Adventure Paths used in Organised Play

[Night13657]

There seems to be a discrepancy between the XP gained in an Adventure Path run as a stand alone adventure and as individual books for organised play.

Each AP book award enough XP to advance the characters as advised in each advancement track, but the Organised play track only awards 3 XP to a Starfinder character meaning you have to play another AP or 3 individual chronicles to be high enough to play the next book.

Is this intentional or an oversight in the awarding of XP?

[NielsenE]

Its intentional.

[Hmm]

My advice is to run the adventure path Campaign mode so that you can level characters as needed within the storyline. Then your players can apply the adventures to their Society characters as they get them, without you having to disrupt the AP's story.

[Sebastian Hirsch]

To be honest, I would like to see the Starfinder sanctioning experiment a bit and try the PFS2 AP sanctioning method, while it would necessitate some sort of wealth table, it would make some of them a lot more useable.

[GM Wageslave]

My current thinking of running one of the introductory AP is to use some of the SFS scenarios/quest packs to help flesh out the story between books, and to provide a bit of a link between them.

Not quite sure how I'm going to make it work yet, but that's the thought.

[Kishmo]

I ran my regular home group through Against the Aeon Throne, and am now about to start Dawn of Flames book 3, using the above method of sandwiching 3 Society scenarios in between each chapter of AP.

It definitely requires player buy-in. Each AP chapter tends to end with a cliffhanger or new hook or revelation or whatever, so the players need to be aware that those are coming, but then followed up with "...but you all decide to take a break back in the Pact Worlds for, oh I don't know, however long it takes to get 3 XP." Sometimes it's easier than others, like when an NPC says "thanks for the data dump you liberated from the bad guys; we'll review everything and get back to you in a month or so when we have more concrete findings!"

The way we've been doing it also take a bit of finagling on the GM side to scale-up encounters for the first bit of an AP. For example, if the AP is written assuming you start at lvl 5 and level up to 6 partway through, but the party is coming in already at lvl 6 and staying that way until the end, then you need up bump up difficulty while the adventure still assumes your party is lvl 5. Bit more work for the GM, but the alternatives are much messier for players.

I enjoy doing it this way, as it means characters still get to see the high beats of Society play and storylines, but still get the ongoing thread and narrative of an AP. Plus, you also don't have to keep track of 'banking' XP earned from completing higher level AP chapters even though the character isn't high enough to apply them yet, which for whatever reason I find hard to do.

[Dracomicron]

My group has been doing multiple APs in regular play mode, alternating Against the Aeon Throne with Dead Suns and then Signal of Screams with Dead Suns. We're up to Dead Suns #5 I think.

It's taken us a long time, but it has been fun to see all the content.