Hello, forum-goers! I'm looking, as the title suggests, for tips from the community on introducing some friends to Pathfinder.
Background: my roommate plays video games (including RPGs), but has never played a pen and paper roleplaying game. The other two potential players (his sister and her boyfriend) have similarly never played D&D, but expressed vague interest. His sister doesn't play many games, but her boyfriend is more of a gamer.
I'd like to introduce them to the game as simply as possible while still having some fun with the Golarion setting and the wide range of Pathfinder classes. My roommate's family is only going to be in town for a week, so I need to put this together pretty quickly.
My current thoughts are to provide some number of pregenerated characters to pick from, probably at level 3. My thought process behind not starting at 1st level is I'd like to give them a bit of a greater variety of powers and abilities, without completely overwhelming them.
As to the adventure to run, I'm not sure. I could put something together myself (I have a short adventure I wrote some time back for 3.5 for a pickup game that could work), but perhaps a published adventure would be better?
Thanks for any thoughts/comments/suggestions!
Thanks for the quick reply! As mentioned in the o.g. post, I'd like to provide more of a look into the cool range of classes Pathfinder has, and make sure they have a little more in the way of available options than the Beginner Box pregens would provide.
I do own a set of Pathfinder pawns from Bestiary 2 and a bunch of random miniatures to aid in visual presentation.
My advice would be to start at first or second level, and make the adventures REALLY easy. A great start would be something like the first issue of the Rise of the Runelords AP. The initial combat is against goblins who are more interested in looting and burning then fighting the PCs, the the actual goal of the combat is protect the town and the townspeople, rather then specifically slay and loot. This gives the players lots of options, and gives a good feel for the open ended nature of the game. Speaking of open ended, be sure to encourage out-of-the-box thinking rather then mechanical play. For example, if a player wants to push a wagon into a group of goblins, don't require a profession teamster check or anything, just a DC 10 strength check or something easy.
Finally, I would just keep an eye out for situations that are intended to challenge experienced players to get out of their comfort zone. For example, sometimes they throw very difficult boss encounters, or encounters that require more then just attacking with weapons (like a swarm). While this is great for players looking for a challenge, it is not appropriate for first time players.
One last hint: The enemies (no matter what they are) are slavers. They are not looking to kill the PCs, but take them alive and sell them for gold. This allows you to pull punches and even allows for rescues, rather then rolling up new PCs.