My main concern is the lack of class features. No armor, barely any weapon proficiencies, no good saving throws, no BAB, only 1d6 hit points, a fairly limited list of class skills, and barely any skill points.
And no class features at all.
The commoner class is practically having no class at all.
It's like playing chess with just pawns.
I don't want to proselytize, so I'll leave it alone at this post. If you think of role-playing as something to do to pass the time between combats, then that's all a role-playing game will be for you. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, and Pathfinder is an incredibly crunchy system that absolutely 100% supports that kind of play.
Role-playing games can be so much more than that, however. Think of every novel ever written; how many of them are *not* about the main characters killing monsters? Anything that a novel can do, so can a role-playing game. You could have a game centered around a murder mystery, torrid romance, slapstick comedy, inter-family drama, exploration of an alien (but friendly) culture, medical emergencies, or about a million other things. Pathfinder is certainly not the best system for some of those things, but it can still be used to tell those stories. When we broaden our horizons, RPGs can be about more than just combat, just like prime-time TV can be about more than police procedurals--even though neither usually are :) The hard part is finding the players and the GM to tell stories outside the conventional ones.
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I read books for stories. I play games for game play. :-D
But I've found it difficult to transfer a lot of stories to multi-person games because a lot of stories focus on one or two protagonists at a time, but games often have 4 to 6 or more main characters.
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It could be worse...if you extend the PB table based on the pattern to account for the 6, you rolled an 11 point buy, which is actually very good for 3d6 straight down.
It's almost as if your GM pulled aspects of character creation from Dungeon Crawl Classics - in that system, you roll 3d6 straight down, including a roll of 1d4 for hp, and play 1st level commoners basically for one session. You also make 4 of them. The idea is that at least one should actually survive session 0 and become a real adventurer with a class and everything. They call this the character funnel.
That makes sense - the 3d6 in order is what I remember from my misspent youth playing AD&D (and you should see my kids, raised on 20-point buys, shudder when I tell those stories).
My rolls:
Looks like a future wizard, witch, occultist, or investigator to me.
Of course, IIRC, back in 1st edition the stat order was SIWDCCh, so those scores would need to be moved around. That order would improve your future as a cleric or druid. Anyway, it sounds like a fun challenge. It's a home game, so it's mostly getting together with people you like and letting your imaginations run amock for the night anyway. Don't overthink it.
But definitely spend the 8gp to buy a donkey. Your character is probably too weak to carry 35gp worth of gear anyway.
Don't feel too bad: 7, 11, 11, 10, 15, 10. That is a 9 point roll, I'd basically be forced into being a druid.
Actually, that is a 5 point roll. But that's just 1 point less than the maximum estimate for my own personal point buy, and a lot higher than the minimum (I'm somewhere in the range -3 to +6). And I don't make a good Homer Simpson stand-in . . . .
Actually, if you go REALLY far back, Basic D&D had roll 3d6 in order, but then it also let you do a limited amount of trading of ability score points with a very unfavorable exchange rate. I don't remember all the details, but I remember that a Fighting Man (what they called a Fighter in those days) could trade 3 points of Wisdom or 2 points of Intelligence for 1 point of Strength, as long as you had above a certain minimum level of the ability score being traded away.
I think my old Red Box Basic D&D set had you roll 3d6 in order, but you could subtract 2 from one score to add 1 to a different one.
3 was -3
4-5 was -2
6-8 was -1
9-12 was 0
13-15 was +1
16-17 was +2
18 was +3
{. . .}
You know, we really ought to just have some sort of off-topic thread where you roll 3d6 in order, then roll on a chart for race/class/alignment.
I should do that when I get a chance to dig out my Basic D&D booklet to find out the conversion rates for stat trading (I don't know what color of box it came from, but the booklet itself was blue). Or maybe not even that, since just a little bit later on AD&D dropped stat trading, although it did introduce the concepts of a several alternative rolls (including but not limited to 4d6 drop lowest) -- although now that I think about it, that might have been delayed until Unearthed Arcana, so I might have to dig out all that stuff.
Huh. No bad stats. That'd make a good ranged character of some kind, or a charisma-based caster. Oracle, Sorcerer, Bard... Or heck, building a gunslinger or an eldritch archer magus with a gun (and a 1-3 level dip into either Musket Master or Trench Fighter) would be fine.
At level 1 as a commoner, using a crossbow and providing some much needed people skills with decent INT and CHA doesn't sound bad. If the character was a halfling they'd actually have excellent stats for a lot of roles. Any of the +2 to any stat races would be nice, too.
Lucky rolls for a game I'll never play. *Sniffle*
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I never played a "Roll your stats" table, because A. I suck at it, and B. I'd be better off just "taking 10." Let me demonstrate why.
I got a 2 point buy, and at best I can play a Spellcaster Cleric who sucks nuts past 7th level. Let's try that again...
I just got a negative three point buy now, for a character who is dumb as a box of rocks, can't make prudent decisions, and is ugly as sin, and whose physical features are lackluster. (Heck, there are probably my real-life attributes.)
This is why the traditional rolling rule sucks. I'd be better off not rolling, taking 10's for each attribute, and then applying racials, since you're more likely to get negative point buys per attribute score than positive point buys.
You can't take Spell Focus and Augment Summoning until you can cast a spell.
This is not true.
You can't take Spell Focus and Augment Summoning until you can cast a spell.This is not true.
For real? Wow.
EDIT:
Just checked my (dusty) CRB. You're 100% right.