Pathfinder 2e Roleplaying Game

Character Creation

Pathfinder Core Rulebook (Second Edition), page 19

Unless you’re the GM, the first thing you need to do when playing Pathfinder is create your character. It’s up to you to imagine your character’s past experiences, personality, and worldview, and this will set the stage for your roleplaying during the game. You’ll use the game’s mechanics to determine your character’s ability to perform various tasks and use special abilities during the game.

This section provides a step-by-step guide for creating a character using the Pathfinder rules, preceded by a guide to help you understand ability scores. These scores are a critical part of your character, and you will be asked to make choices about them during many of the following steps. The steps of character creation are presented in a suggested order, but you can complete them in whatever order you prefer.

Many of the steps on pages 21–28 instruct you to fill out fields on your character sheet. The character sheet is shown on pages 24–25; you can find a copy in the back of this book or online as a free pdf. The character sheet is designed to be easy to use when you’re actually playing the game—but creating a character happens in a different order, so you’ll move back and forth through the character sheet as you go through the character creation process. Additionally, the character sheet includes every field you might need, even though not all characters will have something to put in each field. If a field on your character sheet is not applicable to your character, just leave that field blank.

All the steps of character creation are detailed on the following pages; each is marked with a number that corresponds to the sample character sheet on pages 24–25, showing you where the information goes. If the field you need to fill out is on the third or fourth page of the character sheet, which aren’t shown, the text will tell you.

If you’re creating a higher-level character, it’s a good idea to begin with the instructions here, then turn to page 29 for instructions on leveling up characters.

In this section

  • The Six Ability Scores One of the most important aspects of your character is their ability scores. These scores represent your character’s raw potential and influence nearly every other statistic on your character sheet.
  • Ability Score Overview Each ability score starts at 10, representing human average, but as you make character choices, you’ll adjust these scores by applying ability boosts, which increase a score, and ability flaws, which decrease a score.
  • Ability Modifiers Once you’ve finalized your ability scores, you can use them to determine your ability modifiers, which are used in most other statistics in the game.
  • Step 1: Create a Concept What sort of hero do you want to play? The answer to this question might be as simple as “a brave warrior,” or as complicated as “the child of elven wanderers, but raised in a city dominated by humans and devoted to…
  • Step 2: Start Building Ability Scores At this point, you need to start building your character’s ability scores.
  • Step 3: Select an Ancestry Select an ancestry for your character. The ancestry summaries on page 22 provide an overview of Pathfinder’s core ancestry options, and each is fully detailed in Chapter 2. Ancestry determines your character’s size,
  • Step 4: Pick a Background Your character’s background might represent their upbringing, an aptitude they’ve been honing since their youth, or another aspect of their life before they became an adventurer.
  • Step 5: Choose a Class At this point, you need to decide your character’s class. A class gives your character access to a suite of heroic abilities, determines how effectively they fight, and governs how easily they can shake off or avoid…
  • Step 8: Buy Equipment At 1st level, your character has 15 gold pieces (150 silver pieces) to spend on armor, weapons, and other basic equipment.
  • Step 9: Calculate Modifiers With most of the big decisions for your character made, it’s time to calculate the modifiers for each of the following statistics.
  • Step 10: Finishing Details Now add the following details to your character sheet in the appropriate spaces.