Let's Be Clear

Monday, January 11, 2016

Happy New Year, everyone! As we return from our holiday vacations, John, Tonya, and I have been diving into some projects that have been sitting on the Pathfinder Society back burner for some time. We are happy to announce the release of the first of these projects—the Pathfinder Society Campaign Clarifications Document.

As anyone who has ever seen the official list of Additional Resources knows, Pathfinder Society characters have many options. As anyone who is a regular on our forums knows, some of these options can be interpreted in different ways. When these rules ambiguities crop up in a home campaign, where a player is likely to have only one GM, the GM and the player can work together to find a satisfying solution. In the organized play campaign, where players are likely to have many GMs over the course of each character’s adventures, these ambiguities can lead to substantially different rules interpretations from table to table. We created this document to help reach one of goals of organized play—to provide an equitable gaming experience to players all over the world. The Clarifications Document is a centralized place for us to offer official rulings for ambiguous rules.

Many of these interpretations are the suggestions of the developers who worked on the rules in the first place, which have until now been unofficial posts on the messageboards. Others come out of Additional Resources, which we will be trimming down a bit in the next update. The last source is a list of ambiguities I’ve been saving until we had a clear plan for how to address them. I’m sure some of you will notice a couple of rules elements mentioned in the Clarifications Document that are not currently legal in Pathfinder Society. These elements will appear in our next update of Additional Resources.

While GMs are free to use clarifications from this document in their home campaigns if they wish, these are not official errata. The Clarifications Document principally addresses rules material that appears in softcover sources such as the Pathfinder Campaign Setting and Pathfinder Player Companion lines, rather than the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game hardcover books. As part of our Additional Resources process, we plan to revisit this document each month and make changes if necessary. What rules ambiguities have you seen in your Pathfinder Society games that you would like to see resolved?

Download the Campaign Clarifications Document — (8.43mb zip/PDF)

Linda Zayas-Palmer
Assistant Developer