What Character Creation Methods Did Your Game Use?

[Warped Savant]

I'm going to be starting Mummy's Mask with a group of 4 players and I'm trying to figure out what point buy I should use and what limits I should have in place.
What did you/your GM do for character creation?
And were any changes made to the fights/enemies due to the creation rules used?

I'm thinking 25 point buy and applying the Simple Advanced template to everything (and then possibly adjusting some things like AC back down as needed) but I'd like to hear what other people did and how it worked out for them.

Did you limit races? Classes? Did you allow creation feats/custom magic items? Did you use anything out of Pathfinder Unchained? (eg: Background skills) Anything else I'm not thinking of?

[AaronUnicorn]

Warped Savant wrote:

I'm going to be starting Mummy's Mask with a group of 4 players and I'm trying to figure out what point buy I should use and what limits I should have in place.

What did you/your GM do for character creation?
And were any changes made to the fights/enemies due to the creation rules used?

I'm thinking 25 point buy and applying the Simple Advanced template to everything (and then possibly adjusting some things like AC back down as needed) but I'd like to hear what other people did and how it worked out for them.

Did you limit races? Classes? Did you allow creation feats/custom magic items? Did you use anything out of Pathfinder Unchained? (eg: Background skills) Anything else I'm not thinking of?

My players had a 25 point buy, anything in an actual Paizo published book permitted. We ended up with a Tiefling Occultist, a Half-Elf Hunter, a Half-Elf Paladin, and a Gnome Rogue (not-Unchained) who is about to multi-class into Wizard with the goal of becoming an Arcane Trickster.

We haven't adjusted any of the encounter difficulties yet, and so far they've had plenty of challenge with the encounters as written.

[Shade Kerrin]

I'm using an unusual stat-rolling method, geared to ensure high stats, but not ideal distributions. While I have scaled everything up, this is mostly because I am running a 6-player game.
I don't think a superior point-buy is enough to require scaling, and if you do feel the need, I'd suggest against using the same method for every encounter. Try scaling through power, numbers, situation, etc. Sometimes letting an enemy engage under their preferred circumstance is all it takes

[Vorsk, Follower or Erastil]

This was the first AP my group finished and we ended this past March after playing for about 3 years. I played encounters by the book as often and as much as i could. My group was 20 point buy. Core races, featured races (from Advanced race guide), and others allowed if made sense for character. All classes but unchained monk, rogue, and summoner, and barbarian was mostly chained but used the rules that the HP gained from raging would be temp HP. I allowed each player to give me at any point during the AP one custom item that i would see in as either loot or they could buy. Only 2 players took advantage of it.
Group ended up being a human heavens oracle, a half orc barbarian/rogue (3 lvs breaker barbarian, rest went rogue), human blackblade magus, and a human scarab stalker hunter.
Blackblade was the only character death (hunter lost his lion in book 3 but replaced it with a roc) late in book 3 but got reincarnated as a sylph (used a larger table i found to allow her to roll on).
Allowed retraining rules. Oracle took advantage of it mid ap to move skill ranks around to get some in fly, hunter used it more to go from combat style of dervish scimitar user to bow user (around same time his animal companion changed)

[Warped Savant]

Vorsk, Follower or Erastil wrote:

All classes but unchained monk, rogue, and summoner, and barbarian was mostly chained but used the rules that the HP gained from raging would be temp HP.

Why were the Unchained classes excluded?

I've always seen them as improvements to the classes so that they're a little more balanced with the rest.

[drsparnum]

My group has a 15-point buy and anything they want from the CRB and Advanced Player's guide. Other options are approved ad hoc and I'm a bit stingy about that - it should be core to your role-playing concept or Egyptian themed.

I have 7 players, and we play whenever we can get at least 4. For example, this Saturday we will have 6. I do boost the encounters when I have more than 4 players and try to boost it linearly with the number of PCs (e.g., if the encounter as written involves fighting 4 cultists and I have 6 players present that day my party fights 6 cultists). That increases the challenge and increases the treasure too.

We are about to finish book 4. I think we've had about 6 PC deaths, and no TPKs.

[MerlinCross]

I'm using Point Buy of 25 and Automatic Progression. Limits were "Something sensible" and otherwise sell the idea to me. Really the biggest limit I put in was on magic with "No spells from APs" and a ask of Don't break my game.

However I'm pretty bad at balancing fights so outside of some good dice rolls they've been doing pretty well for themselves. Now that we're in book 2 and level 5, I plan on giving Advanced to some creatures while NPCs/class based characters are built on 20-25 rules as well.

[Morhek]

I'm using 4d6, drop the lowest, and assign wherever rather than straight down. So far, most of my players rolled really well, like ridiculously well, except for possibly the most experienced player who rolled badly enough that she took the backup Point Buy 15. I heard that this adventure can be pretty lethal, so was hoping some good stats would offset it, but I honestly feel bad about lumping her with point buy so I might talk with her about a PB 20 rebuild just to make her witch somewhat on par with the rest of the party.