I went to a con recently and played a Pathfinder Society scenario with a pregen character, the human fighter. After the scenario our GM mentioned that we can take the character and the rewards from the scenario that are on the chronicle sheet and make a new character from the gound up somehow. How exactly can I go about doing this?
I have experience with D&D 3.5 and know the principles of character creation pretty well and have read through the info about society play so i know about the faction and character traits. I just need to know how much of the pregen character I have to keep, how much gold I get to use in creation, and anything else that is important and different from normal character creation. I have the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play and have looked at the section "How to convert your 3.5 pathfinder society character to a pathfinder rpg character", does this section apply at all?
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I have experience with D&D 3.5 and know the principles of character creation pretty well and have read through the info about society play so i know about the faction and character traits. I just need to know how much of the pregen character I have to keep, how much gold I get to use in creation, and anything else that is important and different from normal character creation. I have the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play and have looked at the section "How to convert your 3.5 pathfinder society character to a pathfinder rpg character", does this section apply at all?
Welcome to the party!
Basically, yes totally ignore the 3.5 conversion rules.
I believe the cleanest answer is for you to transfer the pregen stats, feats, eq etc to a new character sheet, pick a faction and two traits. Poof, you're done. I've heard answers range from 'just change the name' up time 'just make sure he's still a fighter (in your case).'
Indeed the Guide itself says on page 21:
In order to do so, however, she needs to “file off the serial numbers” from the pregenerated character—change the name, select two traits, choose a faction, and register the character on paizo.com/pathfindersociety — before she can continue to play the pregenerated character as a fully-functioning character in Pathfinder Society Organized Play.
For normal character creation everyone gets a flat 150 gp, but the pregens are already geared up and a few of them have some coins left over.
Since you have 1 Chronicle already you should have ~ 500 gp (give or take) that you earned which you could use to buy some additional/new gear at the start of your next adventure when you are with a GM.
Hope that helps!
: ) thanks for the welcome!
So there is no way to change him other than add the traits and a name?
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So there is no way to change him other than add the traits and a name?
When new players arrive at my games, I hand them a pre-gen and offer them the opportunity to swap out weapons, feats, spells, etc before they start the game. In essence, this is no different than creating your own character, but using a pre-gen as a base to start from.
If you've only played one session with the pre-gen, I don't think anyone would notice if you customised it before your next session (but if anyone asks, you didn't hear that from me), because if you'd had the forethought and time, you could already have done this prior to your first session.
If you've only played one session with the pre-gen, then over the life-time of your character, you really won't be missing much by creating a wholly new character and writing the pre-gen session off as experience. If you're familiar with 3.5 rules, then it would probably be a more satisfying solution in the long-run, because it will be wholly your character build/background/ideas.
Cheers,
DarkWhite
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We get a lot of new players, like totally new to pathfinder. I could not imagine telling someone they had to be stuck with the suboptimalness of the pregens. Nor that they should just toss the cert into the trash just because their first encounter with the game made them realize what they really wanted to do. We just let them take their cert and make whaterver character they want.
Everyone is quite happy with that and it increases the likelyhood that they will come back, invested in their own character, and hopefully become a regular.
+1
Completely and totally agree.
-Pain
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We get a lot of new players, like totally new to pathfinder. I could not imagine telling someone they had to be stuck with the suboptimalness of the pregens. Nor that they should just toss the cert into the trash just because their first encounter with the game made them realize what they really wanted to do. We just let them take their cert and make whaterver character they want.
Everyone is quite happy with that and it increases the likelyhood that they will come back, invested in their own character, and hopefully become a regular.
+2.
We even turn a blind eye here if someone wants to rebuild a second level character after they've had time to understand the differences between a home game and organized play. There's just no sense in driving away possibly good players over frustrations with minor rules like this.
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+2.
We even turn a blind eye here if someone wants to rebuild a second level character after they've had time to understand the differences between a home game and organized play. There's just no sense in driving away possibly good players over frustrations with minor rules like this.
I don't know if I can get behind allowing rebuilds at second. That's a good home game rule, but just a little too much, even in an OP environment (especially when the powers-that-be have really shown a dislike of rebuild rules).
That being said, letting somebody walk up to a table that's just starting and letting them get involved quickly with a pregen is a different story. I think the existing "file off the serial numbers" rule actually hurts more than it helps.
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I don't know if I can get behind allowing rebuilds at second. That's a good home game rule, but just a little too much, even in an OP environment (especially when the powers-that-be have really shown a dislike of rebuild rules).
That being said, letting somebody walk up to a table that's just starting and letting them get involved quickly with a pregen is a different story. I think the existing "file off the serial numbers" rule actually hurts more than it helps.
+1
If you've only played one session with the pre-gen, I don't think anyone would notice if you customised it before your next session (but if anyone asks, you didn't hear that from me), because if you'd had the forethought and time, you could already have done this prior to your first session.
Honestly I would be happy with the pregen with some minor tweaks to feats and starting equipment. What I'm getting here is that overall there doesn't seem to be a concrete rule as to modifying pregens and it seems like it is a house rule kind of situation. The general concensus seems to be that some modification is ok, and in some cases, a clean rebuild may even be ok.
Just to be safe I will also draft up a whole new character from scratch and the next session I make it too I will ask about the pregen. If the pregen gets a thumbs down then I will just play the fresh character.
Thanks for the input everyone!
Sergeant Zim,
As the discussions about the pregens are probably buried in threads lost to the Archives, be aware that the four Core class pregens are pretty mediocre, while the APG pregens are much better done. Also, complete reworking and expanding of the available pregens is on the schedule for Mark and Hyrum and whoever is working with them, just that a date when they will be available to us is still unknown. Plus, you or any other GM could whip up your own batch of PFS-legal 1st level characters and hand them out as pregens. In other words, the pregens available from the PFS webpage are not the only legal pregens for PFS play.