overcoming a hazard, whether they disable it, avoid it, or simply endure its attacks. If they trigger the same hazard later on, they don’t gain XP for the hazard again. | Game Mastering |
| Hazard Format | 522 | Hazards are presented in a stat block format similar to those used for monsters. A few notes regarding the format follow the sample stat block. | Game Mastering |