Downtime Mode

Downtime mode is played day-by-day rather than minute-by-minute or scene-by-scene. Usually this mode of play occurs when you are in the safety of a settlement, maybe recovering from your adventures or studying an artifact you found.

Downtime gives you time to rest fully, engage in crafting or a professional endeavor, learn new spells, retrain feats, or just have fun. You can sell items acquired during your adventures, buy new goods, and perform other activities as determined by your feats, your skills, and the settlement where you are spending the downtime.

Long-Term Rest

You can spend an entire day and night resting during downtime to recover Hit Points equal to your Constitution modifier (minimum 1) multiplied by twice your level.

Retraining

Retraining offers a way to alter some of your character choices, which is helpful when you want to take your character in a new direction or change decisions that didn’t meet your expectations. You can retrain feats, skills, and some selectable class features. You can’t retrain your ancestry, heritage, background, class, or ability scores. You can’t perform other downtime activities while retraining.

Retraining usually requires you to spend time learning from a teacher, whether that entails physical training, studying at a library, or falling into shared magical trances. Your GM determines whether you can get proper training or whether something can be retrained at all. In some cases, you’ll have to pay your instructor.

Some abilities can be difficult or impossible to retrain (for instance, a sorcerer can retrain their bloodline only in extraordinary circumstances).

When retraining, you generally can’t make choices you couldn’t make when you selected the original option. For instance, you can’t exchange a 2nd-level skill feat for a 4th-level one, or for one that requires prerequisites you didn’t meet at the time you took the original feat. If you don’t remember whether you met the prerequisites at the time, ask your GM to make the call. If you cease to meet the prerequisites for an ability due to retraining, you can’t use that ability. You might need to retrain several abilities in sequence in order to get all the abilities you want.

Feats

You can spend a week of downtime retraining to swap out one of your feats. Remove the old feat and replace it with another of the same type. For example, you could swap a skill feat for another skill feat, but not for a wizard feat.

SKILL DOWNTIME ACTIVITIES

Chapter 4: Skills includes several downtime activities, which are summarized here.

Craft: Using the Crafting skill, you can create items from raw materials (page 244).

Create Forgery: You forge a document (page 251). Earn Income: You earn money, typically using Crafting, Lore, or Performance (page 236).

Subsist: You find food and shelter in the wilderness or within a settlement (page 240).

Treat Disease: You spend time caring for a diseased creature in the hope of curing that creature (page 248).

Skills

You can spend a week of downtime retraining to swap out one of your skill increases. Reduce your proficiency rank in the skill losing its increase by one step and increase your proficiency rank in another skill by one step. The new proficiency rank has to be equal to or lower than the proficiency rank you traded away. For instance, if your bard is a master in Performance and Stealth, and an expert in Occultism, you could reduce the character’s proficiency in Stealth to expert and become a master in Occultism, but you couldn’t reassign that skill increase to become legendary in Performance. Keep track of your level when you reassign skill increases; the level at which your skill proficiencies changed can influence your ability to retrain feats with skill prerequisites.

You can also spend a week to retrain an initial trained skill you gained during character creation.

Class Features

You can change a class feature that required a choice, making a different choice instead. This lets you change a druid order or a wizard school, for example. The GM will tell you how long this takes—always at least a month.

Other Downtime Activities

Work with your GM if there are other ways you want to spend downtime. You might need to pay for your cost of living (the prices for this can be found on page 294). You might acquire property, manage a business, become part of a guild or civic group, curry favor in a large city, take command of an army, take on an apprentice, start a family, or minister to a flock of the faithful.

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.

Planning a Campaign

A Pathfinder game is typically structured as a campaign—a serialized story that focuses on a single party of characters. A campaign is subdivided into multiple adventures, smaller stories that involve exploration and interaction with nonplayer characters. A single adventure represents a complete story that might be connected to the larger arc of a campaign. Playing an adventure spans one or more game sessions—gatherings where the group plays a part of the adventure over the course of several hours.

A campaign provides the overall structure for your Pathfinder game. As you prepare for your campaign, you’ll establish its scope and themes, which you’ll then reinforce in the adventures and scenes that take place within it.

Campaign Length

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.

As Game Master, you have the final say on how the world and rules function, and how nonplayer characters act. This rule’s purpose is to make the game run smoothly, with one guiding hand ensuring consistency. It’s not intended to make one player into a dictator over the rest of the group. Collaboration is vital to roleplaying games! How you implement collaboration in a game depends on what your players are interested in. In some groups, players enjoy adding details to the world and to nonplayer characters. In others, players want to feel like the world is outside their control, and the only decisions they get to make are those made by their own characters. Both are fun and acceptable ways to play.

You are encouraged to collect input from your players before you start, asking what storytelling genres they’d like to emphasize, which areas of the world they want to play in, the types of enemies they’d like to face, or which published adventure they want to play. A good campaign includes some back-and-forth at the beginning as the players figure out what characters they want to play and you figure out what sort of adventure to run. The results can range from building an adventure entirely to fit the characters to choosing a specific published adventure, having the players make their characters, and then just adapting the beginning of that adventure so that all the player characters have a reason to be involved.

As you play, opportunities to collaborate will occur again and again. When players throw out suggestions or come up with specific theories about the events of the campaign, they’re telling you what they’d like to see in the game. Try to find ways to incorporate their suggestions, but with enough of a twist that each still includes something unexpected.

A single session, or a “one-shot,” is great if your group is trying out Pathfinder or wants to play a specific short adventure. This requires a smaller time commitment but requires the GM to present the events of the game in a way that is immediately engaging, since there’s less opportunity for the players to become invested in the story or setting.

If you want to play through a longer campaign, you’ll need to add some story elements that speak directly to the characters in your game rather than just to the events of the adventure. In other words, the characters should have individual goals in addition to the group’s overall goals.