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The Life of a Party

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 64
Once a group has its players, the elements of the game are decided upon, and characters are made, it’s time for adventure! The importance of the players doesn’t end when the GM’s story begins. The ways players cooperate, characters play off of each other, and an adventuring party functions together can determine not just the success or failure of an adventure, but also the fortune of a gaming group as a whole. This section focuses on elements of the game GMs—and their players—should consider to improve the quality of their parties, make running the game easier, and generally spend more game time roleplaying and less time squabbling. Keeping in mind some of the issues and sticking points most commonly faced during roleplaying games can help you steer your party away from problems, frustrations, and wasted time.

Gathering A Group

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 64
There’s an important step between creating characters and having that first adventure: forming an adventuring party. Unless your players have discussed connections between their characters in advance, you might find yourself with a disparate group of individuals seemingly unlikely to work toward the same goal. This can prove an extremely daunting task, and may require some quick and clever improvisation, though experienced players are likely to try and make the job easier for you by responding receptively to potential common interests. The less handwaving a GM has to do, however, the stronger a story feels. To help a group deal with the often-awkward first encounter, the following options aid in transforming a group of strangers into a cohesive adventuring party.

Party Composition

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 65
As long as every player is participating and having fun, there’s no right or wrong number of players in a gaming group. Yet times arise when the number of characters and the choices they make have a significant effect on an adventure, and can potentially compromise the enjoyment of all involved.

Handling Treasure

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 66
Over the course of any adventure, there are treasures to find and rewards to win. While the shape of these rewards can vary wildly (see Chapter 5), the way PCs handle such rewards can create a host of issues, the most common being how to divide treasure fairly. Groups should work out how their party divides treasure early on to avoid tensions mid-adventure, and GMs should watch for signs of growing resentment and offer advice as needed, keeping in mind the following factors.

By Need: While it’s easy enough to give every PC an equal share of the coins found or gained by selling art, jewelry, and easily liquidated items, desirable magic items and other unique treasures pose their own problems. If the group finds an item that would be beneficial to a certain character, most groups will allow that character to use it, for the good of all. If two characters want the same item, they can resolve who gets it by determining who would receive the greater benefit. Should this prove unclear or even, the players can determine who gets it by whatever method pleases them—high die roll, sharing the item, or even paying the other person for the privilege of using it—as long as the game keeps moving along. This is a simple system for the players, but relies on you providing equally useful items for every member of the party, which may stretch credulity.

By Value: In a more complex method of handling treasure, the characters collect their loot and wait to divide it until they’re safely out of harm’s way. Then the gp value of all the items is totaled, and every character takes a turn choosing an item. The value of that item is then subtracted from the character’s share of the overall treasure. This system ensures that characters who don’t find items they want among the treasure have money to buy other items, while characters who do want treasure items have proportionately less money.

NPC Shares: Seldom discussed, NPCs have their own motives. Does a cohort get a share of the treasure? A hireling or follower? An NPC who’s tagging along? An animal companion? Before splitting up treasure, the entire group—and any avaricious NPCs—should be on the same page about where the loot goes in the end (and such issues can conveniently resolve the problem of the character with too many hirelings or cohorts).

Death of a Hero

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 67
Inevitably, whether in a dramatic sacrifice or merely through bad luck with the dice, player characters die. How the group reacts to the death—and what the now-characterless player does about the situation—can say a lot about your game. In most cases, the focus of all parties involved changes to making sure the recently deceased character can get back into the action as soon as possible. But should the circumstances of the character’s death render him beyond the party’s reach, it might be time to create a new character.

Alignment

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 68
Alignment is easily one of the most debated topics in roleplaying, and straddles the line between descriptive element and rules element. How it is treated varies wildly; for some GMs it’s merely a two-letter description, while for others it’s a web of permissions and restrictions. Sorting out how this system works is important; it determines how players portray their characters, and how you as GM adjudicate certain aspects of the game.

Alignment exists primarily to define and summarize the moral and ethical tendencies of characters in a game, for both PCs and NPCs, and finds its roots in the fantasy literature that inspires most roleplaying games. Many characters in such stories easily fall into the camps of good or evil, but others straddle the line and seem good in one instance and evil in the next. Additionally, the relationship and outlook of these characters toward matters of law, justice, freedom, and anarchy further divides them. Just as one character might ignore society’s rules in order to do what he knows is right, another might work great evil by manipulating laws to his own ends. Alignment is summarized on page 166 of the Core Rulebook, but the interpretations are endless, and ultimately lie with you as the GM at a mechanical standpoint, and with your players in how they define their characters’ morality. Some gamers favor strict alignments and black-and-white judgments, while others prefer a gritty, “realistic” game in which morality is relative, and well-intentioned “good” characters are capable of terrible atrocities.

Many of the debates spawned by alignment arise as the system moves beyond mere description to taking on a role that affects the game’s rules. While no real-world humans can say they’re entirely good or law-abiding, there exist creatures in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game that are fundamentally good, evil, lawful, or chaotic, and some magic depends on judging a character by its alignment. Because game effects are associated with an ultimately subjective system, you should make sure your players understand your interpretation of alignment ahead of time. The following are a few ways you might handle alignment in your game or use it to help players develop their characters.

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