Pathfinder 1e leaves you a lot of rulings. Familiar puts them on a page you can find again.

What the pf1 system works out, and what it has no way to notice

Bonus types stack or refuse to stack by their own rules, which is the single fiddliest piece of arithmetic in this game, and on a pf1 world it is simply gone. So is nearly all the arithmetic around it. Base Attack Bonus adds itself up across your classes. CMB and CMD, the three saves, touch and flat-footed AC, skill ranks against class skills, encumbrance: all derived off the sheet, all recomputed the moment something changes. A full attack builds its own sequence down the iteratives. Damage reduction and energy resistance come off before a total lands. Buffs are items with real durations, and they expire on the turn they are supposed to expire on.

So the arithmetic is not the problem. What none of it can do is notice, and this is a game that quietly asks a GM to notice a great deal over a very long time.

A recomputed sheet has no opinion about the ruling you made in session twelve. Nothing in the system knows the party is running two magic items behind what the encounter maths assumes they have, or that the merchant who is about to walk in has been described once before, eight months ago, by you, differently. Those are all record problems, and a record is the thing Familiar keeps.

It reads the packs installed in your own world, the journals you wrote, and the notes from the session before last, and nothing beyond those three. On this system that matters more than usual, because pf1 ships one creature pack called Basic Monsters and everything else at your table arrived because you brought it.

• A ruling written down the night you made it, in the words you used, and readable again three years later
• NPCs given a voice and a want, and kept sounding like themselves across a campaign that changes tone twice
• The scene around an encounter you already prepped: the room, the weather, the light, the noise from the street
• Party gear read straight off the sheets, item by item, so the wealth question stops being a guess
• Session notes written as the session happens, rather than at midnight from memory

• The prep, read and run loopWhat goes into a journal page before any of it can be read back to you at the table.

The jobs that survive all that automation

None of these is arithmetic. The pf1 system took the arithmetic years ago and it is not giving it back. What is left is continuity, and continuity is the thing a long campaign runs out of first.

Every one of them has the same shape: something was true once, and the only copy of it was in your head.

• A rules call you made in the first volume, now up again, and two players remember it differently
• A returning player who missed the last two sessions and needs the thread, not a tour of every room
• An NPC out of a volume you finished eight months ago, back with the same name and the same grudge, and only a scribbled note to go on
• The question of whether the party is anywhere near the gear the encounter maths assumes, which nobody has checked since level six
• Four creatures in the same fight, three of them marked with something, and no reliable memory of which one shook off what

Three tokens, one note, and nothing else touched

Conditions are the clearest place to see the split on a pf1 world, because here they are real, mechanical, and switchable from chat. So the ask does two jobs at once. "Mark the three in the front rank as shaken, then write down that the captain has offered terms."

What comes back is not a claim that it worked. Familiar reads the status list this world registers, toggles that condition on for the three tokens, then goes back to each token and reports what actually stuck. If one of them did not take it, that is what the reply says.

The pf1 system carries the rest from there. Each of those conditions is backed by an effect the system owns, so the modifiers land where they land and come off when the system says they come off. Nothing is nudged from outside.

The note goes onto a page in your own world in the same breath, in the wording the table actually used. Whoever asks about the captain's terms next, and somebody will, gets that wording back instead of a reconstruction.

The dice around all of this stay where they were. So does the initiative, and so does every number on a sheet.

Which Pathfinder the model has read more about

Every system on this site has to be recognised before it can be helped with. This one has a harder version of that problem than any of its siblings, and it has nothing to do with Familiar. Ask a language model about Pathfinder and it has every reason to answer about the edition still being printed. Terms that changed meaning, terms that were retired, a maneuver system rebuilt from the ground up: the newer game is a different game that happens to share a word.

A GM here spots that in one sentence. Getting flat-footed AC or the Combat Maneuver Defense wrong is not a small slip at a table where the players built their characters around exactly those numbers, and confident-and-slightly-off is the failure mode that costs the most trust.

Two things push against it, and neither is a setting you have to find. Every request out of a pf1 world carries a standing instruction that names the system, states plainly that this game's rules are not something the model has memorised, and sends the lookups to the compendium and journals in your own world. And the starter below, offered the moment Familiar sees that world, opens by naming the edition and listing its own vocabulary: Base Attack Bonus and iterative attacks, CMB and CMD, the three saves, skill ranks, touch and flat-footed AC.

The starter also decides where recall comes from. It says to take past events off the written notes rather than out of memory, and to say so plainly when something was never recorded. On a campaign this old that is the difference between an answer and a guess.

The starter also asks for feats, combat maneuvers and class features to be run by the numbers rather than by feel. That is a sentence written for this edition specifically, and it is the closest thing the module has to a statement of respect for what your players built.

Where the rules engine stops

On Pathfinder 1e, Familiar runs everything around the rules, and the rules are the one thing it does not touch.

Refereeing the rules is D&D 5e (2024) only. In combat the tracker, the turns, and the tokens still work; the rulings stay yours.

One setting to change: turn the combat auto-pilot off in Familiar's settings. It drives NPC turns through the 5e engine, so it does not know your system; the monsters' turns stay yours to run. Playing solo, that is the part you will feel.

This table is read from Pathfinder 1e's own data model and Familiar's shipped code. It has not yet been run at a live Pathfinder 1e table, so nothing here is described as observed.

The starter your table begins from

Familiar carries a Table Rules field per world, under Settings, System Rules. Whatever you put there is appended to every request, and it reaches your MCP client too.

Pathfinder 1e has its own starter, offered first when Familiar sees your world. It is a starting point rather than a ruleset: the terms, the table culture, and slots for your setting, your tone, and your house rules. Paste it, then cut what does not match your table.

We play Pathfinder First Edition. Use its own terms: Base Attack Bonus and iterative attacks, Combat Maneuver Bonus and Defense (CMB and CMD), Fortitude, Reflex and Will saves, skill ranks, touch AC and flat-footed AC. Look rules up in this world's compendium and journals, and defer all rules calls to the GM.
Let the PF1 system roll and resolve attacks, saves, and damage.
Standing guidance:
- Run the Adventure Path or your prepared notes as written, and read each chapter before the party reaches it.
- Respect the mechanics the players built: run feats, combat maneuvers, and class features by the numbers, not by feel.
- When the rules leave a call to you, make it once and keep it consistent so builds stay reliable.
- Keep treasure and magic items near the expected wealth for the party's level; the encounter maths assumes that gear.
- Give NPCs a clear goal and their own voice, and let them misjudge the party, dig in, or refuse to help.
- Recall past events from the written notes, not memory, and say so when something was never recorded.
Setting: [a Golarion region or your own world].
Tone: [heroic / gritty].
House rules:
- [rule]
Never speak or decide for the player characters.

The number you get back is not always the whole number

The character read finds this system exactly where it looks first, which is more than it can say for several of the systems on this site. That is the good news and also the catch, because on pf1 the pool it finds is not the only pool in play.

• Nonlethal sits on the same sheet, in the same block, and does not come through. The read carries the standard pool and its temporary points and stops there. A character can therefore read as untouched and still be on the floor, so treat the number as one of two and check the sheet for the other.
• If your table runs the Wounds and Vigor variant, the pool the read finds first is the one you are not using. Nothing announces the mismatch, because from the outside it looks like an ordinary answer. Worth knowing before you ask, and a good reason to keep asking about the sheet rather than about a single figure.
• Working out what a hit actually costs stays with the system, and on this game that is not a formality. Damage reduction, energy resistance, temporary points and nonlethal each get their turn in a set order, and a number written in from outside would have been through none of it.
• Initiative is declined out loud, and here that costs you something real, because this system does have an order to roll. You make it in pf1's own tracker, the way you always did.

One thing genuinely stays lost, and it is a common complaint on this game: whether your own NPC actually had its buffs switched on before the fight started. Familiar does not hold that ledger. Buffs are items your system owns, with their own durations, and nothing here reaches in to flip them.

What three years of a campaign leaves behind

Most of what a long Pathfinder 1e campaign generates is not written anywhere. The rulings are in your head. The reason that noble hates the party is in your head. Which of six volumes the party is actually on is on a sticky note, and the sticky note has moved.

A journal page changes what any of that is worth, because a page can be read back. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth being unromantic about it: nothing is recalled that was not recorded. Ask about a session nobody wrote up and the honest answer is that there is nothing to go on, which is the answer the starter instructs it to give.

What that buys is narrow and useful. The recap for a player who missed two weeks comes off the pages from those two weeks. A house rule stays the same house rule in year three as in year one. And the campaign's own history stops living exclusively in the one person at the table who is already doing the most work.

• How the record and the recall workWhat gets written, where it is kept, and what it takes to get it back out.

The parts that are the same everywhere

Connecting an AI, choosing a model, and what it costs do not change with your game system.

• Everything Familiar can doThe full tool reference. Everything outside combat refereeing runs on your system too.
• Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or GeminiThe connection steps, identical on every game system.
• Choosing an AI modelWhich model, and how much thinking headroom a hard scene needs.
• Voice and sound for your tableVoices, music and effects, the same on every game system.
• Campaign memoryThe record and the recall, unchanged by your game system.