Surprisingly OSR feel of Pathfinder Card Game

 - Was tempted to buy the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game to play with my kids, with the fail-safe of being able to play solo.

- Love the story driven scenarios, and the fact you can level your adventurer cards up as you play.

- Surprisingly OSR feel due to strong fantasy tropes, resource management and deadliness.

- Pathfinder Adventures game on Android / Steam a nice way to learn, though it uses the previous am edition of the game.

- I've lost as many times as I've one both on the tabletop and online, which increases the interest for me.

- Bad play is punished, though good play not a 100% guarantee of success.

Cugel the Clever and Vancian Magic

 - Recently finished reading Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld, which follows the adventures and misadventures of Cugel the Clever on his Oddysey home.

- Cugel is an unscrupulous rogue, whose wit saves him from a variety of terrible fates, often damning his companions.

- Though not a wizard, he is able with some difficulty to learn some simpler spells, given access to the written spells.

- The description of magic is very evocative, with the words of incantations being excruciatingly hard to learn, desperate to get out, and liable to punish the tiniest mistake in pronunciation.

- So while early versions of D&D took the "cast and forget" part of Vancian spellcasting, the unpredictability of the magic is much better embodied in systems which allow for spell failure results, such as DCC and Mörk Borg.

Eclectic worldbuilding

 - It always struck me that Greyhawk was a setting which allowed Gygax to pitch troops of different historical periods against each other.

- I used to consider this a weakness, but then I heard an interview with the lead designer of Pathfinder, who said they made Golarion as "a world to have adventures in".

- Then I wondered if this was the right approach after all, it is certainly what The Dark Eye authors did with their Aventurien setting, right down to the name.

- After all RPG settings are primarily places for PCs to do things.

Solo scenarios to teach the game

• I'm a fan of solo scenarios to teach rules, there's nothing like learning by doing.
• The ones I've done (in approximate order of publication are).
• The one from the the D&D Red Box (Mentzer).
• The one from the D&D 1991 Black Box.
• This one was embedded in a more thorough tutorial, which deserves its own post.
• "All in a Night's Work" from the GURPs 3e Basic Set
• The one from the Starfinder Beginnner Box (though this one is pretty minimalistic).
• And the one from the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, which also slowly introduces character generation. 
• I guess they're an extension of the ubiquitous (and also useful) example of play idea, which goes right back to OD&D.