If this is explicitly spelled out in the playtest rules, I'm not seeing it.
My expectation from PF1e and earlier editions is that you divide the XP for an encounter between the PCs. This is reinforced by the encounter-building rules in the Bestiary, which (somewhat convolutedly) says that a trivial encounter is worth 10 XP per PC, a high-difficulty encounter is worth 20 XP per PC etc.
However, the only mention I can find about dividing XP in the rules is:
Any XP award gained goes to all members of the group. For instance, if the party wins a battle worth 100 XP, they each get 100 XP, even if the party’s rogue was off in a vault stealing a treasure during the battle. If she collected a splendid gemstone, which you decided was worth 30 XP, all the party members get that XP, too.
That might be simply saying that everyone gets equal XP, whether they participated in a fight or not, which is consistent with Pathfinder's idea that there is no individual XP and all PCs in the party level up together. However, it also could be read to suggest that everyone gets the full value of the encounter...
It really doesn't make sense to me for a trivial encounter for a party of 3 PCs to award them 30 XP each and a trivial encounter for a part of 5 PCs to award them 50 XP each, so I feel it must be divided, but as I said, I'm not seeing it actually called out in the rules...
If this is explicitly spelled out in the playtest rules, I'm not seeing it.
My expectation from PF1e and earlier editions is that you divide the XP for an encounter between the PCs. This is reinforced by the encounter-building rules in the Bestiary, which (somewhat convolutedly) says that a trivial encounter is worth 10 XP per PC, a high-difficulty encounter is worth 20 XP per PC etc.
However, the only mention I can find about dividing XP in the rules is:
Any XP award gained goes to all members of the group. For instance, if the party wins a battle worth 100 XP, they each get 100 XP, even if the party’s rogue was off in a vault stealing a treasure during the battle. If she collected a splendid gemstone, which you decided was worth 30 XP, all the party members get that XP, too.That might be simply saying that everyone gets equal XP, whether they participated in a fight or not, which is consistent with Pathfinder's idea that there is no individual XP and all PCs in the party level up together. However, it also could be read to suggest that everyone gets the full value of the encounter...
It really doesn't make sense to me for a trivial encounter for a party of 3 PCs to award them 30 XP each and a trivial encounter for a part of 5 PCs to award them 50 XP each, so I feel it must be divided, but as I said, I'm not seeing it actually called out in the rules...
XP is not divided. For parties that are larger or smaller the Bestiary says the challenge ratings must be adjusted. SO a party of 5 characters fights enemies worth 50 XP for the trivial encounter. However, it says the XP gain is NOT adjusted, so they gain 40XP regardless, not 50.
So the 40XP encoutner will always give the chars 40 regardless of how many party members there are, even if you add/substract enemies.
They should really use na example in the book to make this clear though.
For parties that are larger or smaller the Bestiary says the challenge ratings must be adjusted. SO a party of 5 characters fights enemies worth 50 XP for the trivial encounter. However, it says the XP gain is NOT adjusted, so they gain 40XP regardless, not 50.
Wow. You're right, carefully re-reading that section shows that is how it's meant to work.
What a bizarre way to do things. We don't divide XP, but we scale XP for 4 players, irrespective of the size of your party.
So, essentially you'd just getting four times the XP you'd get if we divided the XP by the number of PCs. That means that you'd get the same result (ignoring non-combat XP) if you did divide XP, but you only needed 250 XP to level.
Thanks for the clarification!
Hang about... how does this work when I'm running a published module by-the-book with a non-standard-sized party? Either I'll need to adjust the number of creatures in every single fight in the published book to preserve the difficulty of the fight, or I'll have to reverse-engineer the difficulty to work out what it should have been?
Like, if a party of 6 PCs fights the Sewer Ooze at the start of The Lost Star, it's a level 1 monster, so if I just mindlessly apply the rules everyone gets 40 XP. However, to do it properly, I'd either have to
The same way people have been doing it forever. Not really a PF2 thing.
A) You do encoutners as stated, which will be easier and give less XP so they level up slower so eventually the fights get harder. In the Ooze case yeah they'd get 24 XP or whatever only.
B) Add enemies as you said so that they gain the expected amount of XP. Will need to do this a lot, but at least the guidelines are easy enough. The bestiary does recommend against powering up the monster, so there's some scenarios like the Ooze that would be hard to fix when it doesn't make sense to add minions.
It's the "running the encounter as stated" case where I think PF2 has a problem. By trying to simplify the maths (removing the division), they actually make the case where you run a fight designed for one party size with a different party size harder (instead of dividing the XP for the encounter between the actual number of PCs as you would in PF1, you have to multiply the XP for the encounter by (4 / # of PCs))
Well you could re-calc the exp budget. Say you have a high (80xp) enouncter with a 6 person party. you could treat it as a low (60xp) with +30(15 per extra) for a budget of 90, which is close enough to the base encounter.
I find it slightly ironic and humorous that you implied my complaint about how XP was determined and doled out as unfounded then do so similarly soon after.
Yes, my bad :) Your comments prompted me to look more closely at the XP system, which brought up my own questions.
I also thought the main thing you were complaining about was the way the PF2e XP system restricted the size of encounters you could construct for the players ("Encounters are small groups, individually wrapped, and built for quick resolution.") I didn't feel that the system specifically enforced that... you could still create several rooms of creatures who might be reasonable fights in isolation, but with a danger that they could band together if the PCs were careless (which was the experience I remember from the Caves of Chaos in B2).
However, re-reading your original post, I see you list a number of issues with the XP system, and the comment about bite-sized encounters wasn't really your main point.
The PF2e XP system appeared to have a certain elegance to me when I first read it, but in thinking about how it works at the table and with pre-published adventures with non-standard party sizes, it starts to get wonky pretty quickly.
The basic idea of the system, that monster XP scales down as the PCs reach and then exceed the monster's level, feels reasonable as a design goal. A high level PC slaughtering a million kobolds shouldn't really learn anything from it, for example. It's interesting that it was a feature of the D&D 3/3.5 XP system which Paizo discarded when they made Pathfinder 1, but now they want to bring it back.
The 3/3.5 system was somewhat clunky in its own right, but quite a bit of that was to accommodate variables like mixed-level parties and non-standard party sizes. PF2e seems to have built something that seems more elegant than the 3rd ed version, but only if you ignore the possibility of non-standard party sizes and forbid mixed-level parties (although they do have the throw-away line of "if someone is of a lower level than the rest of the party, just give them double XP until they catch up").
Well you could re-calc the exp budget. Say you have a high (80xp) enouncter with a 6 person party. you could treat it as a low (60xp) with +30(15 per extra) for a budget of 90, which is close enough to the base encounter.
Yes, you get approximately the same result if you multiply the 80 XP reward by (4 / # of PCs) = 80 x (4 / 6) ~= 53 XP each (close to the 60 XP you came up with).
I don't see that the original "problem" of having to do simple division to divide up XP in PF1e is really improved upon by the new system that still requires you to do division if the party size isn't 4, but then multiply the share-per-PC by 4 to put it back in line again.