How easy it is for someone not knowing the game to build or even play a character? It’s great to have thousands of option, except when you join a game, don’t know yet all the option available and find up latter that your build doesn’t work. Is it a risk in pathfinder, or are the options robust enough to neither close path early nor have necessary combo?
It’s really easy so long as you a) start at level 1 or 2 and avoid building out too far ahead, b) build to a character concept rather than try to optimize mechanically, c) avoid options released in adventures. Oh, and d), understand that retraining is actually baked into the rules.
Adventure character content is less rigorously tested, and mostly amounts to professional homebrew. It’s often super focused on the scenarios presented in the adventute and significantly less applicable in general.
Focusing on mechanical optimjzation rather than character concept often leads to madness, since feats are generally well placed within the same power bands (there are few stand out or trap options). For a crunvhy game, it’s often best played descriptively.
Characters become mechanically more complex every level or two, so starting at higher levels can be very overwhelming for new players. Building out a higher level character means choosing a lot of feats, and often the utility of those feats is only really understood through play.
I’d say it’s not terrible if you have some experience with TTRPGs and use Pathbuilder (a free character-building site/app). That said, I obsessively research and follow guides while making my characters, so I might not be the best source on vibes-based character creation.
I have a new player in my group who plays a rogue and tbh she still struggles a lot with all the different ways to get enemies off-guard. But it’s her first TTRPG overall and Pathfinder is not the best choice for that. Unfortunately for her no one in the group wanted to go back to Hasbro.
Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they’re on the ground (prone), when they can’t see where they’re being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).
Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.
How easy it is for someone not knowing the game to build or even play a character? It’s great to have thousands of option, except when you join a game, don’t know yet all the option available and find up latter that your build doesn’t work. Is it a risk in pathfinder, or are the options robust enough to neither close path early nor have necessary combo?
It’s really easy so long as you a) start at level 1 or 2 and avoid building out too far ahead, b) build to a character concept rather than try to optimize mechanically, c) avoid options released in adventures. Oh, and d), understand that retraining is actually baked into the rules.
Adventure character content is less rigorously tested, and mostly amounts to professional homebrew. It’s often super focused on the scenarios presented in the adventute and significantly less applicable in general.
Focusing on mechanical optimjzation rather than character concept often leads to madness, since feats are generally well placed within the same power bands (there are few stand out or trap options). For a crunvhy game, it’s often best played descriptively.
Characters become mechanically more complex every level or two, so starting at higher levels can be very overwhelming for new players. Building out a higher level character means choosing a lot of feats, and often the utility of those feats is only really understood through play.
I’d say it’s not terrible if you have some experience with TTRPGs and use Pathbuilder (a free character-building site/app). That said, I obsessively research and follow guides while making my characters, so I might not be the best source on vibes-based character creation.
Just play a fighter/rogue. Best way to learn pathfinder 2
I have a new player in my group who plays a rogue and tbh she still struggles a lot with all the different ways to get enemies off-guard. But it’s her first TTRPG overall and Pathfinder is not the best choice for that. Unfortunately for her no one in the group wanted to go back to Hasbro.
Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they’re on the ground (prone), when they can’t see where they’re being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).
Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.