While I'm interested in the campaig setting, I, personally, am most interested in learning how you all play the game. As a player I've always had to struggle with the GMs I've played with. They're used to a certain way the game was played in older editions, and they keep trying to shoehorn those limits into the current games. One of the big things is the relative power of things.

Like, anytime I would bring up something that someone could do, if it "sounds" strong, then they reflexively nix it because it's new, and different, and scary, and they don't like it. For example the Paizo version of Kineticist from Occult Adventures is overpowered because it gets at-will kinetic blasts. I love that class dearly, but I'm fully aware the Kineticist isn't the king of anything except being anime as ****.

It's been so frustrating because I never know how the game functions. They will change rules from session to session which makes it so hard to do anything. Like, how is someone supposed to live if the physics of the world keep changing every day? Some examples include a troll that was able to stand up from prone, double move, pick up a child, move to a door, open the door, move through the door, close the door, and lock the door via a drop bar all in the same turn. Or my 19th level Ranger with a +40 in Perception can't see the enemy sneaking up on her, but the Wizard with a +16 Perception is able to do so, despite my Rangers minimum check automatically being higher than the Wizard's check. Or when an enemy wizard uses a fireball and wipes out my mirror images even when I point out area effects don't do that, but it worked, "because it does in his game" and when I do something similar, it somehow no longer works because that's what the rules say...

If I question this, I always get the same response, "stop focusing on the rules and let the GM tell a story, or is that against the rules?" Like I'm somehow that bad guy because I'm trying to play the game with the mutual assumption the rules work the way they say they do.... I'm ranting now, sorry.

So as a player, I've always ended up building what I'm sure most would consider weak characters because that's what I'm allowed to build. The one time I was ever able to flex my knowledge of the game, my best friend was the GM and I ended up building, or help building 3 1/2 out of 5 1/2 of the characters. We had 5 players, but one person was consistently a no-show and our only Arcane caster, so my buddy had me build a secondary Wizard that would only be played when the other guy wasn't around. The guy missed so many sessions he eventually quit and the Wizard became a permanent party member and now I was playing 2 characters.

That was an interesting game as I was also the default "back-up" player for everyone's character. If someone had to leave early or miss a session (except the sorcerer who wouldn't let anyone touch his sheet), they would have me control their character in the meantime. One session had two people leave due to an emergency so I ended up playing 4 characters for 2 hours as we finished the mess we were embroiled in.

Anyway, as I said, I'm most interested in seeing how you all play and learning from it. As a player, I'm still very much a noob, I actually have more experience as a GM than as a player and I consider GMing easier. Probably because it's harder to prepare for situations as a player but as a GM I can literally rewrite reality on the fly if necessary. I'm also not sure I even have that much fun playing characters anymore to be honest.