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I'm starting up PFS in a new area, my first gameday was a success with two tables. Some of the players were experienced, but quite a few were completely new to Pathfinder. Because of that, I'm going to be hanging out down at the LGS tomorrow helping people build characters.
Does anyone have a smooth process to explain character creation to new players? I sat down and tried to come up with something that I could print out and hand out to people, but after a flow chart, 20 pages of explanations of the core classes, and a two page "basic" guide, I think it's more complicated than it might be.
So I'm looking for feedback and to see if anyone else has tried to do this in an organized manner. I want to only use the Core Rulebook and Traits web supplement, so keep that in mind.
For the outline of how to create a character, I have:
1)Come up with an idea. It can be a character from a movie/book/history, it can be a schtick, it can be a combat technique or skill you want to focus on, it can be a personality. As long as you think it’s interesting, go for it. The rest of these steps do not necessarily need to be done in order, and your idea may dictate some of your choices. This is just meant to give you a structure to work with and make sure you don’t forget anything.
2)Decide what your character does. Pick one thing that is your character’s primary focus, either in combat or outside of combat. Then, pick a secondary focus that’s for the opposite situation. I.e. if your primary focus is hitting things with a Dire Flail, pick an out of combat focus as secondary.
-a)What do you do in combat? There are three basic roles you can take in combat. These categories aren’t exclusive, one character might do two or all three things at times, but they should generally focus on one.
--i)Damage Dealer: You do physical damage, either in melee or from range.
--ii)Caster: You cast spells, either to blast the enemy or control the battlefield.
--iii)Support: You support your teammates, either through buffing them, debuffing the enemy, or controlling the battlefield with combat maneuvers.
-b)What do you do out of combat? Pathfinder Society scenarios are written to take advantage of characters’ out of combat abilities as well as their fighting abilities. Effective and creative use of skills, noncombat spells and class features can make the scenario go much more smoothly or even be required for success. There are three basic non-combat roles. (Not all skills will be listed, just examples to get you thinking.) Perception helps with everything.
--i)Interact with NPCs. Usually this is diplomacy, sometimes you can use bluff or intimidate, and sense motive can be helpful. But diplomacy often gets you farther than intimidate.
--ii)Information. The knowledge skills and heal, appraise, sense motive on occasion provide the party with vital information, helping them solve puzzles and prepare themselves for what is to come.
---iii)Overcome obstacles. Climb and swim occasionally come in handy, but they can usually be used untrained. Survival for tracking, stealth, disable device and sleight of hand are more commonly useful in overcoming things that brute force or diplomacy might not.
3)Pick a class. Now that you know what your character does in and out of combat, pick a class that will allow you to do it. See the Character Creation Flowchart to narrow down the classes that do the combat roles you’re interested in and the Class Basics entries for the classes that look like candidates to find out how they do what they do in combat and what they’re good at out of combat. Once you have chosen a class, read the entire class entry from Chapter 3 of the core rulebook.
4)Pick stats. Pathfinder Society uses a 20 point buy method of assigning stats. (See page 16 in the Core Rulebook for how this works.) I would suggest working backwards: Write down the stats you would like to have, based on the priorities listed in the Class Basics sheet for your build and the skills you want to use, then tinker around to get the buy to 20 points. Keep in mind that your race will have bonuses and maybe penalties to stats.
5)Pick a race. See chapter 2 of the Core Rulebook, your race will have an impact on what stats you end up with and will give you special abilities. You can choose a race for mechanical benefit, because you like the concept, because you like what they look like, whatever you want. There are no wrong choices.
6)Pick a faction. Descriptions of the 8 factions begin on page 13 of the Pathfinder Society Guide to Organized Play. You will need to choose one, you can choose it because it reflects your character’s ideals of home nation, because you like the description, because it offers traits that are useful to your character, whatever reason you want. Again, there are no wrong choices.
-a)The guide can be downloaded for free at http://paizo.com/products/btpy84k4
-b)Descriptions are also available online at http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety/factions
7)Pick traits. Every PFS character gets two traits. These are available in a web supplement. These traits reflect aspects of your character’s background, and you can only pick one from any category (combat, faith, magic, social, campaign, race.) The campaign traits on the web supplement are not legal for play, nor are the Rich Parents or Natural Born Leader traits. Pathfinder Society’s campaign traits are the traits available from your character’s faction, listed in the Pathfinder Society Guide to Organized Play beginning on page 13. You can pick traits because they reflect your character’s background, provide mechanical benefit, sound interesting or fun, or any reason. There is no wrong answer.
-a)The web supplement is available at <still have to find this>
8)Put on the finishing touches. These can be as detailed or vague as you want.
-a)Give your character a name.
-b)Choose an alignment. Pick an alignment that fits the personality you want your character to have, but make sure you don’t violate any restrictions your class has. A Pathfinder Society character cannot be evil.
--i)Ultimate Campaign has the best description of the different alignments: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCampaign/campaignSystems/alignme nt.html
-c)Give your character a background. You can come up with something yourself or use Ultimate Campaign’s system: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCampaign/characterBackground.htm l
-d)Buy equipment. You will need weapons and armor, extra adventuring gear like rope and iron spikes and torches. Every PFS character gets 150gp to start with, so keep track of your expenditures and keep track of the weight of what you buy. Check the table on page 171 of the Core Rulebook to determine if you are encumbered.
9)Try your character out. Play a game or two with him. Don’t let uncertainty gridlock your decision making. Get a character put together and play it. The good thing about PFS is that you can rebuild a character any time before you play it at level 2, so you can try things out to see if they work. Did you take Cleave but not get to use it at all in your first two sessions? Maybe retrain it to something else. Did you want to make a brooding thief, but just couldn’t find the character’s voice to roleplay? Work on something else. Explore, Report, Cooperate. And have fun!
So, what am I missing, what can I do better, is there a better way to structure this? I'm not entirely enamored of the combat and non combat roles, but that's sort of how I classify things when I think about them or try to explain them to new players. Maybe non-combat roles could be changed to Social, Mental and Physical roles?
Any feedback would be appreciated. I'll get all the documents up onto a google drive and link them all when my PC stops hating me. That could be a while.
First, you might have them choose a pregenerated character to learn the
game. You can always play a character and retrain him/her for free if
you do it before playing a character at level 2.
Then there is 5.5 on your list, assign skill points.
zarconww wrote: First, you might have them choose a pregenerated character to learn the
game. You can always play a character and retrain him/her for free if
you do it before playing a character at level 2.
Then there is 5.5 on your list, assign skill points.
Good call on the skill points. I forgot that and the favored class bonus.
Added section 6:
6)Assign Skill Ranks. You get a number of skill points based on your class and Int modifier. Assign these in the skills you want to use out of combat. You also get a favored class bonus of either 1 skill rank or 1 HP, choose where to assign that as well. See page 86 of the Core Rulebook for an explanation of how skills work.
I have pregens and certainly encourage players to use them. But until they've done it a few times, some people just don't understand creating characters. I have a friend with level 3 and a level character who wants to create a new character, but she got stumped figuring out what stats were important and feats to take. The character is different than what she's used to and the different possible roles, with the stat and other adjustments for them, aren't spelled out in the rule books. Class guides on the Advice forum are great but they assume a certain level of knowledge and are focused on combat optimization, skipping backgrounds and out of combat roles that people might be interested in. They also go into non-core-assumption material: I want players to generate characters that they can play, not that they can play if they pick up $200 in books.
So, this isn't necessarily intended for people playing their first or second game. This is for people who know they want to play and now want to build their character, but they don't have someone experienced around to hand hold them through the process. This is something I can link to on out Meetup site to help them build their character at home, or hand out with a newbie packet, or have available tomorrow when I'm hanging out at the game store just to provide character building help.
I have always found it best to talk to the new players and try to help guide them towards the character that is in their head...
This is by no means fool-proof... But if you feel confident in your Core knowledge, it shouldn't be too far off, and you can help limit the "Options Shock" that a lot on new players feel.
As long as you have a general idea of what is in the 'Advanced' and 'Ultimate' books you can also help direct their buy-in to those books that are more helpful to their concept.(lesser issue)
You should have a basic idea of each class... A one or two sentence blurb will do...
Mind, this is just my experiance.
Most of my characters come from my enjoyment of building... I like creating characters, I have way more characters then I will reasonably play, but that isn't why I make them...
Tempest_Knight wrote: I have always found it best to talk to the new players and try to help guide them towards the character that is in their head... This is really important. It has to be their character.
Even if they've got the training wheels on, learning the game using a pregen, they should still be allowed to play the character's personality as their own, without someone butting in, to tell them 'that's not what Seoni/Valeros/Merisiel/etc would do! Sheesh! Haven't you read the blog/comic/chapter headers in the CRB? Tschh...'.
When making a character of their own, it has to be their own.
While an unoptimised, ineffective PC isn't much fun to play, it doesn't matter how effective or successful their PC is, if it isn't what they wanted to play as.
Last year, I was at an event, met a player whose PC had reached level 2, and helped her with the mechanical side of upgrading. She'd had several other players confuse her, by mansplaining how she should choose her skills and feats, to make the character they wanted her to play.
I asked her what she wanted to improve at, what she'd like to be able to do, that she couldn't yet do, and gave her several methods she could achieve that. Advised her she couldn't improve all those things at once, but to decide on which took priority.
It then became her choice, whether she picked Weapon Focus, 'to hit more reliably', Cleave, 'to whack two enemies at once', Dodge, 'to get hit less often', etc., or any of the other options.
And having been the one to make the choice, it mattered more.
I got an email of thanks after the event, and one of her local GMs told me when we met again this year, that she was still playing, as a result of having a positive experience.
I try to always point out that there is at least 10 times as much stuff as I am focusing on, and that they should look at the other options when they have the time...
You can always refine and refocus before playing for that 4th XP...
The best way to think of it is taking the Beginner Box method to the rest of the classes...
My knowledge of the classes has been expanded by some of my players bouncing some... odd... unique concepts, and then we look to see what we can do to bring it to life...
One other thing that I find helpful is using base Arrays for the ability scores... (you don't need to keep to them, but they are useful as a starting point)
Advantaged+ (16, 14, 14, 10, 10, 10)
Advantaged- (16, 14, 14, 12, 10, 8)
Balanced (14, 14, 14, 14, 10, 10)
Jack 'O (14, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13) <Almost never a good choice>
Why did WE start to play? Chances are it was because it sounded like fun, or because we were interested in history, or because we liked the people that played the game.
New players are no different now than when we started to play. This means the details are not important - for the first time one plays, anyway.
Somebody mentioned handing a new player an NPC.
Those iconic NPC characters are awesome, now I have to admit I have not played any of the newest set, but the originals were very well designed. That way they get a chance to play without the hassle of doing a character BEFORE a game - lets face it - the detail is daunting. New players who design their own PC's on the fly before a game, are ALWAYS left with the feeling they did something wrong. Starting with the iconic allows them to apply the XP to their character when it is complete.
The background story and hair color are not important, for the first game.........
If you have tablet or laptop, save A point buy calculator as a full webpage
Open page
File
Save as: web page complete
Makes the point buy MUCH easier and more intuitive as you can see what each change does to your point total as you do it.
Nice calculator BNW. I completely forgot that those exist.
Adam
I think people are misunderstanding my goal. This isn't something to hand a player for their first game, this is something to hand them to get ready for their second or third game.
I'm looking for a tool that will help players who a.) are already committed to playing PFS and b.) aren't familiar with the Pathfinder game and c.) aren't close personal friends (that I have tons of time to work with) to create characters.
I have pregens at my games for new players, but players can't play pregens forever.
I don't have time to walk a complete newbie through creating characters, especially when they want to create their own character. But I want to encourage them to make the character they want to make.
I'm looking for a tool to help players when I'm not available. I couldn't find one, so I'm making one. Though I'd love to avoid reinventing the wheel if someone else has already done so.
Tempest_Knight wrote: I have always found it best to talk to the new players and try to help guide them towards the character that is in their head...
I prefer to talk new players through character creation as well, but I simply don't have the time to help everyone out. And, people surprise me with what they don't understand even after they've been playing for a while: A friend of mine just asked me to help build a paladin because they couldn't figure out what stats were important. And they've got a level 6 inquisitor and a level 3 witch in PFS already. I figure if an experienced player can get that confused by character creation, new players can get completely overwhelmed.
Saturday I spent 5 hours at a game shop helping a couple new players create their own characters, explaining the options and how the mechanics work. I did that instead of running a game, but I can't do that very often and I can't spend that kind of time before or after a game. These are players who already played their first game using pregens and want to continue playing with their own characters. They're ready, but they need more guidance.
What I want is a guide to help shepherd players like that through the basic process of creating a character. A little more definitive than the CRB character creation section is (giving specific advice on builds, stats and feats) but less formulaic than the optimization guides in the Advice forum (explaining what's important to a type of build and giving suggestions, but reassuring players that it's OK to deviate from those.) I also want something that explains the process of creating a character, so new players can create any concept they want, rather than handing them a recipe for a specific type of character that they can follow but not generalize.
I think I'm going to scratch my initial outline, I sat down and started writing instead of planning so there are some fundamental problems with the structure. Doing it as a flow chart (or at least making up a flow chart and then converting it to a list) might be a better way to go. Some of the feedback I got from the forums and from using it with new players Saturday includes:
- I forgot the step to add Skills. Thanks zarconww.
- I forgot the step to add Feats. Thanks zarconww.
- Give some stat arrays (or a point buy calculator.) Thanks Tempest Knight and BNW.
- More links to rules references in the CRB.
- More focus on explaining the rules behind the mechanics of certain steps. i.e. explain how you use skills to achieve objectives.
- More explanation of the flow or relationship between things: Combat function leads to stat priorities leads to stat assignment (and race leads to racial modifiers that affect stat assignment.) Primary and secondary combat stats can lead to skill selection and synergize with out of combat roles.
- I should give an example of character creation using my steps.
- I don't like how I organized out of combat roles. Maybe I'll change it to physical, mental and social skills and them mention those categories in my class descriptions.
- Simplify the initial steps, link to the details on another page or section.
- Do a better job of introducing the "whys" and not just the "hows."
- Have an introduction.
Does anyone have other suggestions?
Akerlof,
This procedure is super cool.
Maybe spend some time talking about defense in combat: heavy armor, being dodgy, using magic to create miss chances, having enough hit points to suck up damage, etc.
One offense option in combat is "mounted".
One of the sources for inspiration (cool movies, cool books, etc) is "cool miniatures". I know a number of people who build a character based on a mini.
It might be nice to have a couple already-filled backbacks. There are several examples in this book or that. But let's not send new folks into a tissy over how many flasks of oil to buy, or whether to buy a week of rations or silk rope.
It's important to explain that some good options are restricted access, that they have to buy this additional resource or another to use them. In particular, if they've been told by someone else that they "should" have an aasimar paladin, or a cavalier, or a character with a non-core feat / trait / piece of equipment / spell.
Akerlof wrote: ...Does anyone have other suggestions? You can either create another step for this, or add it into the 'Pick your Class' section -
Pick Class-Specific Options: favored enemy, spells, domains, hexes, talents, etc. There are a lot of other things to add, but it varies from class to class what other 'rules options' come into play.
You might also put something along the lines of, "...don't feel bad if there is another character of the same class at the table with you. There are so many different character concepts and options, each character is different. Worried that the higher level wizard at your table will outshine your newly-minted wizard? Don't worry - there are so many spells to choose from, each spellcaster is different. Two fighters? No problem - maybe one guy is an archer, while another one takes on foes while standing behind a massive shield..." That's just a side thought, though.
Nice job so far Akerlof. I like to start off with play what you want to play. Once I know what that is, I can give them suggestions. This would be part one of your above outline, but I think it needs to go three or four questions deeper at least.
Do you have a copy of your flowchart we could see?
I have not read any of the Beginner Box stuff, but it seems the right place to... errr... begin. Particularly you should look at the players pack and the PFS character gen guides. by "you" I mean "we" as I have the same questions you do (except I do have the time usually.) These are free PDFs and probably something I will add to my event organizer folder. :)
Chris:
Good point about talking about different defensive styles. I address that a little in my class descriptions, but it would be a good idea to explain a couple of the basic theories and what are important to them: Heavy armor means lower Dex and more gp investment. High Dex + defensive Class skills is another, and these are the stats, feats and tactics you're looking for, etc... I should do the same for offense: What are the underlying theories (and therefore stats, feats and equipment) for the different fighting styles.
I like the idea of pre-made starter item lists. Choosing equipment took a lot of time Saturday with a lot of back and forth on what's useful and what things do.
Mounted combat is interesting, hadn't thought of doing that with the core rules and classes.
And yeah, I should explain that all my advice is limited to what's available in the CRB, why that is, and a hint of what else is out there.
evilaustintom:
I created a bit of a flow chart, based on the in combat options, (and eventually I plan on making one for out of combat options) with classes and builds. Then I did short write ups on each class and suggested build including things like Favored Enemy and Smite.
Good call on the point about duplication of classes. Maybe I can add something about the less-than-optimal-ness of your average PFS group and not to worry.
Right now I'm reworking my basic steps document: I'm aiming for a leaner outline with just a sentence or two explaining each line which refers both to the CRB page for rules and a more detailed page of explanation that I've written. We'll see how that goes.
In the meantime, here is a link to what I currently have. On top of the Character Creation Steps that I posted here, there's a flowchart and the Class Basics doc that I explained the different classes and builds.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6qenUsMiQacc2FaTWNEU2hGaXc&usp =sharing
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