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I love Pathfinder but hate character creation. There's already a min-max template out there somewhere, and my gaming group has 1-2 people who have them already memorized. There's no point in bringing an suboptimal build to the table.
The result is I get this ugly mix of spending a couple hours stumbling through building something, doing an 80% good job because I'm not totally stupid but also we've never kept a campaign going past level 5 and the the gaps between each one are long enough that I forget some of the nuances.
Then we show up for our first session and we spend 2 hours adjusting it to one of the templates for the class anyway. Ugh.
Playing is a blast, but I hate the grind of using sub-optimal tools for creation beforehand.
I would say there's no point in min-maxing, and you should stop doing that. Doing that sucks the fun out of any game (not just Pathfinder), so of course you don't have fun with character creation. You can still have just as much fun, if not more fun, with a suboptimal character you built with a fun idea in mind.
I understand what you're saying here - I think it depends on the playgroup.
3 of the dudes in our group can GM reliably. 2 of them are very take-no-prisoners, to the point where we need one to be the player's advocate when the other is GM. You can't really survive in those games if you're doing C-level builds, and if you're B-level you'll spend a lot of time in combat taking cover and not doing much (to say nothing of having the non-combat skills to move things forward).
In a sense my attitude is a reflection of general problems with the group's ability to stick around with long campaigns. A mediocre build can be rectified over many levels and the "fun" element can be fleshed out. They're in a weird space where they get bored once they hit certain levels and so even if they do make the commitment for a long campaign they try to cut it off for something new! Unbelievably cool universes have been left on the table after just 10-15 sessions.
It's still an absolute blast, but it's made the character creation part of the equation the least fun.
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