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If you have spare a health potion/elixir is always good to have on hand! But, yeah, otherwise you're probably not buying much with that 15One thing I rarely see on character sheets is consumables.with the 15 starting gold it's hard to justify consumables.
True, but even a single healing potion or life elixir is worth having.
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The ABC thing is also chronological: You were a Dwarf before you apprenticed as a blacksmith before you became a Fighter.
I find that most people in practice tend to pick Ancestry and Class together (e.g. "I'm going to be" a halfling rogue, or an elf monk, or a dwarf barbarian). The Ancestry choice is not one that's hard to change if you decide you want to go in a different direction midway through your chargen; I've had multiple characters that started out as one ancestry and ended up with a different ancestry.
I thing the weird one is background, since that's usually last and you're thinking about it like "what background gives the stat boosts I want, has a skill feat I would want to use, and sounds like my character." APs make this easier since there's usually only about six of them so you just pick between the 2-3 that give the stat bonus you want.
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If I look in the current CRB in the introduction, there's a series of steps to build a character.
Page 22: pick a concept
Page 23-24: overview of ancestries and classes
Page 25: anatomy of the character sheet, followed by select your ancestry.
Page 26: pick background and class
So you've already had a moment to see ancestries and classes together, along with ability modifiers for both of them. So first you review the ABCs, then you actually pick your ABCs.
So for anyone who actually reads all that, they get everything you're asking for. You're worrying about strict handholding the people who didn't read the initial handholding.
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So funny enough, i just very recently came up with a character who started with the Background. I knew I wanted this person to be a laborer because I wanted them to be a sort of unassuming person, someone who was a bit "plain" before *something* happened to them and I wanted them to have a lot of phyaicality to them because I imagined her as a big, strong, Bulky gal. It was a horror game so I wanted to go for a Hulk, or Swamp thing, or man thing situation. Where a regular persom was transformed due to some accident. I decided to lean into the plant monster inspiration, and decided to make them a wood and water kinetecist, to give them "swampy powers" at some point while trying to figure out what class I landed on Human, humans are kind of treated as the basic/mundane ancestry which would have made for a stronger contrast between the before and after and i hgave her the Ardande heritage to represent that her powers changrd her on. A very physical level.
So while unlikely it is possible to pick Background first.
I do think Ancestry -> background -> class is the best way to go, at least when providing a base framework to think of these things. Especially since the rulesbooks are set up previee of the ancestries and classes, to help provide a. I also think it is good that at the concept phase it says it is equally legtimate to atart with any of the three pillars so to speak.
But, but... There are seven Pillars of Wisdom. Aurens said so!
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So funny enough, i just very recently came up with a character who started with the Background. I knew I wanted this person to be a laborer because I wanted them to be a sort of unassuming person, someone who was a bit "plain" ...
I have created several NPCs who essentially had only a Background. "You talk to the Barkeeper," or "You hire some Laborers." Yet, sometimes that NPC stepped into a bigger role that required a fully-built character.
One amusing case was NPC Amelia Rivercast.
The assault on the city of Longshadow in the module Assault on Longshadow was supposed to be a series of separate encounters. The city's defensive forces would handle the dull parts and the party would show up for individual challenging parts.
However, my players are very hands on, so they were not going to sit out the dull parts. Furthermore, the enemy commander Kosseruk decided to throw the entire army at Longshadow at once as her only chance of overwhelming the defenses. All the challenging parts happened consecutively or overlapping. The party ended up scattered across all the city walls, hundreds of feet from each other, with the players also controlling defensive units called Longshadow Archers. I need a way for the party to communicate with each other, so I invented a messenger named Amelia who ran from wall to wall carrying messages between party members. We ignored that to do that she would need Speed 150 feet. The party members' own Speed was also fudged to get them places.
Amelia was a Runner, but Firebrands was not yet published, so I called her a messenger. She was an NPC with only a background. I didn't specify her ancestry, but the token I used for her had a picture of a female human mail carrier.
Back in July 2022 I was reading a thread Thoughts on Time Oracle? Time oracles had a boost to speed, so I wondered whether Amelia's incredible speed could be justified that way. And in the current adventure, slightly more than one module after the assault on Longshadow, I needed a messenger from Longshadow to rendezvous with the party.
So I built Amelia with full ancestry, background, class, etc. She was a human deckhand oracle with time mystery: Amelia Rivercast. Runner background from Firebrands had still not yet been published, but I could easily swap out her Deckhand background for Runner background.
The party was glad to see Amelia again. She also volunteered to escort some refugees the party had rescued back to Longshadow.
If I look in the current CRB in the introduction, there's a series of steps to build a character.
Page 22: pick a concept
Page 23-24: overview of ancestries and classes
Page 25: anatomy of the character sheet, followed by select your ancestry.
Page 26: pick background and classSo you've already had a moment to see ancestries and classes together, along with ability modifiers for both of them. So first you review the ABCs, then you actually pick your ABCs.
So for anyone who actually reads all that, they get everything you're asking for. You're worrying about strict handholding the people who didn't read the initial handholding.
The issue is that the advice that everyone simply review the entire system before making any choices isn't going to work for people that prefer to follow a list to learn the process in chunks. "But the first step says you gotta read the whole book first" isn't really a gotcha, it's just not how someone already overwhelmed by the system is going to handle it. It's an option, sure, bit for those specifically coming in without prior TTRPG experience and want to follow a step by steo guide where step 1 isn't "drsw the rest of the owl", there's gonna be an order of choices that'll minimize the need to revisit steps and make sure a new player has a guide in front of them for their character ss soon as possible.
I don't think it's that uncommon to run into people who go through lists in numerical order when trying something new, I'm not entirely sure where all these "they should form thr entire concept on their head first" comments are coming from. If you're doing that then this thread isn't about you, it's about a different set of needs whose accommodation will not harm you.
If someone is claiming ABC is an easier order going into the game for the first time for whatever reason, I might disagree (boiling down to C having good advice that would be hydroxyl to know early on) but like at least that is still actually focusing on accessibility, there it's still an understanding lots of people need an ordered list. It's not dismissing the idea someone might want or need that accessibility tool at all.