The APG is great, useful, with lots of ideas and ressources.

- New core classes, new spells, new feats : it could appear, at a first glance, as one of the many 3.5 books. But it is much more.

Here, you have tools that allow you to "shape" you player character, to have a "race X / class Y" PC that doesn't look or act as another "race X / class Y" PC.

Paizo has managed to give many kind of "kits" (like in AD&D 2nd edition) to create (almost) unique player characters, without having tons of prestige classes all over the book.

A ranger is still a ranger, but hey, he can be something else than either a bow-machinegun or a two-bladed guy.
He can be good at fighting with one weapon and a shield, and some other kind of differences altering the ranger as we know it.

Great great book.

Looking forward to use more of this book !

This is one of the best rulebooks I have every encountered for clarity and ease of use, and versatility! Check out my full review: Advanced Player's Guide

I can firmly say that without reservation, this is the finest RPG supplement I have ever read.

What made the 3.5 system great was that it made characters highly customizable. You had the class as a base, but you could dabble in multiclass, you could take prestige classes, you could take feats, and so on.

This has taken what's great about that, and multiplied it out exponentially. Now, the racial traits you took for granted are suddenly malleable.

The 6 new core classes are all wonderfully unique and varied additions to the game, as opposed to some kind of tacked-on perk to make people open the book and then never use. My next character is probably going to be a witch.

The class sub-types are insanely cool. I can make a "Zen Archer" monk now who can focus his training into bow usage now instead of being shoe horned into a melee combatant role.

The best thing about all of it though, to me, is that none of it really broke into any kind of power creep. All of these new abilities have trade offs. You want your dwarf to have magic resistance as a class feature? OK, sure, but you'll have to give up the "hardy" racial trait.

The new spells and feats follow the same tack. Useful but not overpowered.

The artwork is suberb, like the rest of the PFRPG line. The layout useful, intuitive, and sensible.

Just wow. If this is what we can expect, then I need to get a new job to pay for all the stuff I need to be buying. :)

Like many other reviewers, I was overjoyed when the APG was finally released! The class options are varied and interesting... of course, the Inquisitor has been my personal 'favored class' since the beta testing first came out. It was also good to see new combat maneuvers, and some new spells which go a long way to proving that 'fireball' is not the be all and end all of arcane spellcasting.

The lack of editing throughout the book was noticeable and disappointing. Hopefully this will be fixed in later printings. That said, the APG is a very solid addition to the Pathfinder series with a great range of options to prevent your players from ever quite knowing what to expect...

Pathfinder managed to pack so many great ideas in one book ! I am truly amazed. The classes variant are awesome, the new base classes are great and all the rest is amazing.

At every page I always think "Waow that is a great idea".

Also the arts are excellents!! I only bought the PDF so far but I MUST buy the printed copy.

You have so much information that you need to be completely rested when you read it.

Not since the original Unearthed Arcana have I seen so many useful character flavors and flesh outs! Rules for DM and Player alike to work through and easy options to give your character more substance beyond a detailed back-story. For many years my group has created similar variations on their character classes and to have something to further that is just awesome.

Bravo Paizo!

The APG may not be for everyone, but those people are evolutionary dead ends. Tons of class options, class variants, handy feats, trait system, new classes, new equipment, new everything. My old 3.5 sourcebooks will see less use in the future. For the most part, new options are well-balanced and interesting.

This book is a lie. It does not contain six new classes. It contains over 40. The alternate class features alone change base classes so drastically you will not recognize a NPC with them as their iconic class without the DM tipping you off.

Between the Core rules book and the Advanced Players Guide you will be able to run dozens, if not hundreds, of adventures with no two characters alike.

Simply put this is the greatest supplement ever made for a player. Please enjoy responsibly.

Like everything Paizo has been doing lately this is a high quality product. The art is awesome, the layout is superb, and the content is top notch.

A staple of D&D systems is supplements with options for players to customize their characters. Every edition of the game has had a slew of such books. The quality has generally been highly variable. Most books have one or two neat new ideas in them, and a bunch of weird crappy ideas that no one ever uses. I have shelves full of past "Complete Warriors" and "Players Handbook 14's" which have seen very little use in campaigns I've run. This is the first such supplement I've ever purchased in which practically every page has a juicy new idea that I can immediately visualize being used in a game by one of my players in the immediate future.

My favorite thing in the book is the Prestige Class "Master Chymist". Designed to be a route for Alchemist characters to develop it is a wonderful riff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Master Chymist functions as an alchemist preparing extracts, tossing bombs, and whipping up magical potions to boost his allies most of the time. But this alchemist has imbibed a few too many of his own mutagenic concoctions. Several times a day he mutates into his alter ego, a bestial humanoid with a different name, and personality and goals - and supernatural abilities. When you build your Master Chymist you must design the two separate personalities (required to have differing alignments) and choose the particular mutations of your alter ego, which may be animal traits or magical resistances, strength, speed, sharp teeth or claws and such.

I already plan to create the pompous and calculating Lawful Evil Dr. Finias - investigator of the bizarre and macabre, and unscrupulous purveyor of hazardous chemicals; and his uncouthe mutagenic alter-ego "Moog" - Chaotic Good party animal and super-cuddly defender of people who feed him sweets.

I'm quite satisfied with all of the content in the Advanced Player's Guide; all of the class variants and new classes seem well-balanced and provide even greater opportunity for storytelling and role-playing.

The only issues that really caught my eye were the pervasive grammatical errors and some occasional mislabelings (see the Arcane Duelist option for the Bard, which has a few uses of the name Spellsword, and a few tables that use "a" for "an" and vice versa.