Ascalaphus Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden |
Woran Venture-Captain, Netherlands |
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I'd vote for Advanced Players Guide actually. While I like the ACG, I think the APG is more fundamental, while the ACG to some degree builds on it.
I second this.
The advanced class guide is really sweet. But they are all 'hybrid' classes. Understanding the cora/advanced player guide classes really helps with understanding the ACG classes.
Also, the Players Guide holds many other sweet things you can use to spruce up the base classes.
Sebastian Hirsch Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria |
Dylos |
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Inner Sea World Guide - This is a plethora of information for PFS, and there's a surprising amount of crunch in it, plus its the only non core pdf that is $9.99
Advanced Player's Guide - New options are always nice, and these are not as complicated as the Advanced Class Guide
Advanced Race Guide - So you can play Kitsune, Nagaji, Wayang, and Tengu and it will likely also cover any race boons you might get.
Preston Hudson Venture-Captain, Washington—Spokane |
Happy Early Birthday!
I have to agree with those that mention the APG as one of the next books to grab. The ACG does give great new classes to play with and I do agree with the poster that mentioned about the APG giving one more familiarity with some of the parent classes making up the new hybrid classes. Inner Sea World guide is great for increased knowledge of Golarion. The Advanced Race guide is great for what Dylos mentioned. I would have to add Ultimate Equipment as it provides just about anything a character would need to function in Golarion.
Dominick Regional Venture-Coordinator, Gulf |
snickersimba |
I put down APG, ACG, ARG and UM, I might go for gods of golarion so I can make some neat cleric, thank you everyone for the birthday wishes, you all are saved one piece of cake. Ultimate magic was just one of those books I liked, I personally feel its a tiny bit better than UC, only for the fact it doesn't replace any classes, but adds a very neat one. I do like arcanists. They sound explosively fun, in a I AM AN INSANE MAGE WHO HAS BLOWN HIS HOUSE UP FOUR OR FIVE TIMES IN THE LAST YEAR way. Norse gets two slices of cake because hes awesome. kinevon gets a slice of cake and this strange green mouldy thing I found under my desk when I was cleaning, I think its a half rotted cactus and a bit of moulded toast
chbgraphicarts |
3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I recommend in order:
1) Core Rulebook
2) Advanced Player's Guide
3) One of any (or all three) Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Equipment
4) Advanced Race Guide
5) Game Mastery GuideYour mileage may vary!
I second this heavily.
The Core Rulebook is the basic rules (the most-necessary book)
The Advanced Players Guide adds 6 of the 8 new iconic Pathfinder classes. It's the next-most-important book and should be gotten shortly after the CRB (or in conjunction).
Ultimate Magic adds the Magus and is the go-to-book for casters and contains almost all of the magic you'll need. You should get this in conjunction with:
Ultimate Combat, which adds the Gunslinger class, and is the go-to book for martial characters and has most of the combat ideas you'll ever need.
Ultimate Equipment isn't ABSOLUTELY necessary, but is probably the biggest book of useful stuff and really should be included for any campaign.
These 5 books effectively make up the "core" of the Pathfinder system. These are the books on which you can build nearly any campaign.
From there you have:
The Advanced Class Guide adds 10 new classes that thematically have been hinted at before, but rarely could have been perfected: The Arcanist, a hybrid sorcerer-wizard who is the "consumate" arcane mage; the Bloodrager, a rage-caster who combines primal magic with primal rage; the Brawler, who's basically the answer to nearly every "what class is [insert superhero]" question ever; the Hunter, a magically-inclined warrior of the woods who's at home as part of the Wild Hunt; the Investigator, effectively the RDJ version of Sherlock Holmes meats victorian-era-tech McGuyver; the Shaman, the archetypical spirit-speaking wiseman from naturalist cultures around the world, from the Medicine Men of the Americas, to the Shinto Priests of Japan; the Skald, the viking equivalent of the Bard, who incites Rage in his allies rather than in himself; the Slayer, the archetypical bounty hunter, assassin, and generally someone who's interest you don't want to attract; the Swashbuckler, who is every Errol Flynn role rolled into one stylish swordsman, with a dash of Dread Pirate Roberts for good measure; the Warpriest, who is a true Divine mage-knight, acting as the weapon of their deity.
The Advanced Race Guide, which adds a slew of new playable races to the list of Core races, adds new rules for existing races, such as new Favored Class Abilities which can be taken in place of the 1HP/1 Skill Point per Level you normally get from Favored Classes, special feats which focus on iconic Races, and rules for adapting monstrous races (like the Centaur) to PC races, or creating entirely new races of your own design.
These 7 books are what you'll want and "need" as a Player; as the DM you'll want to look into:
Game Mastery Guide. This adds lots of useful non-core rules to the game that practically everyone wants to experience at some point, such as Chases and Ship-to-Ship Combat, along with popular "darker and grittier" optional rules such as Madness/Insanity, Drug Addictions, Haunts (for horror-themed campaigns), great rules for helping you design your world with realistic towns and cities (Settlements), and rules for when your players want to adventure outside of the typical "inspired by Middle Earth" setting, and into the Planar realms.
Ultimate Campaign follows shortly after this for helping you flush out your campaign world and make it more immersive. These include rules for Retraining, which allows your players to change aspects of their characters by devoting non-adventuring time to, well, retraining themselves; it also includes rules for Downtime - what your PCs do when they're not entering the Tomb of Horrors and fending of Acererak. It goes further into adding rules for Exploration, and how this can be used to create a more vivid Sandbox campaign. There are rules for building entire Kingdoms if your PCs become powerful and influential enough, and how to conduct wars with other kingdoms. Beyond these major rules, it also contains a number of smaller "campaign-catch" options which help your PCs gain vetted interests in seeing the campaigns through to the end.
Mythic Adventures is both one of the most-useful books out there, and also probably the least-necessary. It adds rules for Mythic Tiers for Characters and Mythic Ranks for Monsters. Mythic Tiers can be taken in tandem with Character Levels in order to create low-level-yet-high-adventure characters who are just that-much better than their counterparts; alternatively, they are Pathfinder's answer to Epic Levels, so if you don't want to bother with trying to determine XP beyond lv20, you merely just have your characters start advancing in Mythic Tiers from there, gradually growing stronger without needing to constantly crunch their XP values. Mythic Ranks are a fast-and-dirty-yet-beautiful-and-evil way to up the power of classic Monsters. They function identically to Mythic Tiers, but are intended to be added to Monsters based on their CR (while Tiers are based on HD). Want that Great Wyrm Red Dragon to basically be a port of Smaug, and be a CR26 monster? Slap a few Mythic Ranks on him, and start the terrorizing. Because the conceivably-absurd levels of power your PCs will have if you give them Mythic Tiers (it starts out kinda simple, but as they go on and gain more, they get very powerful indeed), you can skip this book and not have it affect your game much; however, becoming familiar with Mythic Ranks for monsters is highly suggested, so it's still worth picking up at some point.
NPC Codex. It adds nothing to the game, and yet adds EVERYTHING to the game. It's a massive book of generic, pregened NPCs of every Core, Base, and NPC Class in the game, from levels 1 to 20. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's the single greatest tool at a DM's disposal, aside from the Bestiary books - the amount of time you'll save just looking up NPCs rather than randomly generating mooks is immeasurable.
And, with the Bestiaries in mind:
Bestiary 1-4. The backbone of the DM's library. If you're looking to DM, you'll want to pick these up before nearly anything else after the first 5 books I mentioned (optionally even after the Core Rulebook). They're full of awesome creatures, and unless you plan on using nothing but Humanoid enemies in your campaign, you'll want these (you'll probably want them even if you ARE using nothing but Humanoid enemies, they're just that useful).
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SO, as a bit of a corollary to the above, I'd suggest getting books based on how you want to play:
Pathfinder Core-Only (the bare-bones "D&D 3.75" way - no "Pathfinder-specific" stuff):
1) Core Rulebook
2) Bestiary 1-3
Pathfinder Vanilla (the backbone of the Pathfinder game as a whole):
1) Core Rulebook
2) Advanced Player's Guide
3) Ultimate Combat + Ultimate Magic
4) Ultimate Equipment
5) Bestiary 1-4
6) Advanced Race Guide
Pathfinder Plus (most of the major options for both DMs and PCs):
1) Core Rulebook
2) Advanced Player's Guide
3) Ultimate Combat + Ultimate Magic
4) Ultimate Equipment
5) Bestiary 1-4
6) Game Mastery Guide
7) Ultimate Campaign
8) Advanced Race Guide
Pathfidner Complete (everything in the "core" rules of Pathfinder - all the PRD books, barring the Technology Guide which expands Pathfinder from High-Fantasy/Steampunk to full-on Sci-Fi-Fantasy)
1) Core Rulebook
2) Advanced Player's Guide
3) Ultimate Combat + Ultimate Magic
4) Ultimate Equipment
5) Bestiary 1-4
6) Game Mastery Guide
7) Ultimate Campaign
8) Advanced Class Guide
9) Advanced Race Guide
10) NPC Codex
11) Mythic Adventures
Fromper |
My list of books I'd recommend to everyone playing PFS, in order:
Core Rulebook
Advanced Players Guide
Advanced Race Guide
Ultimate Equipment
Inner Sea World Guide
Follow up with any of:
Ultimate Magic
Ultimate Combat
Advanced Class Guide
But only get these if there are specific things you want to use from them. Also, the Bestiaries if you'll be GMing, because they're formatted nicer and have pictures than just downloading stats off the PRD web site. Or if you're using an animal companion/familiar from one of them, of course.
For the non-hardcovers, my top recommendations are:
Pathfinder Society Field Guide
Seeker of Secrets
Inner Sea Magic
Finlanderboy |
I woudl disagree with fromper.
The ultimate equipment is a gathering of lots of other books.
THe Ult combat is more valuable than that and so is the Ult magic.
The inner sea world guide has lots of neat options but is below the Ult combat. comparable with ult magic.
Advanced race is also something most people do not need as it repeats so ideas in other books and has ton of restricted stuff.
Fromper |
You may have a point on Ultimate Equipment having enough reprinted stuff from other sources not to be that high on the list by itself. I really have no idea why you seem to like Ultimate Combat so much. I can see it for certain builds, but other than a couple of spells and feats, I haven't used it. I've definitely used Ultimate Magic and Inner Sea World Guide at least as much as UC.
I'm really surprised that so many people underestimate Advanced Race Guide. Besides the fact that you'll want it to play tengu, kitsune, wayang, or nagaji characters in PFS, there are a ton of good options just for the core races. Whenever I make a new character, I always go through the alternate racial traits in there, and inevitably find at least one or two that I'd consider using for the PC I'm making. Other than the Core Rulebook, and maybe the Advanced Players Guide, I think ARG is the book that I've actually used options from for more of my PFS characters than any other book.
Finlanderboy |
UC I use a great deal. It has tons of great archetypes, the combat styles are very useful.
The UM has a good chunk of the book worthless for PFS with the spell words. It is still very usefull, but I find the UC has more solid content.
When I build a melee character I always pull from the UC. I may not use the UM or adv race guide at all from many characters I build including casters.
Granted I try to powergame a very optimized character. After I do that I begin to develop the story for the character.
I appreciate the Adv Race, Ult E, and inner sea guide. But the amount of use I get from the Core, APG, UC and UM are definately top.
I am reputed for character buildingin my area and I frequently get emails askign for build advice. Those are what I find most valuable.
Dominick Regional Venture-Coordinator, Gulf |
I'm really surprised that so many people underestimate Advanced Race Guide.
I think its more important too but
Ultimate Equipment having enough reprinted stuff
Starting players don't have the breadth of the smaller Pathfinder Chronicles (splat) books. I think UE bridges that nicely in one place.
We are talking about society play for new players.
kinevon |
Get a kindle. For a mere 100 bucks or so you'll save the costs either on your first slew of PDFs, and if not there with your first chiropractos visit.
Or a Nook or an android tablet, or an iPad.
Find the right one, and it can be inexpensive, but offers access to a PDF reader, and for some of them there are downloadable helper apps, as well.
Gotta say I am loving HeroLab on iPad, now...
Sebastian Hirsch Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria |
BigNorseWolf wrote:Get a kindle. For a mere 100 bucks or so you'll save the costs either on your first slew of PDFs, and if not there with your first chiropractos visit.Or a Nook or an android tablet, or an iPad.
Find the right one, and it can be inexpensive, but offers access to a PDF reader, and for some of them there are downloadable helper apps, as well.
Gotta say I am loving HeroLab on iPad, now...
I tremble with suppressed rage, as the proud owner of a lenovo android tablet.... soooooooo jealous.....
But seriously for PFS I can heartily recommend my tablet of choice (lenovo idea pad yoga 10) the battery life is pretty good, but I am looking into an e-reader like a kindle for reading in the sun, and for the insane battery life.
kinevon |
kinevon wrote:BigNorseWolf wrote:Get a kindle. For a mere 100 bucks or so you'll save the costs either on your first slew of PDFs, and if not there with your first chiropractos visit.Or a Nook or an android tablet, or an iPad.
Find the right one, and it can be inexpensive, but offers access to a PDF reader, and for some of them there are downloadable helper apps, as well.
Gotta say I am loving HeroLab on iPad, now...
I tremble with suppressed rage, as the proud owner of a lenovo android tablet.... soooooooo jealous.....
But seriously for PFS I can heartily recommend my tablet of choice (lenovo idea pad yoga 10) the battery life is pretty good, but I am looking into an e-reader like a kindle for reading in the sun, and for the insane battery life.
Heh. I used to have money, at one time, so I have an iPad 4, and a Nexus 7 android tablet, lots of options...
Not sure about battery life, overall, but I have run a scenario off of my iPad, one time, no printed copy, pickup game to allow everyone to play, instead of having to turn people away from the scheduled table... Used the android to look up stuff in the rulebooks/bestiaries...
snickersimba |
I own the original kindle, I haven't touched it in three years... I don't mind reading on it, but if I have rulebooks, I like having them in my hands. Personal prefrence. UE personally had barely anything to interest me, most of the stuff I liked from it was the fireworks. I am just sticking to murdering my spine with PFS books, I needed an excuse to get out of gym class anyways. Sebastian owes me thirty bucks for the supressed rage.
snickersimba |
I have decided to grab the animal archive and advanced players guide. Paizo, damn your books are expensive! Seriously, 39 bucks for a book? Thats a lot of cash! I dunno when we will order them or what site we will use, but we will order those two.
Mostly cause I wanna make an elven warlock with a rabbit familiar who uses hexes defensively and spells offensively.
Fromper |
I have decided to grab the animal archive and advanced players guide. Paizo, damn your books are expensive! Seriously, 39 bucks for a book? Thats a lot of cash! I dunno when we will order them or what site we will use, but we will order those two.
Mostly cause I wanna make an elven warlock with a rabbit familiar who uses hexes defensively and spells offensively.
Most of the hard cover books are available as PDF files for only $10.
Since realizing how much I have to carry to play PFS, I've started buying PDFs both to save money and make it easier to carry. I keep most of them on a tablet, but I also print out the key parts that apply to specific characters. For instance, I printed out the entire Oracle description from the Advanced Players Guide, up to and including the details of the Battle mystery, and put it in the folder with my Battle Oracle PC's character sheet and chronicles.
Fromper |
snickersimba wrote:Yeah, again, I don't own a tablet. I don't like them, I returned the one I got for christmas.When I went ot gen con, I printed out the pages I used and brought them since at that time I did not own a tablet either.
A small binder for the splat books is not bad.
I do have a tablet, but I actually rarely use it at the gaming table. Like I said, I print the important stuff for each character, so I would be just fine with most of my PCs if my tablet ran out of battery, or I forgot to bring it.
My bigger problem is the 7 or 8 splat books I bought as hard copies before I started doing the PDF thing, which I still have to carry as hard copies, because I don't want to buy them again.
Secane |
I can't print them, our library charges a dollar a page to print and my computer cannot handle large files. I still need to print the CRB. Its gonna be pricey at the library
Wow... that is VERY expensive. Hopefully you can find a print shop to print from instead. They usually charge a lot less. (At least in my part of the world.)
Fromper |
The CRB is the one book I still bring in hard copy form every game day, besides the half a dozen or so splat books I bought before I started collecting PDFs instead. It's just handy to have at the table, and I prefer looking through paper books for something where I use different parts of the book every time.
Ascalaphus Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden |
Harley Quinn X Venture-Captain, Massachusetts—Central & West |