Drewus's page

I am just curious on what peoples opinions are. Which would you rather have for character creation; Point buy or 4d6 drop the low? Also, why?

Personally I like the point buy with 20 points. I feel that it makes for a nice balanced party where all players can easily have their time in the sun, without 1 character being the "lead" and everyone else feeling like "support cast".

I say this as I have been in too many games where dice roll was used and (after calculating everything out) one or two characters had point buy equivalents in the 40+ while some others where in the 10-20 range (due to poor rolling).

As I said, just curious.

When I use the 4d6 method, i purposely do re-rolls in order to make sure the players are all evenly balanced. I don't purposely fudge the numbers, but if someone is clearly weaker because they happened to roll low numbers constantly, i do re-rolls until a number above 5 appears.

As a follow up to my original post:
http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/pathfinder/pathfinderR PG/advice/beginnerConfusion&page=1#20

I thought i'd just mention that our first game went really great, even without using mini's!

I started them off with the Crypt of the Everflame quest. Handed out a bunch of pre-gens i made (one of the players quickly altered one of my sheets to turn his guy into a monk), altered the adventure a little to kind of pull them into the game as quickly as possible without the need to look up any rules, and we went from there.

I included a cheat sheet and a graph for the Wizard and the Cleric to be able to quickly jump straight into the rulebook and pick the spells they wanted. For equipment I started every character out with absolutely nothing, I then hand picked appropriate equipment for the adventure and drew each item up on an individual piece of card with all of that items stats on the back, this was introduced when the characters met the Mayor in the town square before heading off on the adventure. He simply pulled back a hide cover that was over the top of the wagon, which revealed a peathora of equipment the PC's could dig through for their adventure. This way there was no rulebook passing throughout the game, and everyone could immediately see what items they had and what each item could do. It also added an element of strategy and roleplaying into the mix as the characters decided who would take what.

In terms of combat, my group has a great imagination and they are all really good at visualising what is going on. So I really just described the situation, the environment, where each PC/NPC was in relation to the environment and each other, and let it go from there. I told everyone that they really just had a move and an action they could perform (with appropriate compromises depending on the situation). If someone attempted to move away or past an NPC, i gave that NPC an AoO, and if someone used an attack that targeted multiple NPC's we just imagined (based on previous movements) how close those NPC's would be to each other and I would grant or deny the attack.

I know that a lot of people would consider this style of play absolutely crazy. Not following the rules right down to every individual square and action, but it flowed so brilliantly and naturally that i'd recommend it to anyone.

So yeah, at the end of the day it went really well and there really wasn't much confusion at all. I read enough of the rulebook to know the basics, but I still skipped and made up a lot of stuff on the fly. And no doubt this will change over time as we become more used to the system. Thanks again to the guys that offered help in my previous thread.

Thanks again for the advice guys. I think i'll at least give the system a shot and run a session. NorseWolf's description of how spells are memorised was incredibly helpful, and i think i'll even print that out and hand it off to whoever will be playing a wizard.

Either that, or i'll take the advice of most people here and roll a Sorcerer instead.

Like i said before, i'd really like to give this system a shot, mainly due to how much support there is for Pathfinder.

Wow, thanks for the great advice Sean. I think i'll start with those pregens, see if the system works for us, and go from there. I think after a session i'll feel a little better about how it all works, and maybe then we can delve into making our own characters and studying the rules a little more.

First of all, welcome to Pathfinder!

4E was very streamlined in its approach to the hobby, where-as Pathfinder has done a lot to polish 3.5 but it's still a complicated game. I think you'll really enjoy yourself if you can get into it, but it may not be for you.

If you're new to Pathfinder, and 3.0 based d20 rules in general, the best thing I can recommend is to ignore the spellcasting classes until you've got a good grasp on how the rest of the game works. Try running a few low-level gaming sessions with the characters who don't cast spells and see if it's something you guys can get into. Barbarian, Fighter, Ranger, Paladin, Rogue, and Monk are all really interesting and don't cast spells if you play from levels 1-3. It'll give you a good intro to the game.

I only saw the beginner box after I had already bought the core rulebook and Everflame, and not really knowing if we'll end up enjoying the system or not, i'm not sure I want to invest more money at this stage unfortunately.

Thanks again for the advice. Are there any player cheat sheets available that I could hand out to the group when we start?

I definitely recommend that you check out the pregenerated characters here. Even if you choose not to use them it's worth seeing how a character should look once you finish it up.

But yeah, avoid spells and go a couple of sessions trying the game on for size. These boards can overwhelm you with the amount of information people are willing to share, and I'm not sure that's exactly helpful right now; especially considering how confused you are. Once you've gotten a better grasp of things (and some dirt under your nails) you could try coming back and exploring specific things you don't understand. We're a very helpful bunch, I promise.

Truly the key to digesting pathfinder is taking it in small chunks. You could also try checking out your local gaming shops and see if there's any PF lovin' going on there. Sitting in on a game or two could be very helpful in grasping the flow of a session.

Good luck with your gaming adventures!

Hey guys,

I just recently picked up the Pathfinder core rulebook and Quest for the Everflame to play with my gaming group. We have never played Pathfinder before, but we have lightly delved into 4e and also a bit of Rapture. We found 4e far too board-gamey for our liking, with far too much emphasis on tactical elements and not much focus on actual role playing. Rapture was far better suited to our group, with it's free form story driven style of play, we had lots of fun driving the story forward and keeping decisions and combat restricted to just a few dice rolls with some modifiers on top.

Anyway, so i'd heard great things about Pathfinder, and after reading some advice on various forums and having a quick browse through the rulebook it looked like it was easy enough to abstract the combat a little and play without minis. I'm going to be DM-ing, so i sat down this weekend and decided to roll a couple of characters to see how the process worked.

It was easy enough to roll a fighter, but as soon as i got around to rolling a wizard, everything took on a whole new level of confusing. Spellbooks, memorising spells, restrictions on which spells I could memorise, familiars. There was just a wall of rules that I have to remember, and it's starting to get a bit overwhelming.

4e had lots of rules, and we found ourselves spending more time in the rulebook than actually playing the game, which is ultimately one of the reasons why we gave it up. Everyone sitting around twiddling their thumbs while someone reads a book really isn't a very engaging experience.

I REALLY want to give Pathfinder a go, but now i'm starting to wonder if the system is really suited to my group at all. Does anyone have any advice for helping out a bunch of Pathfinder/roleplaying noobs? Are there any player aids out there that would help with character creation, and specifically things like managing spells and reminding the player what kind of rules to apply to magic/spell management without having to dig through a rulebook in order to remind themselves all the time?
If my players can just SEE what restrictions they need to apply, instead of having to dig through a book, i think this would help greatly.

Sorry for the long post, but i really just want to give Pathfinder a chance, i'm just feeling really overwhelmed at the moment :(