Chapter: Game Mastering
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54 rules
| Name ▲ | Page | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Game Mastering | 483 | Chapter 10: 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. |
| 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. |
| Themes | 484 | The themes you choose for your campaign are what distinguish it from other campaigns. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Building Encounters | 488 | The most common type of encounter is a combat encounter, where the PCs face other creatures. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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! |
| Running Modes of Play | 493 | Pathfinder sessions are divided into three different modes of play: encounters, exploration, and downtime. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Social Encounters | 494 | Most conversations play best as free-form roleplaying, with maybe one or two checks for social skills involved. |
| 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. |
| Exploration Activities | 496 | In exploration mode, each player who wants to do something beyond just traveling chooses an exploration activity for their character. |
| 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. |
| Rolling Initiative | 498 | Transitioning from exploration to an encounter usually involves rolling for initiative. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Longer Periods of Downtime | 501 | Running downtime during a long time off—like several weeks, months, or even years—can be more challenging. |
| 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… |
| 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. |
| 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… |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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… |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Treasure | 508 | As the GM, it’s your job to distribute treasure to the player characters. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Environment | 512 | Primarily used during exploration, environment rules bring the locales your party travels through to life. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Detecting a Hazard | 520 | Every hazard has a trigger of some kind that sets its dangers in motion. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |