It's actually not that bad if you work front to back in the book.
Chapter 1 details your basics and has you roll for stats. Usually 4d6 six times, dropping the lowest d6 on each roll.
Chapter 2 has you pick a race and modify your ability scores.
3rd is pick a character class. For a new character this is the point where you write down the Base Attack Bonus, and Savings Throws on the character sheet. At 1st level refer to the 1st level row.
4th is picking skill. Each class gives you a set amount of Skill Ranks to use to buy skills.
5th select any feats you have available. At 1st level and every odd level you get a free feat. Some races and class give additional bonus feats.
6th buy equipment
7th (ch 9 to 10) pick spells
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For leveling up a character its much the same with steps 3 to 5. In the case of leveling a ranger from 1st to 2nd, look a the Base Attack and Saves for 2nd level and change them on your character sheet to match. Spend any new skill ranks, pick any new feats.
Hopefully that helps some of the out line.
Me and my son have been playing pathfinder for a few months now and would like to build our own characters,but find the core rule book to be utterly confusing. Is there anything out there that is a step by step guide for building a character. I can't even level up my Ranger that I am currently playing.
Any help would be appreciated.Thanks
Well, I'll see what I can come up with. I'll cover what I do when I create a character.
Read all of the Core Rule book.
Particularly the race, class, skills, feats, ability scores, and spells section. This is just to get an idea on how everything works. You don't necessary have to read it all, but you want to understand how things work.
What type of character do I want to play?
The first question you need to ask whenever you make a character, is what type of character you want to play. Something like Aragorn, that would be a ranger. Maybe Dumbledore would be a wizard or sorcerer. It kind of keeps going from where with character types. The reason I do this first is, I have to have some type of goal at the end of building the character that I'm trying to reach.
For the purposes of this, I'm going to use the character I just finished working on for a new campaign starting up that I wanted to be a good two-handed fighting character, similar to Roy from Order of the Stick.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html
Which Character Class should my character be?
What character class I want to have is the next question. This is similar to the first question, but sometimes you might want to go and do some random stuff. So I want to be Gandalf, right? Gandalf wasn't particularly a straight wizard as he would step up into melee and have a go with everyone else. This might lead me to do a fighter/wizard/eldritch knight or some variant of it.
For my two-handed fighter, I thought about going with a ranger but realized I'd like to go ahead and be proficient with heavy armor. I also like the idea of all those feats. So, we'll go with Fighter as the class
Character Stats and Race
There are a few ways to do character stats. 4D6, dropping the lowest. 3D6 with rerolls, 20 point buy, and it goes on and on. Generally, point buy will give the most balanced characters in the party and it allows a good bit of character optimization since you can decide where what stats go where. Page 16 in the core role book has what the point buy costs are.
So, then it comes to race. Race modifies certain abilities you have and stats you have. It's possible to do an elf fighter, but you take a hit to constitution.
For my fighter though, I like the idea of being a human with an extra feat at first level and skill point per level, so. Human fighter.
Character Build
I've seen people argue both ways with doing this. A character build is basically what your character will look like per level, when it comes to feats and skills and other what nots. Particularly, this is done with feats.
Skills
During the class description, it tells you what your class skills are. For class skills, these are the abilities in which your character has been “trained” in for their abilities. Wizards gain a lot of knowledge skills, bards gain perform, and other classes other skills and a lot of over lap. When you put a rank in a class skill, you get a one time automatic +3 for the skill.
So, for my fighter I put a rank into intimidate and I gain an automatic +3 to the skill, plus the skill “rank” (or point) into it, plus the ability modifier. So if I had a 10 charasima (which means 0 for the ability modifier) I'd be at a + 4 for Intimidate. If I put a rank into diplomacy, I'd only be at a +1 since it is not a class skill.
Each class gains a certain amount of hit points. Fighter gain 2+intelligence modifier. So, fighter with a twelve intelligence would have 3 hit points per level. Since I'm doinga human, I'll have 4 skill points per level. I can not have more ranks(or points) in a skill past my character level.
Hit Points
Hit points are fairly simple once you get the math.
First level, you gain your full hit die. Fighters have a d10. Lets say I have a constitution of 14, which means a +2 ability modifier. At first level I'd have 10(from my hit die) + 2 from my constitution score. This gets me 12 hit points. If I can have fighter as a favored class, this can allow me to gain an extra hit point or skill point. Since I'm doing a fighter, I'll go with the extra hit point so that means I have 13 hit points at first level.
At each additional level, there are a few ways to do this depending on the group, but usually you'd take the hit die and give it a roll. If I rolled a 7, I'd take the 13 I had and add 7. From 20 I'd add two from my constitution score and then another hit point for continuing to advance in fighter. So I'd be at 23 hit points.
Calculate saves
This is where you take your class saves and add it to your ability modifiers plus any other random modifiers to saves you might have.
Example is if I have a 13 dex, as a fighter I'd only have a +1 to my reflex save.
Equipment
This is where your purchase your starting equipment. Page 399 has your starting wealth depending on class.
Continue on
I could go further, but hopefully this helped. I'd recommend trying to fill in everything on the character sheet. At that point, the character should be built. Dorje offered the good advice, of simply following the book chapter by chapter, as it is fairly straight forward with what you need to do in character creation and acts as a guide in the steps.
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Mike are you playing in a home game or is it PFS? If it is society, there should be people at the place you play that can answer questions as they come up. It is not hard, just slightly confusing till someone says "this is what they mean by...." If you still have questions, can't the GM of your game answer the questions?