Pathfinder Society 2: Pregenerated Characters

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Welcome to the next installment in our series of blogs about the future of Pathfinder Society in the second edition of Pathfinder! Setting the course for Pathfinder Society in second edition is lot of work, but it's an exciting time too. After all, we get to pull together your feedback and ideas with the lessons we've learned to make a better campaign. In addition to considering the suggestions we've often heard over the years on the forums, in game stores, and at conventions, we launched a series of sticky threads on the forums about specific topics. Now, we're revising our biggest topics, starting with a blog that Tonya and I wrote at the end of September on tiers, level gain, and the structure of the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide. Last week, John and Mike wrote a blog about boons and chronicle sheets. If you missed either of those, I recommend checking them out. This week, we're tackling pregenerated characters.

Pregenerated characters (aka "pregens") wear quite a few hats in the Pathfinder Society campaign: they serve as the first characters for many new players, let people jump into games when they don't have a character of their own, and give people the chance to try out new character classes. Over the years, we've received a lot of feedback on the design of our pregenerated characters for Pathfinder Society. Those ideas shaped the design of the pregenerated characters for the Pathfinder Playtest.

Now that folks have had a chance to try out the new pregens, we'd like to hear from you about your experiences with them. Are they easy to understand? Are they effective? Are they fun to play? Do you have suggestions for improvement? To that end, we have a new pregenerated character survey, linked at the bottom of the blog.

The survey's last page is about the layout and organization of pregenerated characters. For that, we have 5 proposals, linked below. We chose 5th-level Seoni for these comparisons, not only because spellcasters have an extra section on their character sheets that any design will need to accommodate, but also because a higher-level character requires more space for rules. You can view all of the designs below:

Proposal A (Portrait): This is a vertically aligned pregenerated character. It is similar to the pregenerated character released at the beginning of August. The largest change is that more information has been moved to the first page—most notably, Seoni's spells and equipment.

Proposal B (Landscape): This is a horizontally aligned version of Proposal A. It has less open space, but the art fits more naturally on the page.

Proposal C (Character Sheet): Some people have suggested that pregenerated characters use exactly the same character sheets as players will be using for their own characters. This version includes a scan of hand-filled copy of the latest Chronicle sheet to give a general sense of what that might look like, followed by the reference sheets from the landscape layout.

Proposal D (Original Playtest): This is the Playtest pregenerated character for Seoni that we released in the beginning of August.

Proposal E (First Edition Style): This is the 4th-level pregenerated Seoni from the first edition of Pathfinder. We're including it as a baseline to see how well the new designs are improving on what we used before.

I'd like to give a big shout out to Emily Crowell on the art team, who has done all of the layout work for the pregens for the Pathfinder Playtest, as well over 100 pregens for current version of Pathfinder Society. She does the vast majority of layout and art design for Pathfinder Society as a whole, and she's really awesome to work with. Thanks, Emily!

Finally, I want to talk a bit about surveys as a whole. This is now the third blog to ask for your feedback in surveys. This is because we are starting with the most important pieces of the campaign, the ones that we are planning to lock in place by the end of the year. With that in mind, giving us your results by November 30th will give you the best chance of having your voice heard as we push forward. While there may be more survey blogs in the future about critical topics (such as when we revisit the topic of factions), we do not plan to establish an ongoing model where we are asking you to fill in detailed surveys every week.

Pregenerated Character Survey

Linda Zayas-Palmer
Developer