1. Character Improvement: Improvements gained through leveling up should be roleplayed, not posted to your character sheet and forgotten about. Any PC or NPC with a feat or prestige class is a viable source from which to acquire that asset for other characters. For example, if you wish to learn a feat like Weapon Focus, any character that has Weapon Focus can teach it to you if you train with them�but only for the weapon they chose for their feat.

  2. Commonplace Guns: While still expensive and tricky to wield, early firearms are readily available. Instead of requiring the Exotic Weapon Proficiency feat, all firearms are martial weapons. Early firearms and their ammunition cost 25% of the amounts listed in this book, but advanced firearms and their ammunition are still rare and cost the full price to purchase or craft.

  3. Creatures in Combat: The combat rules state that a "noncombative herbivore" treats all of its natural attacks as secondary, suffering -5 to hit and gaining only 1/2 its Strength bonus on damage. However, for this game, if any animal is combat trained, it treats its natural weapons as primary attacks.

  4. Effing Bards: The versatile performance class feature does not magically increase "related" skills simply because you can play an instrument or recite poetry, because that makes no sense and whoever finalized that ability should have been exiled from the gaming industry completely. This missed opportunity to make bards more thematically awesome and to actually give someone a legitimate reason to utilize the Perform skill is repaired with the following: You only gain the increased modifiers to linked skill checks when actively using the related Perform skill. For example, Perform (keyboards) only increases your Intimidate check if you make an Intimidate check while playing a keyboard instrument (like Dracula playing Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the pipe organ).

  5. Familiars: After consulting with official Paizo personnel, including top designers, I've determined that�regardless of how the text reads�familiars do gain feats and ability score increases like any other character, based on their Hit Dice as determined by the master's spellcaster level. Be sure to take advantage of upgrading your familiar! Feats (like Toughness) can make a huge difference!

  6. Fluid Loot: Within reason, players are free to describe nonspecific character loot as they see fit. For example, if a PC were to find 500gp worth of gems and art objects in a chest, I might or might not describe some or all of the treasure. Assuming that�s not the case, you can choose to make your spoils into whatever suits your fancy, so long as the value doesn�t exceed the actual worth of the award. In the case of said gems and art, you could say it includes 10 polished star sapphires worth 50gp each, or a small gold-chased hand mirror worth 300gp, a cut pink diamond worth 150gp, and five rough agates worth 10gp each.

  7. Low-Magic: Only core spells are permitted for PCs (though non-core spells might appear as treasure), with the exception of the spark cantrip. Additionally, item creation feats are disallowed, both as normal character feats and as class bonus feats, unless you can find someone who already possesses the feat, or another appropriate source to teach you the skill. If you wish to take such a feat, you should let me know as far in advance as possible, so that I can try and help you arrange some method for acquiring it. Additionally, the creation of any magic item will always include some sort of special component; such ingredients can be found as treasure or otherwise acquired through play, but you must have appropriate reagents to put toward the creation cost of a magic item before you can craft it. A talismanic component can never account for more than half the creation cost of any single item.

  8. Massive Damage: I do employ the massive damage variant rule. Rather than the flat DC15 Fortitude save given in the official material, a sliding DC is employed, equal to 10 + (damage dealt / 10). Since massive damage still requires a minimum of 50 damage in a single hit to kick in, that means the lowest possible DC remains at the original 15, but the DC for a CL15th destruction spell (150 damage) would be 25�higher to account for increased target saves and so forth, but still by no means impossible to make for the creatures most likely to be targeted by such effects.

  9. Story Feats: Story feats are viable, but only as approved by me.

  10. Summoning Creatures: The special considerations for summoning and binding from Paizo's Ultimate Magic (p101) are in force for this game.

  11. The Magic Hat Rule: The rules indicate, in places, that ability score increases from sources such as a headband of alluring charisma should be treated as permanent; this would ordinarily mean that wearing such an item would artificially increase derived statistics such as relationship scores, in addition to the normal boosts to skill and ability checks, special ability DCs, and so forth. I feel this does not accurately reflect the flavor of either the game or the item, whether it was the intent of the designers or not, and so such attribute bonuses are instead treated the same as any other temporary magical bonus, and important things like contacts and NPC relationships are subsequently not affected by them.

  12. Triple Critical: In addition to the GameMastery Critical Hit and Critical Fumble card decks, I also employ an extra rule for critical hits. A result of a natural 20 on an attack roll is already an automatic hit (barring special mitigating circumstances) against a target; in this game, a second natural 20 on the confirmation roll results in maximum damage for the attack (no damage roll required) as well as a bonus second confirmation roll. If this third roll is also a natural 20, the target is instantly killed or destroyed with no save (a roll of 19 or lower does nothing). This represents how, sometimes, heroic characters land that one legendary, meaningful blow straight to a monster's heart, as in Disney's Sleeping Beauty or the Kate Beckinsale film Underworld, etc. Obviously, this rule doesn't apply to creatures that are immune to critical hits.

  13. Witches: Anyone wishing to play using the witch base class should please note�for this game, your primary spellcasting attribute is your Wisdom, not your Intelligence! This alteration extends to other class features and abilities previously determined by a witch�s Intelligence, such as the effects of hexes, spells known at 1st level, bonus spell slots, and so on (not skill ranks, of course). Archetypes or effects that alter a witch�s Intelligence, such as the Constitution dependent class feature of the scarred witch doctor archetype, treat Wisdom exactly the same way.

Important Note:
Regardless of any ruling by the Paizo design team or of any conflicting opinions on the matter, spell-like abilities never qualify any creature or character for any feat, prestige class, or other feature whose text necessitates spellcasting capability. That is, spell-like abilities are not spells, and so a requisite that a character must be able to "cast spells" or must have "caster level X," etc., in order to qualify is not met by the possession of spell-like abilities.