Pathfinder XP scale and 3.5 XP scale.

[Júlíus Árnason]

I need some help. In my campaign, which we recently converted to Pathfinder from 3.5, my players are at 9th lvl.

According to the PHB 3.5 characters need to reach 45.000 xp in order to advance to 10th lvl. However, using the fastest xp progression in Pathfinder you need 71.000 xp to advance to 10th lvl.

I simply gave them an xp boost to compensate for this but I wonder if it that simple. I feel like I'm doing the encounters wrong now, that they should scale faster than before because the xp gap between levels has widened. Any thoughts?

[Gorbacz]

As long as you are using PF XP rewards system the advancement speed should be similar. I am running RotRL using Fast XP and PF XP awards and the advancement speed pretty much matches the 3.5 one.

[KaeYoss]

The numbers are different (out of necessity, because the old numbers are not open content), but not really:

You still need about 13,333333333333.... encounters of your level to advance.

What you do to convert is this:

Look up how many XP you need to go from the current level to the next level in 3.5 (for level 10, it's 45000-36000 = 9000)

Look up how many XP you need to go from the current level to the next level in PFRPG (for level 10 on fast, it's 71000-50000 = 21000)

Look up how far they've come in 3.5

To elaborate: Say, they're at 39500, which means 3500 past 9, which is 38,8888...% of the 9000 you need. 38,8888...%

Translate into Pathfinder

Our example: 38,8888...% of 21000 is 8166. Add that to the starting XP for that level (50000) and you have something like 58166 (make it 58200)

Done!