What Should I Buy For Pathfinder RPG?

[Kazou]

I've got Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook & Bestiary... And 150€(Roughly 187.77$) to buy RPG books with.

What should I buy alongside the Pathfinder RPG Campaign Setting Inner Sea World Guide?

Choices
Advanced Player's Guide, Bestiary 3, Ultimate Combat or Ultimate Magic, What you can suggest... I'm open for any other stuff too that isn't too expensive.

[Kasbark]

I'd highly recommend the Advanced Players Guide.

I haven't read the ultimate magic/combat. The Bestiary 3 is good, but by no means nessecary (especially if you have any 3.x monster manuals, you can use those with minimal conversion)

[Hyde]

www.d20pfsrd.com

buy what you end up liking the most.

[Kazou]

I'd highly recommend the Advanced Players Guide.

I haven't read the ultimate magic/combat. The Bestiary 3 is good, but by no means nessecary (especially if you have any 3.x monster manuals, you can use those with minimal conversion)

I only got Bestiary and Core Rulebook for Pathfinder... Nothing else. I heard Bestiary 3 had some folk lore creatures. What would you rate it on 1-5 scale? 5 is great 1 is bad.

[Kasbark]

I'd rate it a solid 3.5. If you play high fantasy campaigns it could easaly go higher than that, considering many of the monsters are very 'fantasy' compared to the more mundane (or at least more common fantasy type monsters)

[PinkysBrain]

Advanced Player's Guide, Bestiary 3, Ultimate Combat or Ultimate Magic, What you can suggest... I'm open for any other stuff too that isn't too expensive.
I was going to suggest Magic Item Compendium (with a belt of battle nerfed to only allow full melee attacks/standard attacks/move to make it balanced and no circlet of rapid casting). Then I noticed second hand copies are nearly 50$ ... damn.

Still, I'd recommend it ... magic items are one PF's biggest failings.

PS. 2nd hand prices for MIC are even higher in Europe, 94 euros on amazon.de ...

[Andvare]

Advanced Players Guide is probably the best written book of those mentioned.
It also got the most new classes (six, where as both ultimate X only has one each). I say that the purchase chain is Rulebook-APG-UMifspellcaster/UCifnot.

Both ultimates more adds to existing content, whereas APG gives you new content.

[Kazou]

Ok... I think I'm going with these two: Inner Sea World Guide & Advanced Player's Guide... These two will cost me 64€. Still got something left after that :)

[navar100]

Advanced Player's Guide.

New base classes that are good in their own right. (I'm personally not fond of the Cavalier. I'd rather just play a Paladin, but it's fine for those who are really into mounted combat.) Archetypes of alternative class features to offer variety within the base classes. More good feats.

Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat are alright, but in my opinion are best for when you just want splat for the sake of splat to spice things up. Ultimate Magic gives the Magus, an arcane gish, more archetypes, and alternative favored class bonuses that some people say are too powerful (human sorcerers get a new spell known per level.) There's also a new spellcasting system where players make up their own effects. It's take a bit to comprehend, and in my opinion works best for spontaneous casters. Ultimate Combat offers Gunslinger for firearms and a called-shot combat system.

If and only if you like/want Psionics I do recommend the third party pdf download Paizo offers. It is a well-done Pathfinder compatible 3.5 Psionics update.

[Kudaku]

This might be irrelevant, but if you have access to a tablet you could get Paizo's PDFs of the same books. Your budget will stretch a lot longer.

I'll definitely go with the flow here and suggest the APG, it's an excellent book and well worth the money.

Two other possibilities are the Advanced Race Guide and Ultimate Equipment. Advanced Race is an interesting book with a great deal information about the races already in game and numerous alternate races, it's a wonderful addition if you enjoy homebrewing or if you're thinking about creating your own setting.

Ultimate Equipment is a more-or-less complete collection of the random pieces of magical gear that have been listed in Paizo's other books, sorted into tables for easy oversight. It's pretty darn useful.

[That_guy_there]

This might be irrelevant, but if you have access to a tablet you could get Paizo's PDFs of the same books. Your budget will stretch a lot longer.


This.... if you've got even just a laptop. The PDFs are $10 a pop, roughly 1/5th the price of a hard cover. For those of us with limited funds it helps. (even though i cannot deny the feeling of having a heavy physical book)

And, yeah, APG is a great book. the d20pfsrd has much of the other stuff in the Advanced races guide, Ultimate Equipment, Armory... a lot of the splat book type stuff.

[The Redwolf]

Advanced Player's Guide and the Ultimate books are very worth it, and I've heard good things about Paths of Prestige. The bestiaries are nice too, the first one is the best in my view for straight up monsters and such, but if you want more fantastical creatures or more playable races that's what you get more of in the other two.

[Daftendirekt]

I was going to suggest Magic Item Compendium (with a belt of battle nerfed to only allow full melee attacks/standard attacks/move to make it balanced and no circlet of rapid casting). Then I noticed second hand copies are nearly 50$ ... damn.

Still, I'd recommend it ... magic items are one PF's biggest failings.

PS. 2nd hand prices for MIC are even higher in Europe, 94 euros on amazon.de ...

Really? I would have figured you'd have changed your mind upon noticing that he's asking about Pathfinder books and you're suggesting a 3.5 book. :smallconfused:

[PinkysBrain]

Actually he did not ... he asked what he should buy for (running) Pathfinder.

Magic item selection in official PF books is just plain sad up till very high levels, almost everything is overpriced with a very few items which everyone buys (the big 6, boots of speed/striding and springing and then a few utility items like haversack, bag of holding, hand of the mage etc).

[Kazou]

How do I hate explaining this. I like my books as, well, books. Not PDFs. I might use the online Pathfinder Reference Document for checking rules at times when I need to find it faster. Sometimes even the Pathfinder Reference Document fails. There's one exception when it comes to PDFs and those are free to download games. Nothing else.

[Hyde]

How do I hate explaining this. I like my books as, well, books. Not PDFs. I might use the online Pathfinder Reference Document for checking rules at times when I need to find it faster. Sometimes even the Pathfinder Reference Document fails. There's one exception when it comes to PDFs and those are free to download games. Nothing else.

...You don't think that statement was a little dickish?

"Oh, how these plebeians cannot fathom my impeccable taste for the bindings cardboard and paper! How magnificently vile is it that I have to explain it."

Seems to me that buying .pdfs seems like a pretty decent idea when the OP is on a budget- and not an entirely inane idea as it might seem when Wizards still hasn't figured it out.

If you didn't mean it that way, perhaps it's time to consider how what you say will be taken- because when someone as big an ******* as I am thinks maybe you're going too far, you probably are.

Edit: and if it's something that's just so troublesome as to give you forehead wrinkles and cases of desk to the head, maybe do some genius-level masterminding as stick "man, I really don't like pdfs and wildly prefer books" in your signature or something.

[Yora]

With Pathfinder, when you buy a book, you should be interested in the whole book.
If it is just one class or a couple of monsters, then getting them from the SRD is by far the better choice.

Core Rulebook and Advanced Player's Guide are clearly such books, as they are full of stuff that you need all the time and it is actually quite handy to have them in the way they are structured as a book, as compared to a huge collection of individual notes.
Same thing goes of course for all Setting Books, which you actually read like a book instead of looking up individual things. And their content isn't in the SRD anyway. :smallamused:

Ultimate Magic, Combat, and Equipment are pretty much just list in book form as well, and a great deal of the content isn't very good to begin with. Those are very strong candidates for looking specific things up in the SRD and maybe print them out if you want to have them at hand at the table.
The bestiaries are somewhere in between. Bestiary 1 certainly is a good idea, because it will probably be used by far the most.

[North_Ranger]

Also, once you get a hang of the Inner Sea, you may or may not want to put some money into the mini-books, many of which detail specific areas or monsters vis-á-vis the Golarion setting.

Some of which I've bought and sampled are:
- Rival Guide: a decent collection of 40 NPCs organized in ten adventuring parties, plus various new spells and items they use. A decent buy if you want to throw in a rival party or maybe just nab one or two of the NPCs for stats.
- Dragons Revisited: ecology, behaviour and descriptions of the chromatic and metallic dragons, plus one sample dragon each. Love this one.
- Adventurer's Armoury: Not really worth your time. Some minor new rules, other than that it just lists things you can find in the Core book and APG.
- Book of the Damned 1-3: Princes of Darkness, Lords of Chaos, Horsemen of the Apocalypse: a delving into Golarion's nether realms, dealing with devils, demons and daemons respectively. Good amounts of both fluff and crunch, with new monsters, magic items, spells and such. Nightmare fuel aplenty.
- Dungeons of Golarion: not as much crunch as you would hope, but gives ideas and suggestions as to how to run different setting-specific dungeons, such as Hollow Mountain, Red Redoubt of Karamoss and Gallowspire.
- Guide to Absalom: no crunch, all fluff in this book detailing life and people living in the greatest city in the world. Pretty much an idea book for GMs to think of games set in the city, as well as a read for players.
- Lost Kingdoms: overviews of various lost civilizations in the Inner Sea area, with a couple of new monsters, magic items and such.
- Magnimar, City of Monuments: what Guide to Absalom should have been; a nice mix of fluff and crunch in describing a major trading/adventuring hub with detailed descriptions of various districts and plot suggestions around the city.
- Isles of the Shackles: Pirates of the Caribbean meets D&D.

Have a look at these, I got mine for €20 a piece.