You Have Questions, We Have Answers

Monday, March 13, 2017

Hi Pathfinders! Early last year, we released the Campaign Clarifications document, which gave us on the Pathfinder Society team a way to answer rules questions and to adapt some rules to better fit the needs of an organized play campaign. When we put out the document, I asked the forums to tell us which rules questions have caused issues in their games. You all gave us a bunch of excellent feedback and we continue to keep an eye on the clarifications threads for new questions that crop up.

However, we ran into a bit of an issue. Campaign Clarifications works well for questions that involve a single rule from one book, but it's equipped to handle questions over multiple sources. We made lists of these more general questions and answered some of them Season 8's version of the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide, but we wanted to limit the guide to only the most broadly applicable information. As a side note, Guide 8.1 is still in the works and we'll address some of the questions in that update.

In order to answer the remaining questions, we knew we'd need to make a significant update to our FAQ. We also wanted to clean out information that was already answered in the guide, or that was no longer accurate, as well as gather the forum posts from John, Tonya, and myself that had been serving as unofficial suggestions. Today's update has been a long time in the making, and I'm happy to present it to you all today.

So, what's changed? I'll go through some of the highlights by section. Please read the full FAQ entries for any of the changes below that interest you.

Organized Play Events

• Creating More Events: The instructions for creating and reporting events now take Core mode games and Adventure Card Guild games into account.

Roleplaying Guild General Questions

• Required Materials: There were some questions about what players needed to bring to the table in order to use material from a book other than the Core Rulebook. We cleaned up the language in the FAQ entry on legal sources to make some lesser-known options more obvious.
• Factions for pregenerated characters: You can now earn faction rewards when playing pregenerated characters, as if they were a member of the faction of the character who is receiving credit for the adventure.
• Caster level and spellcasting services: We've tightened up the rules on the caster level for spellcasting services, specifying which ones you can purchase at higher than minimum caster levels.

Wealth and Treasure

• Poisons: the list of available poisons from the Core Rulebook has been expanded.
• Upgrading Magic Items: We've expanded the rules for upgrading magic items to allow some upgrades that do more than increase a number.
• Intelligent Items: You can carry more than one intelligent item at a time, and 1st level characters are never at risk of dying from picking up an intelligent item during an adventure.
• Alternative Ammunition: We've created a blanket rule to allows you to purchase magical ammunition listed on a Chronicle sheet as a different form of ammunition; for example, buying +1 frost shuriken when the chronicle lists +1 frost bolts.
• Scrolls: We've cleared up the rules around scrolls, such as codifying their arcane spell failure chance, the rules for scrolls with multiple spells, and the rules for determining which ability score is appropriate to use when activating a scroll with the Use Magic Device skill.

Character Questions

• Race-Specific Options: We've clarified the rules around the Racial Heritage feat from the Advanced Player's Guide and other options that allow characters to take options initially written for other races.
• Legal Abilities Referencing Ones That Aren't: We've clarified what happens if your archetype or other class ability grants you an option that does not appear in Additional Resources.
• Spell Study: We've expanded the rules around learning spells from NPCs and filling spellbooks to make it clear that such actions are not restricted only to wizards.

Character Companions

• How Many Companions: The FAQ and the latest version of the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide disagreed with each other about the rules for how many creatures a character can bring to the table and use at one time. We've updated the FAQ to more closely align with the Guide.
• Animal Companions and Shields: We've explicitly added shields to the list of tools that animal companions cannot use.
• Retraining Companions: We've added rules for retraining your companion creature's abilities and replacing a companion's tricks with different ones.
• Companions and Boons: We've added the rule from John's forum post describing what happens if a companion creature gains a boon during an adventure.
• Improved Familiars (Work in Progress): We have not yet updated the entry about which familiars have which item slots and which familiars can use wands and other magic items. An update for this entry is in the works, with the help of a team of Venture-Officers, but it will take some time to pull it all together.

Do you have any feedback about this update? What questions would you like to see added in our next update to the FAQ? Let us know in the comments below.

Linda Zayas-Palmer
Developer