Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box

The quality & quantity of the components in this Beginner Box are fantastic. You get 2 books with this kit. 1) One for the players, which contains everything you'd need to create your hero, and level them up with new abilities as you progress through your adventures. You'll be able to create heroes from the following classes -- Rogue (thief), Wizard, Warrior & Cleric. And there are additional player options available straight from the publisher's own website (which I discuss in my detail below), as well as elsewhere online. 2) And the 2nd book is for the Game Master, who will be running the adventures for your group. The GM's book contains easy to follow explanations of the basic rules of the game + a fully written out ready-to-go adventure for your group (one with a few mysteries & puzzles to solve, and a lot of monsters that must be overcome in order to save the people of the town nearby). It also contains an outline of a starting place for your adventuring party...the town of Sandpoint. You will also get plenty of guidance, so you can easily begin creating your own adventures, and begin stocking them with new treasures/magical items & new threats to overcome. You also get a wide range of heavy cardstock pawns with plastic stands -- these display high quality art depicting the heroes, and the villains you'll be facing. The addition of standing pawns is an excellent feature, as it makes it easy for you & your group to see the action from wherever you're seated around the table. The fold-up double-sided plastic map that comes with this set is also well illustrated (one side design specifically to be used in the pre-written adventure included in the GM's book -- which the other side is designed with a generic plain earth look, so it can be easily used with wet- or dry-erase markers to create your own maps for future adventures. It also comes with a full set of dice, character sheets & pre-generated characters that you can just quickly read through & begin playing with. As an added benefit, there are additional downloads to help extend the content & playability of the beginner box too. Many of these downloads are available for free, direct from the publisher's own website! This includes a new playable character class for your group...the Barbarian. While for the Game Master (the one who will be creating/running your group's adventures), there are additional ready-to-go adventures, items, new monsters & more that you can use to build your adventures. You get everything needed to not only create your own party of adventurers, but you'll be able to take them all the way up to 5th Level... So you're bound to get hours & hours of play out of this box. If you have a group that gets together about every other week, you could easily get a full year's worth of play out of this box before everyone has tried out the character classes available! It really is perfect for beginners. With the pre-written adventure + the pre-generated characters, you & your friends could be up and running your first adventure in about 15 minutes.

The Beginner Box is the spiritual successor to the original Dungeons & Dragons "Red Box" in almost every way, only this time a black dragon assumes the role of iconic, evocative image. Unlike other boxed sets since the Red Box that are within the D&D tradition, there is a complete game here: rules for players, and advice and guidelines -- replete with monsters, perilous traps, and magic items -- for game masters to create their own adventures. And it comes with all the accessories you need to run a game: a blank flipmat, dice, and plastic bases on which you can put the cardboard PCs and monsters. The flipmat and the cardboard pieces are also very thick and built to last. A kid could take this box and find literally hundreds of hours of enjoyment with his or her friends. The other strength here is that it eases young people into the Pathfinder RPG with extreme ease. The rulebooks are gorgeous and have scores of full-color illustrations. The solo adventure introduces attack rolls, skill checks, and saving throws as they come up. The Hero's Handbook makes the character creation process fun and holds your hand through it, with bright-colored letter references to similarly-lettered sections of the character-creation sheet. What is more -- the Beginner Box also comes with pregenerated characters and a first adventure at the beginning of the Gamemaster's Guide, which has maps and clear instructions for how to run every encounter. Erik Mona of Paizo Publishing said they did playtests with young teenagers in which they opened the box and started playing within 15 minutes, and I believe it. When the Beginner Box was first announced a year ago, I admit I wasn't sure that it could be pulled off. My first exposure to post-3rd Edition D&D was the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, a 576-page tome that condensed 10 years of rules development, in which every word had important meaning (as a lawyer, I actually found its rule set comparable to what I had studied in law school), and which presumed an audience that had already been accustomed to playing 3rd Edition D&D. Part of the reason for its complexity was that the game's foundations are amazingly robust and can handle nearly every situation, including high-level play during which players are summoning dragons, disarming golems, and felling giants with flurries of blows. To create a complete product and fit it all inside one book, they had to create a dense, concise exposition of the rules. The result was that the Core Rulebook was an excellent reference book, but an awful introduction to the game. Many players on Paizo's messageboards talk about the reactions they get when they try to convince their friends: they excitedly tell them what tabletop roleplaying is like, but once they heft out this massive brick of a book their friends' mouths drop. Enter the Beginner Box. The Beginner Box limits itself to PC levels 1-5 and to the classic 4 character classes -- cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard -- thus lessening the amount of information that needs to be absorbed. The game designers take out many mini-systems (such as attacks of opportunity, combat maneuvers, armor check penalties) that exist in the core rules and boils everything down to the game's core: attack rolls, skill checks, and saving throws. It limits the options to the most basic feats and magic spells, and provides a smaller skills list as well. The cleric and wizard have 34 spells each, and each is explained in four lines. And the Player's Handbook introduces young readers to each new concept one at a time, and in the context of the uber-fun exercises of going through the solo adventure and rolling up a character. The result is something in which non-beginners might be interested: a "rules-lite" version of the Pathfinder RPG. Wonderfully, at the same time it is also compatible with the full Pathfinder rules, so young game masters who love the Beginner Box can also incorporate what they want out of the Core Rulebook and take from the immensely-rich library of Paizo adventure modules, adventure paths, and other supplements with relative ease. The final result is a product that is a most-excellent "gateway drug" for the hobby, and we haven't seen one of this quality in over 25 years. Let the RPG Renaissance begin. EDITED 8/18/2012: The Beginner Box won the 2012 GOLDEN "ENNIE" for PRODUCT OF THE YEAR at the largest annual RPG convention, Gen Con. Congratulations to Paizo! EDITED 12/23/2012: On its website, Paizo also has free downloads to expand upon the options in the Beginner Box, more beginner adventures, and a "Transitions" document for converting over to the full Pathfinder rules. Also, check out EDOWar's blog for simplified Beginner Box versions of 16 additional character classes!

The Pathfinder Beginner Box is intended as a very accessible introduction to the Pathfinder RPG, which is derived from the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons by means of the Open Gaming License. However it also serves as a great intro to fantasy role-playing games in general, where a 'Games Master' creates adventures and setting for one or more players to adventure in via their Player Character alter-ego There is material here for months of play. The box is absolutely stuffed with content - it contains: A player's book - solo into adventure, rules for making characters and advancing them up to 5th level, resolving combat and other situations. A Game Master's book - a fully keyed adventure, plus rules for creating your own adventures and campaigns, monsters, treasure etc. A double-sided flip mat, one side with pre-drawn dungeon, the other blank to draw your own dungeons on. 3 pages of stand-up cardboard figures A set of dice 4 Sample Player Characters, and 4 blank PC sheets to make your own. The only thing not included is a dry-erase marker pen for drawing your own dungeons & floor plans on the flip mat. The rules have been cut down from the full Pathfinder game to make a simpler fast-paced game, but still very complete and satisfying. The writing and presentation is consistently top-notch. There are additional free downloads available on Paizo's web site. There has not been an introductory set like this on the market since Frank Mentzer's 1983 'Red Box' Basic Dungeons & Dragons. I would strongly recommend this purchase to anyone interested in the fantasy RPG genre, whether new or experienced players. It also makes a great introductory gift for ages 10-12+.

Paizo products always seem to be well polished and the Beginners Box is no exception. I've been role-playing for many, many years now and had played the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rules before I bought this box, so I'm hardly a beginner, but I still found this to be a good purchase for several reasons. Firstly, the Beginners Box doesn't change the core game, it simply leaves out the more complex rules. You can use everything in this set with the core game with only a little extra homework. Secondly, you get a massive amount of useful stuff. A double sided and reusable map, loads of card pawns, the full set of seven dice, the rules in two colourful books, an adventure and four ready to go characters. On top of that, Paizo.com has a stack of downloads that include the barbarian class and more options for all of the classes included in the beginners set (Wizard, Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and now Barbarian). There's also another adventure for you to enjoy. Lastly, the whole product was relatively error free. I bought the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box a while ago and I found it to have several problems and places where it seemed that the publishers had taken shortcuts. The Pathfinder Beginners Box has no such issues. This is quality through and though. Buy this if you're new to role-playing or Pathfinder or if you want to get some of your friends hooked on the game. If you've played the game before and want the complete rules then I recommend the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rules. I've done a more in-depth review of the game both on Paizo.com and on my own site: Rising Phoenix Games. Just search for the Beginners Box on either site.

Pathfinder est la nouvelle référence et cette boite de débutant (en anglais intégral) est idéale pour initier un groupe qui n'a encore jamais pratiqué la discipline. Le contenu est généreux pour le prix avec plusieurs aventures pré-définies, des personnages déjà créés mais aussi des fiches vierges, des marqueurs de monstres et ainsi de suite et les résumé de règles vont à l'essentiel. Il faudra évidemment aller chercher les vrais livres de règles lorsque l'on voudra approfondir le sujet mais pour une initiation, c'est largement suffisant.

Exactly as promised and shipped quickly

Producto excelente, hasta para usos genéricos de RPG sobremesa, ademas viene con dados, figuras de carton duro y peanas pásticas... 2 mini guias para el jugador y el Game master!!! muy lindo todo ademas viene con un FLIP-MAT (TM) de ellos, de superficie plástica para usar indeleble y editar cambiar cosas sin dañar ese flip-mat, aunque hay que añadit que es bastante finito el FLIP, pero esta todo bien igual. Como decía 7 dados rojos de 4,6,8,10,12 y 20 caras, muy bien todo.... Viendo el entorno de Compras hasta va bien cojer un par de cajas o 3 para tener MOBS/foes y hasta que no haya mas por españa NPcs variados jejej Bueno espero les agrade el comentario ^^