What is the methodology used to make the recommendations for each class in the newer Adventure Path Player's Guides? Is there a particular way you decide which archetypes, skills, etc. to suggest?
I will be running Legacy of Fire for the second time starting in a couple months, and I'd like to give my players similar recommendations.
Why not just get the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide?
Why not just get the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide?
You misunderstand. I have the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide. However, Paizo did not start including specific recommendations for each class--things like what favored enemies would be most useful to a ranger, what domains best fit the themes of the campaign for a cleric, which archetypes are most appropriate, and which skills will be the most handy--until the Kingmaker Player's Guide.
I would like to supplement the information in the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide by giving my players these sorts of recommendations myself. I have already run the entirety of Legacy of Fire once, so I know how the themes of the AP work out. The list of appropriate deities was fairly easy to come up with. I've already totaled up the number of encounters involving each of the categories of ranger favored enemies so I know what recommendations to make there (unsurprisingly outsider (fire) and humanoid (gnoll) came out on top).
I'm not sure how to go about the skill recommendations. Should I just eyeball it? That seems so imprecise. Do I really need to count up every instance of every skill check? That seems excessively tedious and it can't be the way Paizo does it because, if I'm not mistaken, the final parts of an adventure path may not be completely written by the time the Player's Guide for that AP is published.
So I'm wondering how Paizo does it. Is there a shorthand method for estimating which skills, archetypes, and class features will be most useful? Do they give the early parts of each adventure path extra weight when making these recommendations? Etc.