I just stared playing pathfinder with my friends and we failed on the second mission to a Twigjack. I was disappointed to find out that we could never make up the lost prestige even by going with the slower advancement track. Now our characters will always be behind people who have succeeded in all the prestige awards.
My suggestion to address this issue would be to change the rules on page 24 of the Pathfinder Society handbook from “To maintain balance, between characters on both advancement tracks, those PC’s utilizing the slow advancement track may only earn 1 PP per scenario” to “Characters can only ever earn total prestige up to 6 times their character level”.
If this change was made, characters that did fail to get all the prestige from an adventure could choose to take the slow advancement track to try and catch up with their peers. With this proposed change players would be more inclined to take the ½ XP if they did not get all the prestige points for an adventure. Currently there is no real reason to take the ½ XP advancement. This change would also help assure that all the players at the table were closer to the same power level.
This proposed change would still leave a penalty for failure but allow the PCs to work off this penalty by giving up the opportunity to advance to the next level quicker.
