Character creation walkthrough

Question

It has been a long time since I last played RPGs and I have forgotten so much about how things like character creation work. I am using the Pathfinder core rule book for all of my characters currently as it is the only book I have at this time. There are some aspects to generating a character that I must be missing because. For instance I am not totally clear on how clerics and other magic users choose their spells and how many they get at each level. The cleric has a notation that says that it gets 3 0th level spells and 1+1 1st level spells at first level. What does the 1+1 get you?

Is there a site that does a walkthrough from start to finish for generating characters for new players?

Answer 1

I found a youtube series by Dawnforgedcast which did a pretty good job describing the character creation process for non-magical users and then even into some combat. At this time it is a 4 part series dealing with:

• Stats, Races, Classes
• Skills, Feats and Equipment
• Combat
• The Mini-Session

He also has a series on DM Basics that I am going to check out later.

Answer 2

I like to think there are 3 main spell casting class variants (clerics,wizards,sorcerers). Other spell casting classes will have their own specific rules, but will have behavior similar to one of the main 3 (usually wizard):

Since you are building a cleric, ill start there by answering your specific questions:

Clerics get the entire cleric spell list as spells known.

The 3 0th means that they can have 3 level 0 spells prepared for the day.

The 1+1 1st level means they get to prepare any 1 spell of first level from the cleric spell list and 1 level 1 spell from one of their domain spell lists.

Now how do clerics compare to other casters?

wizards : like clerics they have to prepare the spells they want to use each day. Unlike clerics, they do not have the full spell list available to them. They can only prepare spells from the list of spells in their spell book. At each level they get to add spells to their spell book. (they can also learn them by copying other spell books & scrolls)

sorcerers: They learn new spells each level like a wizard. However, they do not have to prepare spells per day (spontaneous casters). They can use their spells slots per day on any spell they have learned of that level.