Community / Paizo Blog
Thursday, January 11, 2024
Illustration by Lucas Villalva Machado
Hi everyone, and a belated Happy New Year!
I wanted to take a moment to talk about something new we’ll be doing to help parents and educators who play our adventures with their kiddos. While we aim to hit a “PG-13” level of maturity for our standard adventures, there are plenty out there that are perfectly suited for those young adventurers out there, and we know it’s hard for someone to know which ones qualify without reading the adventures themselves or asking others in the community. In upcoming quests, we’ll be creating an image for the cover and product page that indicates the quest is suitable for All Ages, as well as tagging the adventure with that label.
Illustration by Vlad Hladkova
While working on quests, we realized that their 2-hour length was a good sweet spot for younger attention spans, and so we decided to start using this new label on qualifying quests. What that means to us is that the adventure in question should be suitable for younger players without turning off veterans. It should avoid themes of horror or violent imagery, encourage creative solutions, and also employ nonviolent resolutions wherever possible. If there’s a fight, it shouldn’t be against something too scary or too human. The goal here is that if you’ve got a younger child, student, or sibling who can do the addition required to play the game, you can pull out one of these adventures and feel confident that they’ll have as much fun as you will.
Happy gaming to all our players, no matter how old!
Josh Foster
Pathfinder Society Developer
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33 comments.
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| HolyFlamingo! | Jan 11, 2024, 12:09 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscriber
Will some of these kid-friendly adventures still include occasional, mild violence and horror, in the Saturday morning cartoon, shounen anime, Goosebumpsy sense? Asking because I'd hate to deprive the kids of ghosts, slime monsters, and guys punching each other.
   Josh M Foster Developer | Jan 11, 2024, 12:30 pm |
4 people marked this as a favorite.
HolyFlamingo! wrote:
Will some of these kid-friendly adventures still include occasional, mild violence and horror, in the Saturday morning cartoon, shounen anime, Goosebumpsy sense? Asking because I'd hate to deprive the kids of ghosts, slime monsters, and guys punching each other.
They can still include battling, but foes will probably be less scary. Mild violence is probably a good way to put it. Ghosts and the like are tricky, since we want it to be approachable for anyone who can do the math, and those can truly be scary to younger players, if not handled particularly deftly. Rather than a list of what's in and what's out, though, the approach is more making sure the atmosphere and content of the adventure is suitable for as many of those younger players as possible.
| Josh M Foster Developer | Jan 11, 2024, 12:31 pm |
3 people marked this as a favorite.
Snotboogie wrote:
Any chance we could get this tag applied retroactively to the store pages of suitable past-adventures? It’d be real helpful!
That's definitely a goal of mine, and I believe we should be able to do it.
| Aaron Shanks Director of Marketing | Jan 11, 2024, 12:50 pm |
4 people marked this as a favorite.
Read more about the Pathfinder Baseline here.
 The Shifty Mongoose | Jan 11, 2024, 07:15 pm |
This makes sense.
From not being gross at new players to giving more options than one big fight. Players can still instigate a fight, unless they'd rather sneak or negotiate.
It also makes Quests slightly easier to write in a free-form sort of way: here's the setup, here are some of the most likely DCs related to the obstacles, here's a major NPC. What will you do about this?
 William Ronald Venture-Lieutenant, California—Los Angeles (South Bay) | Jan 11, 2024, 08:42 pm |
I am glad to see that we will have All Ages quests. Sometimes, players want to introduce their kids to RPGs. Constructs might be a good thing for young players to pit their adventurer's against. (Hmm, maybe a ruing was an old Jistkan construct fight club.)
 Driftbourne | Jan 11, 2024, 10:59 pm |
Josh M Foster wrote:
HolyFlamingo! wrote:
Will some of these kid-friendly adventures still include occasional, mild violence and horror, in the Saturday morning cartoon, shounen anime, Goosebumpsy sense? Asking because I'd hate to deprive the kids of ghosts, slime monsters, and guys punching each other.They can still include battling, but foes will probably be less scary. Mild violence is probably a good way to put it. Ghosts and the like are tricky, since we want it to be approachable for anyone who can do the math, and those can truly be scary to younger players, if not handled particularly deftly. Rather than a list of what's in and what's out, though, the approach is more making sure the atmosphere and content of the adventure is suitable for as many of those younger players as possible.
Around Halloween time how about a goblin version of bunnicula?
 GM Quirk | Jan 12, 2024, 08:13 am |
6 people marked this as a favorite.
Speaking as the volunteer head of the Academy program for kids and families at Gen Con, I can't say how happy I am to see this content. Having read the first of these ("The Winter Queen's Dollhouse"), I can't help but be excited about having these all ages adventures.
I should add that we will be looking for volunteer GM's for the Academy program. If you enjoy GMing and teaching kids, teens, and sometimes moms and dads, HAVE I GOT A JOB FOR YOU! Please watch out for volunteer submission information for Gen Con in the near future. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about the Academy program at Gen Con.
| emky | Jan 12, 2024, 02:34 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
KyleS wrote:
Leon Aquilla wrote:
What I meant was more the fact that RotR dealt with a lot of adult themes and was pretty open about it lol.KyleS wrote:
We've come a long way since Rise of the Runelords...Well yes, there have been almost 200 AP's released.
And one could hope that introducing this tagging system could open them to once again exploring the full range of our emotions and experiences.
| SkyknightXi | Jan 12, 2024, 06:36 pm |
What WOULD we do for more fighty foes, anyway? Elementals sound like a good go-to for this, seeing how they're not exactly the most visceral things in existence. (Just be careful of what metal elementals might do to limbs, for instance. So mostly air and water elementals...?)
| Shay Snow Editor | Jan 13, 2024, 02:50 am |
2 people marked this as a favorite.
CyberMephit wrote:
If this also means that scenarios without this tag will on average have more mature content, then I'm all here for it and will consider re-subbing
All of our scenarios will continue to follow the Pathfinder baseline, which Aaron helpfully linked above! :)
| SkyknightXi | Jan 13, 2024, 01:03 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
I know I get leery when people speak as though they want "mature content" (as you'll see, I'm mostly looking at var. Willfully Edgy and var. Shock Value) for its own sake, rather than a means to an end. I suppose one way to put it is if an emphatically-not-All-Ages scenario involves agents of Zepar, it may want to avoid being too visceral anyway, and instead focus some energy on balming the agents' "incubators" and experimental subjects and helping them back on their feet, especially in downtime mode.
Mostly being a touch worried about PF 1.0's earliest early days, where (and mind any straw that crept in) the heads were determined to be darker than D&D ever had been. Which to me sounds like darker than even Dark Sun. Fortunately the employees had a very high Social Justice Paladin index, from the sounds of things. (Yes, I do think Social Justice _class_ should be seen as a thing of honor, why do you ask?)
 Cassi Venture-Lieutenant, Conventions—PaizoCon | Jan 18, 2024, 08:04 pm |
GM Quirk wrote:
Speaking as the volunteer head of the Academy program for kids and families at Gen Con, I can't say how happy I am to see this content. Having read the first of these ("The Winter Queen's Dollhouse"), I can't help but be excited about having these all ages adventures.
I should add that we will be looking for volunteer GM's for the Academy program. If you enjoy GMing and teaching kids, teens, and sometimes moms and dads, HAVE I GOT A JOB FOR YOU! Please watch out for volunteer submission information for Gen Con in the near future. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about the Academy program at Gen Con.
Is that coming to GenCon Online by any chance? *puppy dog eyes*
Meranthi wrote:
If math is the barrier, dice rollers might help.
I always bring a (dollar store type with big buttons) calculator to IRL tables, cause I'm bad at math.
It can be really useful for kidlets who want to join but also may not be great at math (or adults who may wanna try but are also bad at math). It's a great accessibility tool to have lurking in a IRL GM kit, even if we generally all have phones with inbuilt calculators.
| Alex Speidel Organized Play Coordinator | Jan 19, 2024, 07:36 am |
3 people marked this as a favorite.
We generally don't run Academy as part of online conventions, in part because the kids Academy is targeted at often don't meet the Terms of Service for the services we use (you have to be 13 or older to be on Discord, as an example).
| Watery Soup | Jan 29, 2024, 07:52 pm |
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Meranthi wrote:
If math is the barrier, dice rollers might help. If reading is the issue, well...you might need to wait a bit more. :D My friend's 10 y.o. is getting so much better at both math and reading because of PF.
For my kids, it was probably the maturity level. Young kids just want to succeed every time they roll. :\ I still catch my 13-year-old fudging his dice rolls sometimes.
The biggest catalyst to getting them started in RPGs was actually when we started writing stories together. We'd write a paragraph and then "pass it around" for someone else to continue. When they got the concept of collaborative storytelling, then I introduced the idea of rolling a die to see what happened next.
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