Pathfinder Society Guidelines (2024)

Väl mött, äventyrare! I hope you are enjoying a nice summer day here in the great American Midwest. I find that a cold glass of Southern Style Sweet Tea and my AC set to semi-Arctic climate levels work the best for maintaining my cool demeanor at this point in the year. But enough with the weather! Let’s get down to Pathfinder Society stuff!

I’m going to highlight various aspects of the Pathfinder Society Guide for everyone in a series of blog posts over the next few months. As a Venture-Captain circulating between multiple lodges and hitting up several conventions a year, I see a lot of variety in how everyone understands or is even aware of Society specific actions or rules. So, I’ll take this space and use it to pass words of dubious wisdom to everyone.

The first thing I should address is Downtime, which is almost certainly the least understood rule for Society play. I constantly run into players who do not even know anything about it. Every player earns Downtime when they play official scenarios, quests, and sanctioned adventures whose sanctioning documents dictate if Downtime is earned. Originally, this was done at the end of any gameplay session, but this changed shortly after the pandemic. A lot of FLGS are closing earlier and earlier, so the calculation of Downtime was transferred to the part of the player. It’s an easy thing to figure out, so let’s look at the entry for Downtime in Lorespire.

Downtime

Between adventures, each character can participate in Downtime activities. Scenarios and Quests grant two days of Downtime per XP earned. Bounties are missions the PC undertakes during their Downtime and thus grant no Downtime. Other adventures grant the Downtime listed in their sanctioning document. For most PCs, Downtime will be spent Earning Income by rolling a Crafting, Performance, or Lore check, and consulting the table below. Some abilities or Boons allow other types of skill checks to Earn Income (for example, Bargain Hunter ^{PC pg. 252, CRB pg. 258}).

Players are responsible for rolling and recording their own Downtime activities and results and may choose not to do so if they prefer to simplify play. Alternately, for players seeking more in-depth Downtime, rules for using the entire set of Downtime rules appear in Additional Character Options.

LVL 1-4 EARN INCOME (FOR 8DAYS)

LVL 5-8 EARN INCOME (FOR 8DAYS)

LVL 9-12 EARN INCOME (FOR 8DAYS)

On a critical success increase your PC level by 1 to determine results, to a minimum level of 3.

I took the entire Downtime entry from the Lorespire webpage which is where one can find both the Pathfinder Society (2e) and Starfinder Society Guides at. So, as you can see by the entry, players calculate their Downtime on their time. There are other things that can be done with downtime, particularly for players who wish to engage in crafting. All of this is left to the player. I advise players who are making crafting checks for more expensive items to have a VO or GM witness any skill checks needed for that. I will go over the Society rules for crafting magic items in a future blog post.

You may want to know how to navigate in the Guides. What I do is slide down the page to Quick Links, click on Single-page Guide, and then use my F3 key to pull up a search tab. I just type in the subject I want to find and off I go! They are working to create a pdf version of the Guide, but they have to alter it every time they edit the Guides.

Okay, that’s all I have for this subject. Let me remind everyone that QuinCon 37 will be held July 19-21 in Quincy, Illinois. You may refer to our blog post on the convention. We will have tables of SFS and PFS2 at the con. You can check out the schedule at the con’s Table-Top Events page which I just linked for you.

Regular Society events will be held every Thursday evening at Game Arena in downtown Hannibal, Missouri from 6 to 10 PM. Our monthly PFS Smackdown will be July 13th in Columbia, Missouri at Vahalla’s Gate. We will be doing a Free RPG Day 2024 Bonanza event this month. Tables fire at noon for this event.

Hope to see you at a table soon!

Xathos

PublishedJuly 2, 2024