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I think you might be reading too much into the XP system.
An extreme encounter (160 XP) is just four standard encounters (40 XP each) standing next to each other. In old-school play, it was always deadly to bring the whole dungeon down on top of yourself. I don't know the "Die, Dog, Die!" encounter, but does it start with all enemies aware of the PCs and ready to attack them in round 1? If not, it's not the same as a single extreme encounter.
In any case, the encounter rules don't dictate what you can and can't do, they just give you as the GM the tools to gauge the consequences. You could build the Caves of Chaos without a problem, it's just that unlike in Basic D&D, the GM would actually have a way to measure just how deadly it would be for e.g. the party not to notice the orc guard head on the wall of heads and have all the first tribe orc warriors assembled to attack them, because he could look at the numbers and say "hmm, that would be 200 XP... that's probably a TPK."
Now, sometimes GMs take encounter-building advice and treat it as holy writ. Justin Alexander has an interesting essay about the fetishizing of game balance that occurred in the 3rd edition community, where the advice about what makes a balanced encounter was warped into "you're only allowed to make balanced encounters". But if you treat the advice as just a way to measure things, rather than a straight jacket, you can populate your encounters with your eyes open to the consequences... this should be a push-over, that is going to be challenging, if they do this wrong they're going to have to run like hell or die.
The thing i noticed is that, below the xp total coat of paint, if you try to use the good old “two creatures of level X = encounter of level X+2”, it works perfectly fine.
The math is still the same, but somehow you’re supposed to use the long way around...
0-lv creatures would be the equivalent of the old 1/2, so 2x lv0 = lv1.
However, try this:
2x lv2 creatures = 1 lv4 creature
1 lv3 creature + 1 lv1 creature = 1 lv 2 creatures = 1 lv4 creature
4x lv2 creatures = 2 lv4 creatures = 1 lv6 creature
Haven't opened the book, but if you make up a party level, I am fairly sure the XP will line up perfectly.
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I don't like the new XP system, but that's due to personal feelings of it.
I like things more standard and mapped out. 1000 XP per level is fine, but having XP variable depending on the level of the characters vs. the CR of the challenge complicates things to a degree that I find myself just not wanting to even deal with it.
This is more complex in some ways than 3e/3.5's way of doing XP.
When PF1e came around with a more set and solid XP system for advancement and determining of XP for encounters it was like a breath of relief and fresh air.
The new way that PF2e does it seems to be going to something far worse and more complicated than 3e/3.5e.
For me, with it, it's just something I don't want to really deal with in game. It's going to be more arbitrary leveling in PF2e than actually figuring the XP each time you create an encounter.
However, this is more a PERSONAL opinion than something objective.
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Personally, I switched to milestone leveling years ago, but I know the systems well enough regardless.
The difference between this system and the previous is, basically, that the workload is all on the GM's side. Players are presented an easy, simple, and flowing system, while the GM is swamped in calculations and relative values presented in a way that does not show any shortening or equation to lighten the load.
I can work it out because i spent years memorising little formulas to avoid having to go back to the book every five minutes, but a new GM will just look at it and go crazy.
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I think it's harder to remember and adjudicate. You have to actually plan everything on a relative, rather than absolute scale.
I do agree with OP that 1000 every level just doesn't feel like much of an accomplishment compared to the scaling amount.
I honestly hate milestone leveling as a player and I'll never use it as a DM. From a player perspective, it's annoying not knowing how far I am from a level. From a GM perspective, it has two big flaws.
First and foremost, it makes it very hard to award XP in a granular fashion. At the end of the session, I can say "you get X for killing the monsters, Y for completing these objectives, and Z for fulfilling a special condition (e.g. not raising the alarm during an infiltration)". This lets me directly reward the players for accomplishing specific things and playing intelligently and creatively. If I boil the system down to "you level up" or "you dont", then I lose the ability to give them that feedback. There are other reward mechanisms, such as gp, but the nice thing about XP is that it universally applies to every situation and is a very concrete number to most players.
The second issue is that it devalues side quests. If the characters don't do enough to get a level up, they get nothing in terms of advancement. This means that loot is then the only appeal for most minor quests. And DMs may be hesitant to hand out major side plot hooks, because they may overlevel the party for the main quest, since the only advancement step is a full level (rather than, say, 1/3 of a level's worth of XP).
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Wow! rose coloured bi-focals are on.
Most of your complaints do not appear to be really about the system at all - it's about the style/feel of game you want - and from what I've seen so far, that can be achieved as you get familiar with the system. I'll be honest it feels a bit strange to me, but anything new requires bedding in.
1000xp or 130 millionxp - it's the same number of encounters I'm not sure I get that, but it is amusing especially when it's often the "old school" types complaining about number inflation.
Different levelled characters within a party has never been a good idea and should be avoided if possible. It's a conscious step away from that paradigm. Your houserule solves the problem handily.
+2 to hit against AC 18 is not, and has never been fun. Even way back when you had a thaco of 20 and +2 to hit against AC2.
The xp system is far more flexible now. You can fine tune it to the kind of progression you want. 1000xp is too fast for you, change it to 1500xp or more. You can even change it on a level by level basis if you want (I'm not sure why you would, but you can - maybe you want to skip level 8 as it's a boring level make that one 500xp).
Since I've been playing encounters have been designed primarily around 1 big monster and for encounters to be largely discrete. I'm not sure much has changed - if you merged encounters together before, you still can.
1000xp or 130 millionxp - it's the same number of encounters I'm not sure I get that, but it is amusing especially when it's often the "old school" types complaining about number inflation.
[...]
The xp system is far more flexible now. You can fine tune it to the kind of progression you want. 1000xp is too fast for you, change it to 1500xp or more. You can even change it on a level by level basis if you want (I'm not sure why you would, but you can - maybe you want to skip level 8 as it's a boring level make that one 500xp).
I actually thought to use 1250xp per level to ease the maths, since I run a 5 player group - that way, the xp total does not need to contain "phantom" xp. But then again, that makes me fall into the pit trap of "what if players skip the session" or "what if one player retires". So, back to milestone I go.
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So, this discussion prompted me to delve into the maths of PF1e's XP tables, and I was surprised by the results.
TL;DR: first edition Pathfinder's XP requirements can, like the playtest system, be met with a constant number of level-equivalent encounters each level to level up. PF2e's advancement system produces results almost identical to PF1e, sitting somewhere between the Slow and Medium advancement tracks.
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Details:
Since the three PF1e tracks are just multiples of each other (Slow = Medium x 1.5, Fast = Medium x 2/3) I'll mostly just focus on one track, Medium.
The Medium track goes:
XP for each level: 0, 2000, 5000, 9000, 15000, 23000, 35000, 51000, 75000, 105000, 155000, 220000, 315000, 445000, 635000, 890000, 1300000, 1800000, 2550000, 3600000
In order to see how many XP you need to advance each level, here are the deltas on those numbers (to reach level 2 you need 2,000 XP, then to reach level 3 you need 3,000 XP more on top of the 2,000 XP you already had in order to reach a total of 5,000 XP)
XP gain required for each level: 2000, 3000, 4000, 6000, 8000, 12000, 16000, 24000, 30000, 50000, 65000, 95000, 130000, 190000, 255000, 410000, 500000, 750000, 1050000
The progression of those numbers may already look familiar... the values are generally double the value two before it. Yes, the XP requirement to level in PF1e scales at the same rate as monster CR.
If you assume a party of 4 adventurers advancing on the Medium XP track, they need to defeat 20 CR 1 monsters to advance from 1st to 2nd level (one CR 1 monster is worth 400 XP, divided between 4 PCs gives 100 XP each, 20 x 100 XP = 2,000 XP).
The then need to defeat 20 CR 2 monsters to advance from 2nd to 3rd level (one CR 2 monster is worth 600 XP, divided between 4 PCs gives 150 XP each, 20 x 150 XP = 3,000 XP).
The then need to defeat 20 CR 3 monsters to advance from 3rd to 4th level.
The pattern holds (more or less) all the way up to 20th level.
Number of level-equivalent creatures to defeat each level: 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 20.00, 18.75, 20.83, 20.31, 19.79, 20.31, 19.79, 19.92, 21.35, 19.53, 19.53, 20.51
You can see it's exactly 20 level-equivalent creatures every level up to 9th. There are some perturbations after that due to rounding off the XP required for some levels to end with lots of zeros, but it's basically 20.
For the Slow advancement track, it's pretty much 30 level-equivalent monsters to advance (1.5 times the Medium track). For the Fast track, it's roughly 13 1/3 level-equivalent monsters (2/3 of the Medium track).
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So, how does this compare to PF2e? A level-equivalent monster in PF2e gives 40 XP to each member of a 4 character party. That means the party needs to defeat 25 such monsters to get 1,000 XP... they're advancing at a rate mid way between the Medium (20 creatures) and Slow (30 creatures) tracks.
Converting the PF1e advancement tables to PF2e values, the Slow track is 1,200 XP per level, the Medium track is 800 XP per level and the Fast track is about 533 XP per level.
Of course, no GM would restrict themselves to level-equivalent creatures for every encounter. However, as noted by Ediwir, the XP rewards in PF2e for creatures of different levels still follows the PF1e pattern of doubling every two levels. So, no matter what mix of creatures you use, as long as they're within the party's level +/- 4, it will work just the same as midway-between-Slow-and-Medium advancement in PF1e (and if you want to use creatures outside the range of level +/- 4, the maths is obvious... just double/halve the XP value in the table two levels below/above.)
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So having worked through all that, I'm pretty happy that the PF2e XP system will produce advancement rates akin to what we're used to from PF1e.
The only thing I'm not keen on in the PF2e approach is the bizarre aversion to dividing the XP by the number of party members. It's fairly easily remedied though - just multiply all the XP values in tables 4 and 5 in the Bestiary by four. Then, you get an XP total which you can divide by the actual party size to get the XP per character. For example, a trivial encounter would have a budget of 40 XP per character, which for two characters would be 80 XP, which might be a single creature of the party's level - 2. They would get 80 XP split two ways, i.e. 40 XP each.
In fact, the PF2e method would actually work fine for mixed-level parties, too. Say a party made up of a 1st, 2nd and 3rd level character defeated an Ogre (which is level 3). There were three PCs, so they each get a third of the XP listed in (the modified, multiplied-by-4) table 4 in the Bestiary based on their level relative to that of the Ogre.
Yes, it's more maths than "everyone gets a third of 800 XP", but it's perfectly possible if you want to go against the recommendation and have a mixed-level party.
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Glad someone started a thread on this as the new XP system has been niggling at me since I first got the books.
Why do we have to look up where the encounter sits relative to the party (which, as someone points out above could have varying levels) and then split XP based on relative difficulty? What's wrong with adding up the XP values of the monsters / traps in the encounter (which should are in their stat blocks in 1E) and splitting it between the party? I appreciate the maths needs some thinking about to make sure level progression is fairly steady but this game has nearly twenty years of work behind that sort of system (if you just start from 3E) so why change it. Doesn't make sense to me.
Why do we have to look up where the encounter sits relative to the party (which, as someone points out above could have varying levels) and then split XP based on relative difficulty?
I guess it depends on how non-standard your party is.
If you have four PCs of the expected level, it's going to be simpler. You're going to say "Ok, that was a High difficulty fight for your level, so everyone gets 80 XP". You're going to learn the five XP values from Table 5 in the Bestiary pretty quickly, especially when you notice that it progresses like PF1e XP for higher CR monsters, doubling every two rows.
Even if their level is different, it should be simple enough... you'd be like "Ok, that would have been a High difficulty fight for level ones, but you guys levelled up last week so you're level two... that makes it a Low difficulty fight for you, so you each get 60 XP."
If you're running from a published adventure, it'll be designed for a standard party size. If you have a party of size other than 4, you'll have to decide (as with PF1e) whether you'll adjust the encounters to preserve the difficulty or run them as written and live with them being easier or harder than intended.
The rules strongly encourage you to adjust the encounters, at which point the XP rewards stay the same... a High difficulty fight remains High difficulty because you added or removed creatures, so it remains 80 XP each.
If you just run the fight as written though, it's going to require some more work. You'd have to say "That would have been a High difficulty fight for 4 PCs of your level, 80 XP, but there are 5 of you, so you each get 4/5ths of that... 64 XP."
Mind you, you'd probably get used to multiplying everything by 0.8 pretty quickly, since your party size isn't changing between fights. You could even pre-calculate your own adjusted Bestiary Table 5 for your 5 PC party with the five difficulties from Trivial to Extreme multiplied by 0.8 (Trivial = 32 XP, Low = 48 XP, High = 64 XP, Severe = 96 XP, Extreme = 128 XP) and just use that thereafter.
And if you scale up some encounters (say, the fixed encounters) but run others as written (say, wandering monster encounters), you can use your adjusted Table 5 or the original Table 5 as appropriate.
If you don't reward XP on the spot, and calculate it after the adventure, you'd just be adding up how many Trivial, Low, High etc. encounters they defeated. You could probably just use tally marks against the five difficulty levels (or if you have a non standard party size and you decide to run a mix of adjusted and not-adjusted fights, ten difficulty levels).
If you have a mixed-level party though, the simplifications they've made are going to get in your way. It can be done "correctly" (i.e. to emulate PF1e) as I suggested above, but you'll be needing to do a lot more work. Or you can do what the PF2e rules say and just give the lower level characters double XP until they catch up, but that seems unsatisfying.
I appreciate the maths needs some thinking about to make sure level progression is fairly steady but this game has nearly twenty years of work behind that sort of system (if you just start from 3E) so why change it. Doesn't make sense to me.
Well, as I worked through above, the maths is actually the same as PF1e. The rules in PF2e produce exactly the same progression as the three PF1e advancement tracks if you pick the right parameters.
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That's a lot of math to pretty much get to the same conclusion, but yeah. It's the same rule and system, in a roundabout way.
Am I the only one who feels there's a lot more workload on the GM in this edition?
I feel that the new XP system's only purpose is only to design encounters at difficulties relative to your party's level.
Because of how flexible and customizable it is, I can't see myself using it as a way to track the party's level progress, because it's pretty much dependent on how you feel how fast or slow you want your group to level. At that point, you might as well just focus on leveling your group based on story progression, instead of spending time and effort tracking and calculating numbers.
However, I can see myself using the new XP system to calculate how many creatures I want in an encounter based on how difficult I want it to be relative to my group's party level. Or at least, it would give me a good guideline.
If I want an encounter at X difficulty, then I have Y amount of XP to assemble a group of creatures Z-level difference to my party. I think it'll serve as a good metric to lean on. Seems more straightforward than relying on CR in the past. This is of course assuming that creature levels have been appropriately set by Paizo in the Bestiary...
That's a lot of math to pretty much get to the same conclusion, but yeah. It's the same rule and system, in a roundabout way.
Am I the only one who feels there's a lot more workload on the GM in this edition?
I do get that we reach the same end point but if that's the case isn't this a rule change to solve a problem that doesn't exist? It certainly seems that way to me. Would love to hear from the Paizo people what the rationale was for switching to this system.
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I really dislike the new XP system, for many of the reasons mentioned.
1) My players don't want XP to reset each level, because they're proud of their ever-accumulating totals. It's a marker of what they've earned.
2) Huge amount of work on the GM. PF1's XP system was the best for any edition of this game. Back in 3.0/3.5 days, nothing was worse than having to consult that stupid chart every time I went to award XP. Let's not go back to any calculations other than dividing by # of party members.
3) I run sandbox campaigns where, I kid you not, 12th level characters run around with 3rd level characters. One of the dangerous temptations of the low-level characters is whether or not to accompany high-level characters on missions. Probably you die, but if you don't, you're crazy rich and you level for sure.
Sometimes lucky new characters survive long enough to catch up their high level friends.
The new system doesn't allow the low-level characters to ever catch up with the high-level ones. It enforces a party that must always level together. I really don't want a game where everyone's the same level. And I really don't want a game of "level-appropriate challenges" YAWN
I feel like maybe this was designed for PFS or something? but PFS has a perfectly workable 3 adventures and you level thing going on. Otherwise, it was maybe enacted to enforce consistency in party level? because no one must ever be better than anyone else? Why?
This edition is so odd. PF1 was really open to so many different styles of play, and I feel like PF2 isn't giving me the tools to run a sandbox/West Marches campaign anymore.
Let me say it again: PF1's system was the best for any edition of the game. What bewilders me about this edition is how many of the wonderful parts of PF1 were jettisoned along with the clunky/time-consuming ones. PF1's XP system was a welcome innovation.
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From personal experience, being more than one level lower than other PCs in the party is about as fun as eating broken glass. I'm pretty sure everybody in my gaming groups shares that sentiment.
Your table could be different, but people enjoying 9 levels of difference (and GMs being happy with the extra work necessary in order to challenge the level 12 PC and not sniff the level 3 PC out of existence) are something of a corner case.
I think it's a given in that kind of game that the GM is going to pull no punches when it comes to snuffing out the level 3 PC...
The new system doesn't allow the low-level characters to ever catch up with the high-level ones.
Solution: multiply the XP gain for the behind-the-curve PCs as follows:
Level difference |||| XP Multiplier:1 |||| x1.5
2 |||| x2
3 |||| x3
4 |||| x4
5 |||| x6
6 |||| x8
7 |||| x12
8 |||| x16
9 |||| x24
10 |||| x32
11 |||| x48
12 |||| x64
This roughly maps on to relative level gain from PF1.
Though I think the XP system might be the least of your worries in a game where every attack you take is a crit and everyone has AC too high for you to hit.
Honestly I think this is the one time I've ever wanted to use XP.
1) My players don't want XP to reset each level, because they're proud of their ever-accumulating totals. It's a marker of what they've earned.
If you don't like your XP total dropping when you advance a level, you could just not do that. You'd effectively have a level-by-XP table which says 2nd level: 1000 XP, 3rd level: 2000 XP, 4th level: 3000 XP etc. Or, heck, say that 1st level characters start on 1000 XP, and then your level is just your XP total divided by 1000.
Personally, I view character level as the marker of what I've earned, and I'm not fussed by my XP total dropping. Increases in XP are a nice indication of progress towards the next level, but once I've levelled, I don't mind that the number drops. But then, I've played quite a few RPGs where you spend XP to advance.
The new system doesn't allow the low-level characters to ever catch up with the high-level ones. It enforces a party that must always level together. I really don't want a game where everyone's the same level.
Actually, it does allow low-level characters to catch up - the RAW suggest that they get double XP from each encounter:
Party members who are behind the party’s average level should gain double the amount of XP the other characters do until they reach the party’s average level.
However, now that I understand the maths of the system, I realised that it handles mixed-level parties really naturally without needing that "doubling" rule. I'm not sure why the RAW even has the doubling rule when it actually works just fine and quite intuitively to do it "correctly".
An encounter of a given difficulty and level goes up one difficulty for each level lower the PCs are, and goes down one difficulty for each level higher the PCs are. So, a High difficulty encounter for a level 3 party is a Severe difficulty encounter for a level 2 party and a Low difficulty encounter for a level 4 party.
Given that, you can simply award the XP from the table to each character based on the severity of the encounter for them, as if they were adventuring in a party all of their level.
For example, say the Grey Woods in a West Marches game is a level 5 region, so in one part of the woods you create a High difficulty encounter for four level 5 characters... a pair of trolls (two level 5 creatures). A party of a 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th level characters brave the Grey Woods and defeat the trolls. For the 3rd level character, it was an Extreme encounter (2 steps up from High, since they're 2 levels below 5) and so they get 160 XP. For the 4th level character, it was a Severe encounter (1 step up from High, since they're 1 level below 5), so they get 120 XP. For the 5th level character, it was a High difficulty encounter (as designed), so they get 80 XP. For the 6th level character, it was a Low difficulty encounter (1 step down from High, since they're 1 level above 5), so they get 60 XP.
If you go past Extreme off the top of the table, you can easily extrapolate higher levels by following the pattern of doubling the value two rows before, assuming the character actually survives. If you go below Trivial, the RAW say "no XP", which I'm fine with. I don't mind that a high level character learns nothing from fighting creatures more than 4 levels below them.
PF1's system was the best for any edition of the game. What bewilders me about this edition is how many of the wonderful parts of PF1 were jettisoned along with the clunky/time-consuming ones. PF1's XP system was a welcome innovation.
I've decided I quite like the PF2e XP system, because I think it answers the questions that players are most interested in, "Did I reach next level?" and "How close to the next level am I?", better than the table-of-XP-per-level approach.
In PF1e, say you're on 731,000 XP... how close to 16th level are you? You might have noted down that you need 890,000 for 16th level, but you still don't really have enough information. You'd also have to know that the start of 15th level was 635,000, at which point you can roughly work out in your head that you're about 40% of the way along.
Contrast with PF2e... if you're on 380 XP in the PF2e system, you have a pretty darn clear idea of where you're at.