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Message: <blockquote data-quote="!DWolf" data-source="post: 8120482" data-attributes="member: 7026314">As someone who never really felt comfortable with the “modern school” of game design, I am quite impressed with what I have read of Age of Ashes so far. Despite what some people think, adventure paths are actually written for a variety of play styles and while I can see some flaws with the path (I think hex crawl was the wrong approach for the jungle expedition and a point crawl would have been better for instance) it seems Age of Ashes is very much written for “old school” gms like me - so much so that I am probably going to run it next (at least Hellknight Hill - I stop and gauge interest after running the first part of every AP).I agree completely. Several years ago came across a video addressing Csikszentmihályi flow theory in the context of tabletop rpgs (I think it was by Hawke Robinson at rpgresearch - I can’t check because I currently have limited internet access) and the graph of escalating difficulty and player skill really stuck with me. Specifically, to achieve/maintain the flow state, challenge needs to increase with difficulty and I deliberately try to do that with the games I run - increasing the challenge so that player skill increases (causing me to increase the challenge and so on). The fine tuned difficulty control I can achieve with PF2e along with the exploration level mechanics (which help define/refine decision making at the exploration level) really sold me on the system.A bit off topic: back in the day, PCs had henchmen (max number based on charisma), hirelings, followers, and the like, so when a main character died we just promoted a henchmen to main character status and continued on - or we at least had a method to introduce new PCs that maintained continuity of characters and goals if they didn’t like any of the henchmen as a PC. I still use variants of this in games I run - making sure that the PCs work with or create an organization that contains ‘backup characters’, or character introduction means. You would be surprised at how many APs this is compatible with and running PF1 I liked to give out things like the leadership for free. PF2e has the leadership subsystem in the GMG which I haven’t tried out yet but am definitely going to in about five to six sessions of my jungle game (we started with a survivor pool and when they get off the starting island I will switch to leadership - probably with a couple of modifications inspired by REIGN and integrated with a reputation mechanic).</blockquote>

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