I found a lot of good information on BG in read-only form, and came here to read more. I do not expect to contribute much until I've read for a while.
Some background: I played AD&D when I was very young, and still have the First Edition core books, when I was in school, I played some 3/3.5. Years later, my girlfriend has pressured me into teaching her to game; I grabbed the pathfinder core books, and now she is totally hooked. Sorry in advance if the below is redundant, but I may as well put my ulterior motive for joining the forum up front....
Basically, I am scouring the internet to find the answer to a specific requirement: How can I get a single player a character that is relatively straightforward to play at any level, which can accomplish all of the standard tasks, who will be playing modules from nearly every version of AD&D translated to Pathfinder.
I opted for pathfinder because there is so much AD&D content (1-3.5E and Pathfinder modules) that I haven't played or DM'd, and it looks like they can be easily 'translated', and that modules are being actively written for it. We are probably going to alternate DMing eventually, I set her up with a module (and attached stock character) to try running for me now that she's comfortable playing to see how it works. She isn't into the 'numbers' at all, and I'm really just trying to figure out how to avoid needless complexity as I make a character who can reliably sub in for a full party x levels below her, while riding the line between 'peril' and 'whoops you died again...'.
The main thing I am looking to do is make a character build that is powerful enough to predictably balance against 'most' challenges as a solo or solo plus cohort. There is a lot of cheezy, complicated stuff I can do to power-up a character, but I'm trying to do it in a way that allows me to say 'this particular adventure is optimized for a party of 4 at level x, therefore, we can run it solo with a level y Z'. I'm also hoping to be able to do that without making the sheet look completely insane, or breaking the rules badly enough to provoke unpredictable consequences. The main thing is to have a single character that is able to do all of the 'rpg tasks' (sneak into the castle, bash the BBEG's face into the pavement, play games with traps, solve the mystery by finding the secret doors, cast the city-saving spell, talk the important NPC into an alliance...etc) at just about any level, I'm also open to doing stuff to adjust the 'action economy' issue, but I'm hoping to avoid stuff that just seems crazy like 'ok you get two slots on the initiative list for your character'.
She loves her 'dwarf rogue' character concept, so I'm looking for ways to improve the Pathfinder rogue's soloability in a relatively straightforward fashion--I'm open to changing the class without changing the archetype (sneaky, social burglar type). Chaotic alignment, if that helps.
I also need one for me, but I'm a bit more flexible; I am waffling between some sort of more witch (I like her spell list design and the hex concept), and a 2h paladin with all stats set to 18, trap sense, and stealth/perception/use magic device as class skills. Lawful is fine for me!
The hope is to build a character that can have its 'numbers' adjusted easily up or down, so I can do things like drop back to level x because I found a module I want to do for a character at that level, even though I just ran through something that took the character from 12-18.
Hugs,
Zero
