Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GameMastery Guide

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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.

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 DragonsAt 8th level, you gain a +1 potency bonus to saves, increasing to +2 at level 14 and +3 at level 20. 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. Proficiency is a system that measures a character’s aptitude at a specific task or quality. There are five ranks of proficiency: untrained, trained, expert, master, and legendary. If you are untrained, your proficiency bonus is +0. If you are trained, expert, master, or legendary, your proficiency bonus equals your level plus 2, 4, 6, or 8, respectively. Class: Your character's class provides an ability boost to the ability score most important to your class, called your key ability score.

Favorable Terrain for the PCs: An encounter against a monster that’s out of its favored element (like a yeti encountered in a sweltering cave with lava, or an enormous dragon encountered in a tiny room) gives the PCs an advantage. Build the encounter as normal, but when you award experience for the encounter, do so as if the encounter were one CR lower than its actual CR.

Armor, shields, and weapons have all of the mundane armaments needed for combat, as well as ones made of precious materials or that possess special magical abilities. Typically, specifying three intentions or loyalties works well to define a character. These personal intentions cover broad spectra of behavior and in large part define the subjective definition of good for that individual. Intentions could be as abstract as acting with honor or as concrete as devotion to the character’s mother. A person following their core beliefs or intentions feels like they are acting in a good manner, and they are likely to view actions against or restrictions to these beliefs as evil. For example, a character who believes strongly in the law would see allowing a crime to go unpunished as evil. A dual-class character gains the class feats and class features for both classes at each level as they advance, with the exception of ability boosts, general feats, skill feats, and skill increases—the character gets each of these benefits only once per level, since both classes would provide the same benefit. (A dual-class rogue/ ranger still gets the extra skill feat and skill increase at levels where the other class doesn’t provide them.)