Newbie's Barbarian

[Karrothesus]

I'm fairly new to Pathfinder and have tried to create a level 2 Barbarian (using Hero Lab), and would like input on my build. I do not have a backstory for the character yet and am open to suggestions as I'm still new to the lore of the world. Any suggestions that you can give me about the stats and abilities would be fantastic, thank you!
Character Sheet

[pgfrix]

Some general thoughts:

If you're only shoring up one save, it should probably be Will.  The suite of mind-affecting spells are to be avoided like the plague by barbs.  At the end stage, Dominate Person could mean a dead PC on the table.

Survival sees a little more use over K: Nature, IMO.

If skill points get low, consider an even split on Climb/Swim; those skills are both easily modified by raging.

[Karrothesus]

Alright thank you, I am honestly completely confused by paizo and how it works. When i try to create a character it only allows me to use my forum name to create it, and I also can't find the past session that I did. And where do I find a general character sheet to bring to sessions? Is the one from Hero Lab sufficient?

[Andrew Roberts]

The chronicle sheet you have for your session is sufficient. Sometimes us liaisons take a while to report so it will show up online, but chronicle sheets are the only thing your GM will look at when it comes to past sessions. In fact, if it were online and you didn't have your chronicle sheet, that would be a problem. The chronicle is far more important.

[Abraham Z]

You can print a character sheet from Hero Lab (though not, I think, if you only have the ipad version of Hero Lab). You can also fill one in manually - there are lots of different blank character sheets available online (I think paizo has one on their website, though I'm not sure because I just print from Hero Lab).

It's important to remember that Hero Lab is a separate company from paizo and really, it's just a player aid. It can be *very* handy and it saves a ton of time looking up the details of spells, magic items, etc, especially when the exact wording of something matters. But it also has plenty of mistakes and because it's doing the calculations for you, it's easy to use Hero Lab and not really understand why your character has the stats that HL is calculating. My advice is to use Hero Lab but also build a copy of your character sheet from scratch, just using your own understanding of the rules. You'll probably find a bunch of differences between the two - don't worry about it too much and if you can't figure them out yourself, just bring both copies 15 minutes early to your next gameday and any of us can help you work out the mechanical reasons why something is getting calculated one way or the other.

With regard to Barbarians, it's important to remember that you will spend much, but not all, of your time in Rage, which will change many of your key stats in important ways. It will get really tedious and confusing if you have to recalculate those every time you go in and out of rage, so my advice is to have two separate columns on your character sheet, one for rage and one for non-rage (Hero Lab of course does all this in a very handy way by just giving you a check box so you can click rage on and off).

My first character was a Barbarian and he's still really fun to play and I think it's a great class for a beginner - you get to be in the thick of things, you do a lot of damage, you take a lot of damage, and you get to make some fun choices with your character development through your rage powers. There are some great guides to the various classes online that can help a lot to make sense of the huge numbers of options - a good clearinghouse of all of them is at http://zenithgames.blogspot.com/2012/11/...uides.html . The AM Barbarian guide is very good and has tons of good pointers.

A few Barbarian observations from my own experience:

* Before you play at level 2, you need to decide if you are playing a (original or chained) Barbarian or an Unchained Barbarian. The latter is, I think, regarded as an improvement on the original class. I don't really know because my barb is an original one, so I'm not really a good one to advise you on that, but the key point is that you can change anything about your character freely until you play them at level 2, so this is a choice that you'll need to make.

* Rage powers are what give Barbarians their individualized distinctiveness and you'll only get a few, so you'll want to think about which ones you want and how they fit together. Some of them are really fun and some don't do much. I built my barbarian to use the spell sunder rage power and even though I've only gotten a few chances to actually use it, it has been some of the most fun of the character when those chances have come up. I also built my barbarian around the superstition rage power, which is a very double-edged one - it has saved me multiple times, but also almost caused complete disaster some other times.

* Archetypes are variations on the basic class that add elements in exchange for subtracting some of the base class pieces. If you take an archetype you'll want to make that choice at the outset. Like rage powers, this is basically another way of customizing your barbarian.

* You'll get hit. A lot. Your armor class is probably never going to be too good, so you need to be aware of that and prepared for it.

* Re back story, I wouldn't worry about it too much now and you can let the pieces fall into place as you get more knowledge about the different regions and storylines of Golarion. For now you could start with two simple facts: your character is (at least according to others) uncivilized (i.e. a barbarian), and your character has a really bad temper. If you just think of the reasons why, that'll give you the start to developing your character's back story and you can easily add more as you go along and get ideas.

Hope this helps.

[Doonamis]

* You'll get hit. A lot. Your armor class is probably never going to be too good, so you need to be aware of that and prepared for it.

An important item to pick up would be a wand of cure light wounds.  You can get one for 2 prestige points, which by level two you almost certainly have.  It will come with 50 charges and will heal 1d8+1 hp per charge (most GM's locally will let you take averages of 2 charges for 11 hp).

While you can't activate it, normally someone else at the table will be able to use it on you to heal you up after you get hurt.  It's good policy to pick one up on every character as soon as possible so that you have a way to heal yourself.

[Eric]

Power Attack