Sven Nansen's page

One thing I don't like about PFS is that there isn't an in-game rationale for the way treasure works. I love the rule system itself, but I find it occasionally jars me out of immersion during a session. I like my ruleplaying and my roleplaying to mesh, rather than conflict. So I've come up with an explanation.

I know that this is completely unofficial. I've never mentioned it when GMing, and never will. But thinking to myself that it works this way removes a small impediment to fun, and makes the game a little more enjoyable for me. I'm posting it here in case it might do the same for others.

When the Pathfinder Society sends an agent on a mission, those agents are required to turn over all loot recovered to the Pathfinder Society itself. The Society then rewards the agents in coin. As an extra reward, the Society's crafters make duplicates of turned in items available for purchase by the agents who turned them in.

The Society's motivation in doing this is information. Items recovered from tombs or enemy agents may provide historical information, clues to a vanquished enemy's past actions, or hints about who is supplying an enemy's equipment. This also lets the Society keep any truly dangerous items out of the hands of their field agents.

Of course the Society wants its agents to survive and complete assignments, so it encourages them to make use of resources they find in the field, including consumable magic items. The Society can sometimes glean information from the used remains of a potion, scroll, or wand, or even from broken items, so agents are required to turn in the remains of any consumed or sundered items as well, and the Society also makes copies of those items available to the agents who turned them in.

The 4.1 Guide on pg. 25 says when calculating APL to always round to the nearest whole number. Thing is, every way I count it, .5 is exactly between two whole numbers. Which leaves me unclear as to whether .5 rounds up or down.

This isn't just theoretical rules-lawyering, it arose from discussions about a previous session I GMed and whether playing up was legal in that situation.

The spoilered text probably muddies my question a bit, so to clear it up, I'm most interested in knowing whether to round .5 up or down under the current 4.1 Guide. However, it would be nice, but not strictly necessary, to also know if we miscalculated under the different wording of the 4.0 Guide.

I GMed my first PFS session tonight, running The Citadel of Flame from Season 1. Our Lodge only got started in December, and we've been mostly running Season 3 scenarios.

None of surviving characters completed either of their two faction missions. Based on the following text from the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play 4.0, I ruled that they earned 0 Prestige Points:

Seasons 1 & 2 (Scenarios #29–#56 and #2–01–#2–26):

These scenarios all include two faction missions. For characters using the standard advancement track, one of these should be considered the faction mission and the other the success condition for the scenario, maintaining the 2 Prestige Point maximum.

I haven't reported the session yet, and the surviving characters were played by local players who attend sessions regularly.

I'd like to know if I ruled incorrectly. If I did I can easily contact the players and make corrections to their chronicles, and also report the session correctly.

Ever since I first saw the three different XP charts in Pathfinder, I've been interested in doing custom XP charts. I've started working up a spreadsheet to do this, but before I spend loads of time on it, I wanted to see if anyone else had already done something similar.

What I have in mind is a sheet that will let you choose how many encounters per level, and then calculate a chart for you. So if you want super fast progression, you can choose 10 or even 5 encounters per level, or if you want glacially slow progression you can chose 40 or 50.

I also want the sheet to let you change the advancement rate for each level. So if you think levels 4 to 10 are the sweet spot and want to make them last longer, you could use the slow progression there while using medium or fast progression at all other levels.

Of course custom XP charts will break the game without matching custom treasure charts, so my intent is to include those too, although I haven't starting working out the math on those yet.

Two of the spell effects in this article are different in the sidebar which gives the short descriptions than they are in the full spell writeups.

Necrosurgery: the sidebar says the spell deals 1d4 damage to the recipient in exchange for a +2 bonus to resist disease, but the full writeup only mentions the +2 bonus and not the 1d4 damage.

Seeker's Chant: the sidebar says you gain a +2 bonus on Search checks and take a -2 penalty on Move Silently checks, but the full writeup says you gain a +1 bonus on Search checks and a -2 penalty on Move Silently checks.

Which are the correct effects?

My nephew came by the other day with one of those school fundraisers where they try to guilt relatives into buying magazines by threatening to not give the kid a SpongeBob t-shirt if the kid doesn't turn in enough sales.

Remembering that my Dragon subscription is in need of renewal soon, I looked through the list on the off chance it was there. Nope. No Dungeon either. No Amazing Stories. No Asimov's. No Realms of Fantasy. No Parabola. No sale. Sorry kid, you'll have to earn your t-shirt off someone with more "normal" interests.

This got me to wondering though, does anyone know how they go about choosing what magazines to offer for those school fundraisers? Are the Paizo and other sci-fi/fantasy titles not on the list because of business/financial reasons, because the publishers never asked to get on the list in the first place, or because the lists are decided on by some uptight schoolmarm who doesn't approve of imagination or fun?