KM XP For 3.5 Conversion?

[Curghann]

I'm running a group of 5 through KM at the moment. We just had our second session and the group successfully routed the Thorn River camp.

They're using a 32 point buy in 3.5 rules and I gave everyone a bonus campaign trait and regular trait along with aome other player friendly house rules. To that end, I'm running the full 6 person conversion for them.

I havent been doling out XP after each encounter, instead going with a "I'll tell you when you've leveled" mentality to help avoid the "hey we're close to leveling, let's go find another encounter".

So I'm calculating the XP and so far it seems like the XP in the module itself and in the 6 person conversion is slower than it should be. I have read that it's intended for a "medium" leveling pace, but I'm not exactly sure what that is. Also, when looking at the NPC's in the book and the conversion the CR's seem lower than what one would expect from a 3.5 game. In the book, Happs is level 1 and is CR 1/2, in the conversion he's level 2 and CR1. Similarly, Kressle is L2/CR1 and L3/CR2 in the book/conversion.

For people who may have run 3.5 conversions or run it straight, do you think it would be better to dole out XP as it's written or use a 3.5 encounter calculator and give out XP that way?

[Paladin of Baha-who?]

There's always the option to avoid XP entirely and just tell them "OK, you've reached the next level" when the narrative calls for it.

[RobRendell]

The medium XP track is one of the three options the GM can choose between in Pathfinder, determining how rapidly their players will advance: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/character-advancement

Most (all?) of the Paizo adventure paths written for Pathfinder are designed to use the medium advancement track.

Re: the CRs being lower: that's correct, they changed how CRs for class levels worked between 3.5 and Pathfinder:

Pathfinder SRD wrote:

A creature that possesses class levels, but does not have any racial Hit Dice, is factored in as a creature with a CR equal to its class levels – 1

My brother is doing the reverse of what you're doing, running Age of Worms (a 3.5 adventure path) for a group using the Pathfinder rules. What he's done is go through the modules totalling up the XP rewards, and determined where in each module they would have levelled up if they were using the 3.5 advancement table (assuming they found everything). He then tells the players to advance when they hit those points in the module. So, effectively story-based levelling where the GM tells the players when to level without tracking XP, but calculated from actual numbers.

That approach wouldn't work so well with Kingmaker though, because the sandbox nature of the adventure means that players don't encounter the content in a predictable sequence. Also, that just focuses on the fixed encounters, and in Kingmaker the random wandering monster table has some scary high-CR encounters. If the players somehow manage to pull out a victory against a couple of trolls at 2nd level or something, they should probably get some sort of reward for it.

One option might be to continue using 3.5, but to use Pathfinder XP numbers for defeating monsters and traps and completing quests, and for character advancement (unlike 3.5, the XP tables are part of Pathfinder's open content). That would save you having to convert the XP rewards that are written out in the module (e.g. 100 XP for exploring a hex).

I've also seen a number of GMs on this forum saying they just do story-based levelling in Kingmaker... the PCs advance about 1/3rd of the way through each module, again about 2/3rds of the way through, and then again when they begin the next module.

What I'm doing in the Kingmaker game I'm running (which is Pathfinder, not 3.5) is to track XP, but to have an XP cap. Content from the first module can only contribute to the first three levels... once they hit 4th level (which happened for my group before they finished Stolen Lands due to me adding some extra content and some nasty random encounters which the players managed to overcome), they don't get any more XP from things in the first module. Likewise for RRR (it's for levels 3-6, so the cap is 7th) and so on.

[shadowkras]

More players = more random encounters AND/OR tougher encounters.