Pathfinder 2e Roleplaying Game

Game Mastering

Pathfinder Core Rulebook (Second Edition), page 483

Chapter 10: Game Mastering

As Game Master, you run each session of Pathfinder, providing the link between the players and the world of the game. It’s up to you to set the scene as the player characters battle monsters, interact with other people, and explore the world.

When you take on the role of Game Master, you’ll have the rewarding job of crafting fun experiences for a group of your friends. Your responsibilities include...

  • Telling the story of the group’s adventures in a compelling and consistent way.
  • Fleshing out the world in which the game takes place, emphasizing the fantastical while grounding it enough in the real world to feel believable.
  • Entertaining the players and yourself with novel concepts, and rewarding creative ideas with interesting outcomes.
  • Preparing for game sessions by building or studying adventures and creating characters and plots.
  • Improvising the reactions of nonplayer characters and other forces in the world as the players do unexpected things.
  • Making rules decisions to ensure fairness and keep the game moving forward.

This chapter provides the tools you need to shoulder those responsibilities. The following sections break down the various components of a campaign, discuss the different modes of play and how to set DCs for the tasks the PCs attempt, provide different ways of rewarding player characters, and describe aspects of the environment that might affect an adventuring party.

In this section

  • Planning a Campaign A Pathfinder game is typically structured as a campaign—a serialized story that focuses on a single party of characters.
  • Preparing an Adventure 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.
  • Running a Game Session A campaign happens over a series of sessions. Each session is usually several hours long, with multiple encounters, some exploration, and possibly downtime.
  • Pathfinder Society 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 Pathfinder sessions are divided into three different modes of play: encounters, exploration, and downtime.
  • Difficulty Classes As the Game Master, it’s up to you to set the difficulty classes (DCs) for checks that don’t use a predefined DC.
  • Rewards 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…
  • Environment Primarily used during exploration, environment rules bring the locales your party travels through to life.
  • Hazards 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.