Making characters as a gm.

[Player Someone.]

It is my first time running a campaign and I need help with building the stats on my characters. I also need help with coming up with names and a storyline. I mostly need help with starting it out. I have been working on it for several months. Thanks.

[Eric the Alesmith]

Start here, if you are building your own : http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/npcCodex/core/index.html

This will give you one character per class and level, for all the core classes. That should give you a good starting off point, to tweak instead of building from scratch...

Alternatively, you could always pick up an adventure path, though that is obviously significantly less free... Depends on how much effort you want to put into it, how much time you have, etc. Certainly would make things easier to start out with.

Good luck!

[Mark Hoover]

Player Someone: welcome! The Pathfinder SRD is also a good place to start. You said you also want backgrounds, story. What do you mean here?

Do you have an idea of what you want your game to be, what its setting is or what kind of monsters you want w/your NPCs? What sort of conflicts do you want your players to resolve? What's the main objective or what goal are the characters supposed to accomplish?

Here's an idea:

Navrek the Brute:

Enforcer (Human Adept 5)

Enforcer

CR 3

XP 800
Human Adept 5
NE Medium humanoid (human)
Init +1; Senses Perception +4

DEFENSE

AC 15, touch 11, flat-footed 14 (+4 armor, +1 Dex)
hp 27 (5d6+10)
Fort +2, Ref +5, Will +7

OFFENSE

Speed 30 ft.
Melee mwk club +7 (1d6+6)
Ranged dagger +3 (1d4+4/19–20)

Adept Spells Prepared (CL 5th; concentration +7)
2nd—bull's strength, mirror image
1st—cause fear (DC 13), command (DC 13), cure light wounds
0th (at will)—ghost sound (DC 12), light, stabilize
TACTICS

Before Combat The adept casts bull's strength.

During Combat The adept casts mirror image, then attacks with his club. If he has trouble landing blows, he switches to his wand of burning hands.

Base Statistics

Without bull's strength, the adept's statistics are Melee mwk club +5 (1d6+3); Ranged dagger +3 (1d4+2/19–20); Str 14; CMB +4; CMD 15.

STATISTICS

Str 18, Dex 12, Con 11, Int 9, Wis 14, Cha 8
Base Atk +2; CMB +6; CMD 17
Feats Cleave, Light Armor Proficiency, Power Attack, Toughness
Skills Intimidate +4, Knowledge (local) +4, Knowledge (religion) +3, Perception +4
Languages Common
SQ summon familiar (weasel)
Combat Gear scroll of cure moderate wounds, wand of burning hands (CL 5th, 9 charges), alchemist's fire (3), tanglefoot bag; Other Gear chain shirt, dagger, masterwork club, cloak of resistance +1, belt pouch, manacles (2), silver holy symbol, spell component pouch, 2 gp

Navrek the Brute is your main villain, your Big Bad Evil Guy or BBEG. He's a bully in a small, outlying town where he and his gang, the Cudgel Boys keep people in line and paying for their protection through intimidation and fear. The profits in town are getting thin though, so Navrek had a brilliant (for him) idea: scare up some monsters, then pose as mercenaries to guard local travelers.

While on the road the some of the Cudgel Boys wrangle the monster into position, while the ones in the caravan use the threat to extort more money. The characters could either be a rival protectorate, hear about monsters in the area or perhaps might be passing through in search of other adventures.

The extra monsters will be minor nuisances the Cudgel Boys can control: fire beetles, dire rats, perhaps a single stirge. Whatever the case, once the PCs get involved the threat is revealed and the plot really gets underway.

[master_marshmallow]

Obviously, you can choose to or not to use this method, but the NPCs all have given stat arrays in game.

Standard array is for NPCs are 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, in any order as you see fit. This is mainly for NPCs like commoners, experts, and aristocrats who really have no need for actually making up a stat array.

Elite Array is 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8, and is for NPCs who have levels in an actual class that PCs would normally take.

Myself, I like to give all my 'mook and goon' NPCs the elite array, all my non combatant NPCs the basic array, and for Boss NPCs I use the exact same stat determining method that I let my players use.

Typically for different types of encounters, I like to come up with at least two different types of bad guys, usually bad guy A and bad guy B, or 1 and 2, respectively, who have different strategies in combat. Usually that means one of them is a melee character and the other is ranged, and I save the caster classes for special cases, usually the Boss himself, or one of them.

[Inkwell]

Would you be willing to share more info on the storyline? Hard to give you some specific hints on that stuff without some knowledge of it. Otherwise, I can point you to a few threads here on the boards about ideas other people came up with for starting an adventure.

1001 Campaign Seeds: [Link]
Adventures from Newspapers: [Link]

And if some of this helps but your looking for more, I suggest checking out name and idea generators on the internet. Places like Seventh Sanctum (Link) can help with some name and idea generators.

[Player Someone.]

Thanks everyone for your help, :) .