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 attribute modifiers. These modifiers 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 instruct you to fill out fields on your character sheet. You can find a copy in a Pathfinder 2 game module or on paizo.com 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, you can 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, 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 Leveling Up for instructions on leveling up characters.

Overview

When you turn the page, you’ll see a visual representation of ancestries and classes that provides at-a-glance information for players looking to make the most of their starting attribute modifiers. In the ancestries overview, each entry lists which attribute modifiers it boosts, and also indicates any attribute flaws the ancestry might have. You can find more about attribute boosts and flaws in Attribute Modifiers.

The summaries of the classes list each class’s key attribute—the attribute modifier used to calculate the potency of many of their class abilities. Characters receive an attribute boost in their key attribute when you choose their class. This summary also lists one or more secondary attribute modifiers important to members of that class.

A character’s background also affects their attribute modifiers, though there’s more flexibility in the attribute boosts from backgrounds than in those from classes. For descriptions of backgrounds, see Backgrounds.