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My current group tracks experience. We have rotating GMs, so at the moment we have going 1) Age of Ashes AP just finished book 3, 2) P2 update of Second Darkness also just finished book 3, 3) homebrew sandbox game.
I am gm of the SD game. I try to keep my party on a milestone leveling, but I also track exp. because it helps me to better understand if I need to push the PCs forward or if they can take their time. P2 also makes it really easy to do exp. since it is based on the party's level and monster level, instead of needing to look up how much exp a specific monster is worth, and then dividing it by the number of PCs in the party etc.
Are mixed-level parties a thing that people regularly encounter?
Three scenarios comes to mind.
1. Society play frequently has mixed-level parties, but a different XP system (everyone gets 1/3 of a level per scenario). However, during my GM preparations, I usually back-calculate the challenge of the scaled encounter, just so I get a quantitative assessment of what each character is going to think of the encounter.
2. As a GM, I penalize players a level when their character dies. That is, if they lose a Level 5 character, their replacement is Level 4. Not sure how common that is.
3. In some published material, NPCs that fight alongside the PCs are different levels.
Really, the entire XP/creature formula boils down to:
EXP(LV) = EXP(LV + 2) / 2
For those that can't do exponents in their head, it's basically 1.5x per level and 2.0x per two levels.
Level-4 is 10 XP, Level-3 is 15, Level-2 is 20.
Level-2 is 20 XP, Level-1 is 30, Level+0 is 40.
Level+0 is 40 XP, Level+1 is 60, Level+2 is 80.
Level+2 is 80 XP, Level+3 is 120, Level+4 is 160.
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2. As a GM, I penalize players a level when their character dies. That is, if they lose a Level 5 character, their replacement is Level 4. Not sure how common that is.
wow, that's a really cool way to make their next character more likely to die!
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2. As a GM, I penalize players a level when their character dies. That is, if they lose a Level 5 character, their replacement is Level 4. Not sure how common that is.wow, that's a really cool way to make their next character more likely to die!
Yeah, it's a relatively common practice with new GMs from older editions. Even I did it during my first year. Most GMs abandon the practice after they realize it just creates a death spiral to no real purpose.
As an aside, any GM who thinks they have a need to punish me and/or the other players is a GM that I'm walking away from. This is a cooperative game meant to allow people to have a good time, not to feed some immature participant's power trip. GMs are arbiters of the rules, not vigilantes seeking justice for percived wrong-doings.
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Yeah, anyone who wants to do some form of mixed-level scheme for their games... as gently as I can, I encourage you to reconsider. It's not unique to PF2 either, it's actually just not as fun as you might imagine.
Per RAW, if a PC is behind the party, you award them double exp for an encounter.
Party members who are behind the party level gain double the XP other characters do until they reach the party’s level. When tracking individually, you’ll need to decide whether party members get XP for missed sessions.
So a PC who is a level behind the group will quickly catch up. For instance, the party is at level 5 with 300 exp. New PC (PC-A) joins at level 4 at 0 exp. The level 5 party members will level up in 700 exp, or about 8 moderate and 1 low encounters.
If we use Watery Soup's calculations above, the PC-A will receive 1040 exp from the same encounters (mod 5 is a sever 4 etc). Meaning they will hit leevl 5 just as the rest of the party hits level 6.
Following RAW, the PC-A will hit level 5 after the 7th moderate encounter, putting them at 1120 exp, or 120 at level 5. At this point the rest of the party is at 860. All PCs are now at level 5, Meaning for the 8th moderate and the one low encounter everyone gets the same Exp.
PC-A is now at level 5 with 260 exp, while the rest of the party is at level 6 at 0. To hit level 7, the party needs 12 moderate encounters and one trivial for exactly 1000 exp. PC-A gets double exp, meaning that they level up to 6 after 7 encounters. PC-A is at level 6 with 120 exp, while the party is at level 6 at 560.
Again, now at the same level everyone gets same exp for the next 440 exp. Party at level 7, PC-A at 560. After 3 moderate encounters the party has recieved 240 exp, while PC-A has gotten 480 exp ending up at 40 exp and level 7.
To recap, PC-A came into the game 1300 exp and one level behind. By the time they hit level 6, they are only 440 exp behind. By level 7 they are only 200 behind.
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Look, if I wanted glaring disparity of resources that create constant irritant with the very fabric of the world, I'd play ''real life: the world''
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Even in-game, if you can't deal with two characters a level apart, how are you going to deal with two characters nominally the same level but have a significant power disparity due to class (bard vs alchemist) or build (power gamer vs gimmick)?
Whataboutism aside, there's no significant power disparity between PF2 classes, and power builds are ahead of gimmick builds in terms of damage to the tune of 10-15%.
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I actually went for mixed level parties intentionally in my West Marches sandbox (since the players decide what characters to bring) and the content is 'balanced' for four people parties of a level based on the geographical location, which means I've dealt with some interesting variety.
The system is more robust toward mixed level parties than people think. The most extreme case, I think, was the pack of ghouls and a ghast that would have been severe for a level 3 party they took on at level 1 in their first ever session because they managed to get the key for the lair way earlier than expected-- they took it on with no casualties, which was impressive.
The secret sauce for that is:
1. Everyone knows the level of every other creature on the field, and we use the chase rules improvisationally as a retreat system.
2. Creatures use that knowledge in their threat assessment, generally prioritizing higher level foes-- especially for their full bonus attacks.
3. Leveling is treasure based, and actually uses a 1/4 party treasure by level chart value to go to next level (with multiplied values of output treasure accordingly) this means that a character who is swinging above their weight class, has the potential to level disproportionately fast and catch up.
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there's no significant power disparity between PF2 classes, and power builds are ahead of gimmick builds in terms of damage to the tune of 10-15%.
I don't think that's true as a general statement, and if it's true for any subset of players, it's only so because the subset isn't big enough to capture the true diversity of the player pool.
There are some really awful builds out there - and since several of the participants in this discussion frequent the Great Alchemist Debate threads, let's just use an optimized STR-based 2H fighter vs a mutagenist alchemist as an example. Does anyone really think that a mutagenist alchemist is 85-90 cents on the dollar?
On top of that, new players don't take advantage of all their characters' features. They don't position their champions to use the reactions, they don't flank with their rogues to get sneak attack (or don't help the party rogue get sneak attack), etc.
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If you have new players, why not just give them advice when it comes to positioning and flanking? It will help them think about doing it more.
Also, mixed level parties are rough in basically every game, but especially here where every level matters. What do you do when the lower level player has to bring in ever lower characters each time since they keep getting instagibbed? Bringing a level 1 wizard to the level 8 party?
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there's no significant power disparity between PF2 classes, and power builds are ahead of gimmick builds in terms of damage to the tune of 10-15%.I don't think that's true as a general statement, and if it's true for any subset of players, it's only so because the subset isn't big enough to capture the true diversity of the player pool.
There are some really awful builds out there - and since several of the participants in this discussion frequent the Great Alchemist Debate threads, let's just use an optimized STR-based 2H fighter vs a mutagenist alchemist as an example. Does anyone really think that a mutagenist alchemist is 85-90 cents on the dollar?
On top of that, new players don't take advantage of all their characters' features. They don't position their champions to use the reactions, they don't flank with their rogues to get sneak attack (or don't help the party rogue get sneak attack), etc.
You're comparing a utility/support class that has a limited ability to fight in melee with the class that's all (and only) about fighting with weapons? Well, that's not how it works.
What's the "new players" argument even has to do with this? You can have 30 years D&D veterans who still don't get elementary tactics and you can have new players who immediately grasp the flow of PF2 combat.
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Yeah, it's a relatively common practice with new GMs from older editions. Even I did it during my first year. Most GMs abandon the practice after they realize it just creates a death spiral to no real purpose.2. As a GM, I penalize players a level when their character dies. That is, if they lose a Level 5 character, their replacement is Level 4. Not sure how common that is.wow, that's a really cool way to make their next character more likely to die!It only death spirals for people who don't have basic Excel skills. When a player goes down a level, all the encounters can get scaled automatically. That's the point of an Excel sheet.
It works the other direction, too. If you have a friend that drops in for a session or two, you can also automatically rescale the encounter.
And you can also put in characters at lower levels than their character level if you're not confident a new player is going to play the character to its potential, e.g., putting in a new-player level 5 as a level 4 PC in your spreadsheet so the encounters get moderately scaled rather than fully scaled.
But that would all depend on making an Excel sheet so I understand the reluctance.
This entails that you reconfigure every encounter, including anything with DC. Most people do not want to do that, especially those who GM APs.
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So on alchemist: alchemist is a support class pure and simple. Great utility, great versatility, good skill potential with on the fly mutagen, very poor damage. Comparing it to a fighter is not fait, comparing it to a cleric might be better, and then you see that while they're slightly behind cleric in terms of raw healing, but have much greater buffing potential. The Alchemist in my agent of edgewatch game trivialized encounters by giving everyone major juggernault mutagens at the beginning of every adventuring day as well as greater bravo brew.
On levels: I CAN do the math very easily on the encounter balance, I CHOOSE not to rebalance for lower level players by simply not having them there and making everyone the same level. This is a game! It's made to be fun! A lower level character will feel like they are less than and I don't want my players to feel that way! They're also my friends!
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If you have new players, why not just give them advice when it comes to positioning and flanking? It will help them think about doing it more.
Sure, you can also choose their spells for them and build their characters for them in addition to playing their characters for them.
What do you do when the lower level player has to bring in ever lower characters each time since they keep getting instagibbed? Bringing a level 1 wizard to the level 8 party?
I don't know what you (plural) think happens here, or why the assumption is that a single level drop means (1) a player plays exactly as they did before or worse, (2) a GM targets the weaker PC equally, or (3) that PC death is so common that someone could even get 2 levels behind the rest of the party before their extra XP catches them up.
I'm guessing it has to do with whatever someone said above about the GM being an arbiter of rules.
The whole point of having an Excel sheet is so that you're not mindlessly applying something someone else wrote to your specific party.
If your party is weak on ranged attacks, flier enemies are disproportionately strong, and you need to at least know and preferably adjust. If the new player in the game wants to play an alchemist, nod politely and adjust the campaign around that decision. Don't just mash the "adjudicate" button like you're a computer program.
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You're comparing a utility/support class that has a limited ability to fight in melee with the class that's all (and only) about fighting with weapons? Well, that's not how it works.
So on alchemist: alchemist is a support class pure and simple. Great utility, great versatility, good skill potential with on the fly mutagen, very poor damage. Comparing it to a fighter is not fait, comparing it to a cleric might be better
Whether the comparison is fair or not, the statement that "there's no significant power disparity between PF2 classes, and power builds are ahead of gimmick builds in terms of damage to the tune of 10-15%" is just wrong.
Some builds are going to be +/- 30-50% from others. And unless you put guardrails on character creation (which, don't get me wrong, is another reasonable way to deal with this), you're going to have to adjust the prewritten material.
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You're comparing a utility/support class that has a limited ability to fight in melee with the class that's all (and only) about fighting with weapons? Well, that's not how it works.So on alchemist: alchemist is a support class pure and simple. Great utility, great versatility, good skill potential with on the fly mutagen, very poor damage. Comparing it to a fighter is not fait, comparing it to a cleric might be betterWhether the comparison is fair or not, the statement that "there's no significant power disparity between PF2 classes, and power builds are ahead of gimmick builds in terms of damage to the tune of 10-15%" is just wrong.
Some builds are going to be +/- 30-50% from others. And unless you put guardrails on character creation (which, don't get me wrong, is another reasonable way to deal with this), you're going to have to adjust the prewritten material.
Ran 2 printed campaigns 1 to 20 with full parties of 4-6 players, some of them were noobs and some of them were veterans of other systems.
Did not adjust anything aside from encounter scaling for more players, ran the encounters as is. Modified the plot a bit.
And eventually I made the encounters slightly harder cause my team was steamrolling the 15+ encounters.
Current campaign I'm running has a lot of extreme encounters built for a party of 6, so they've had some tough calls and some encounters they've lost, but that's more homebrew.
Age of ashes group was: 2 handed paladin of sarenrae, thief rogue, animal barbarian, maestro bard, animal druid, bomber alchemist. Alchemist was often times the main DPS output of the party due to the abundance of weaknessess in the AP. Sticky bomb alignment ampoule is pretty harsh on demons :P
Agents of edgewatch group was: Shield divine ally champion of Iomedae, Martial muse Bard with Sentinel and Marshal archetype, toxicologist alchemist, Fire elemental sorcerer. This one had free archetype so skewed the power a bit.
Both these parties had an alchemist, both these parties had the alchemist do some f!*%ing cool things.
Current campaign groups:
Iron gods: Lore Oracle, Runes Witch, Construct Summoner, Gymnast Swashbuckler, Flurry Ranger (Yes I have ALL OF THE SUBPAR BUILDS HERE!) they've been steam rolling extreme encounters with clever tactics and good planning and positioning. The three encounters I was afraid of TPKing in planning phase were very easy for them (A level 5 magus of the technic league vs a level 3 party with no more spell slots, A level 6 Cleric of Hellion vs a level 4 party, A level 5 Rogue with 6 level 0 mooks vs a party of level 3)
Kingmaker: Fighter, Dancer Swashy, Harm font Cleric, Bones Oracle, eldritch Rogue, Necromancer wizard. Only the swashy here is subpar. I've thrown a lot of extreme encounters at them and they just pull through with clever planning.
I really don't know where you're coming from with the ''Gm will have to adjust'' and I had two alchemists.
I always follow the guidelines and often think they're too lenient.
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Consider that every GM is always in a state of adjusting their pre-written AP at all times, whether they know it or not. Usually it doesn't take an excel spreadsheet, though. Regardless whether you painstaking attuned the math of every encounter beforehand, the decisions you make round to round also affect the landing, and are perhaps more important because this is how you can fine tune when the encounter punches higher or lower than expected. For this reason I suspect many would question the assumption that the spreadsheet is at all necessary when experience obviates the need.
Mind you plenty GMs are of the mindset also that if the party has an obvious deficit which they can do something about (eg nobody bought a ranged weapon), then an encounter against a common foe which shows them their lack is the medicine for the ailment. In general the balance is such that calculating dpr against enemy hit points us not very necessary or even necessarily useful given the number of tactical and support benefits which have as larger or larger impact on the outcome of battle than raw damage output.
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You're comparing a utility/support class that has a limited ability to fight in melee with the class that's all (and only) about fighting with weapons? Well, that's not how it works.So on alchemist: alchemist is a support class pure and simple. Great utility, great versatility, good skill potential with on the fly mutagen, very poor damage. Comparing it to a fighter is not fait, comparing it to a cleric might be betterWhether the comparison is fair or not, the statement that "there's no significant power disparity between PF2 classes, and power builds are ahead of gimmick builds in terms of damage to the tune of 10-15%" is just wrong.
Some builds are going to be +/- 30-50% from others. And unless you put guardrails on character creation (which, don't get me wrong, is another reasonable way to deal with this), you're going to have to adjust the prewritten material.
Fine, show me a Fighter build that is +50% in damage ahead of other Fighter builds.
(no, a STR 18 Fighter vs STR 10 Fighter doesn't count)
Of course Str vs Dex vs Skill Monkey (int/wis/cha) Fighter counts. You can't say "show me other builds" and then exclude half (or more) of those builds.
Those builds seem to be built for different roles, though. Nobody expects a magical support fighter to deal as much damage as a damage-focused fighter. (Damaging Dex and magic builds do exist and can keep up decently)
Of course Str vs Dex vs Skill Monkey (int/wis/cha) Fighter counts. You can't say "show me other builds" and then exclude half (or more) of those builds.
I meant comparing an STR-based Fighter that has 10 STR with one that has 18 STR. It would make as much sense as a CHA-based "skill monkey" Fighter that has both 10 in STR and DEX and no means of attacking realiably, because frankly that's purposefully hurting yourself intetionally and discarding the part of the class that says STR or DEX are your primary attributes.
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I mean, if we're going to compare builds in good faith we should not assume a level of system mastery below "reads the class and understands what their stats do".
Like nobody will make the Fighter with 8 Strength and 8 Dex accidentally. Even very new players making a good effort to understand the game will understand like "Oh, I will want to hit things in combat".
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Not to get on topic, but I still track exp for the group and it literally takes maybe 30 seconds to a minute at the end of the session (and a good chunk of that is remembering where my gm screen is for the exp table).
I do not understand the vitriol towards this practice, especially with how easy it is to do in PF2e.
That said, I don't care that people want/prefer to use milestone leveling. It's perfectly fine and I'll probably be using it in my kind of episodic and definitely not secretly Power Rangers inspired campaign that I hope I can hide til the end that I'll be running after we finish AV. I just don't like when they act like exp is the worst/too hard/a waste when it's just a personal preference.
I do not understand the vitriol towards this practice, especially with how easy it is to do in PF2e.
I don't know that I agree with the characterization of vitriol.
My perspective on it (for actually counting XP) is that it's bean counting for bean counting's sake.
My goals when I GM are to foster fun, including for myself. So making encounters easier to set up makes things more fun for me. It's easier when everyone in the party is the same level, and I think it's more fun for everyone if no one is down a level compared to the rest of the party. No one likes seeing their friends get new "toys" and they don't.
So if counting XP makes planning encounters harder, and makes the game generally less fun for players, and my goal is balanced party members having fun then counting XP honestly just seems like a waste of time to me. Counting beans for the sake of counting beans.
I get that some people like it, but I just fail to find a benefit other than to penalize some players under certain circumstances.
I guess you could argue that counting XP let's the party advance based on the encounters you send at them, and without an Adventure Path to tell you where the rails are you might have a hard time doing so otherwise. But when I've done my own homebrew I come up with challenges and encounters for the party, I usually have in mind how powerful I want the enemy to be (and also in relation to the PCs). And so if know that, I know what level I want the PCs to be. And I can just tell them "Hey, level up to 3" and withholding the info that I want them to be at level 3 because the next encounter is going to be a very difficult CR 5 encounter because that's the enemy I want to use. Doesn't matter what happened before, the next encounter I have planned is for a level 3 party vs a level 5 enemy.
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Not to get on topic, but I still track exp for the group and it literally takes maybe 30 seconds to a minute at the end of the session (and a good chunk of that is remembering where my gm screen is for the exp table).
I do not understand the vitriol towards this practice, especially with how easy it is to do in PF2e.
I think XP based leveling is good in some campaigns. However, in the CRB it's presented as the way to do it, while XP is not actually a wonderful fit for the kind of APs that Paizo publishes. So, vitriol ensues.
Paizo's APs are three or six book stories with relatively clear expectations that "by the time you get to part X, you should be level Y". The story is a bit linear because one book has to lead into another. Also, the story is usually presented as urgent: "the bad guy is about to do some bad things, we must stop him quickly before more bad things happen".
But if really try to stop the bad guy fast and don't go on any of the side quests because you care about the story and don't want to waste time while lives are in the balance, you miss out on XP and arrive under-leveled. Or maybe if you really do a ton of side quests and get XP for them, by the time you get around to the boss, you're a level higher than expected and it's a bit too easy.
So XP doesn't really jive well with that sort of linear adventure. It's an adventure "path" for a reason; there are destinations there.
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Compare that with a more freeform adventure, like the West Marches style sandbox. There is not really a core plotline to chase and hurry along, the PCs figure out "do we think we can take on that dungeon over there?" and eventually feel like they're strong enough to do it. Or decide not to, because it looks too tough. You couldn't do that in an AP; you can't decide "we don't feel confident taking on this boss, we're going to do a different quest first to level up a bit".
So I think XP works much better in a player-driven campaign, than in the story-driven AP campaigns where you're really supposed to be a particular level in that part of the story. At that point it's just more convenient to cut out the middleman and use milestone leveling.
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I have never in my life encountered any sort of vitriol relating to milestone leveling vs. traditional XP gains.
Not even on the internet.
I guess I will find out in the next game I GM. We have always used XP to level in the games I have been involved in, so it may be a surprise to some players when I don't award XP at the end of the first session.
At the very least, I will know who read the setting intro.
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There was actually a Roll For Combat stream today where the topic of the 1000xp per level design came up, and Mark Seifter talked about it a bit. The stream is on YouTube right now, titled "Does the Gold Economy Work in D&D and Pathfinder?", and you can find the relevant conversation here. I'll paraphrase some of what was said as a couple questions and answers below:
Q: Why use XP instead of Milestone?
A: Many players prefer milestone leveling, but there's still a significant portion of the base that prefers using xp for their games, and the decision to use xp as the default came down to ease of implementation. It's easier to implement milestone in a game where xp is the default than it is to implement xp in a game where milestone is the defualt, so they opted to make the rules for the more complicated mechanic instead to make it easier for both parts of the playerbase to do what they want.
Q: Why use 1000xp per level instead of some other number?
A: The idea of using 100xp per level was actually considered at one point - 100xp for 100% of a level is pretty easy to remember, after all - but it turns out they really needed the extra digit to add more granularity so they wouldn't wind up handing out 1/2 xp at any point.
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The reason the game defaults to using the same amount of xp for each level up wasn't mentioned during the stream, but personally I think it's fairly straightforward - changing how much xp it takes to level up at each level means you need to increase how much XP monsters are worth at each level, too. That makes it harder to design consistent systems for encounter balance, as a fight with the same level of challenge is going to be worth different amounts of xp based on what level the players are, and means the GM has to remember more formulas or refer to more tables to do their job. It also doesn't really serve much purpose in the game, save for artificially increasing xp values at every level, and if you're already trying to keep the ratio of encounters per level consistent to begin with... why not make the xp required to level up a consistent value, too?
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I don't know if it was part of the reasoning for it, but a happy side effect comes into play if your GM likes to award xp for good roleplay or doing something just kind of neat. But in other editions, if the GM wants to *keep* doing that, they have to adjust the amount as you level up. Pretty massively. They might say, "Wow, that was cool, take 50 xp!" And at level 1, that's great! But it won't be long until that 50 xp is in the same bracket as 0 xp.
With a standardized goal, the GM always knows how potent that reward is.
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Some builds are going to be +/- 30-50% from others.
And that's a lot more likely to happen if you do something silly like force a level gap between party members and then reduce the amount of XP the lower level player gets to make them play catch up even longer.
Worth noting, in case it hasn't already, that the game has rules for slower or faster leveling (requiring 800-1200xp per level), and if your players are all okay with it nothing would stop you from saying in session 0 "at level 10 we're going to slow advancement because it's better for the pacing of what I have planned".
https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=574
So if you really want to have xp requirements be different at different stages of a campaign, you can do that RAW to some extent already.
Generally though, 1000xp is just a nice easy to track and remember number and changing it drastically or often is just gonna confuse people for zero benefit.
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wow I can't help but feel as if every reply missed the point of the question. I think it's "why is the XP requirement constant", as in "why does it take the exact same amount of time/exprience to get from levels 19 to 20 as it does from levels 1 to 2?"
Should it take the same amount of time? You're right, that's a reasonable question to ask.
I think the answer comes down to taste, and what people think they're going to want, and what they actually like when they get there.
The idea that later levels should take longer to progress through seems to be pretty instinctive. But if you actually do it, is it nice?
I've played two PF2 APs all the way to level 20 now and I find that the speed of leveling works quite well. It's pretty consistently one big chapter of story per level, 2-4 chapters=levels per book.
The amount of stuff you gain at each level is pretty consistent:
- odd levels, you get a class feature/proficiency upgrade, spell rank, skill upgrade, and an ancestry or general feat
- even levels, you get a class feat and a skill feat
So levels taking about the same amount of time at the beginning and the end of the campaign, works together with the amount of new stuff you get each level also going at the same speed. You have the same time to try out your new toys, before the next level gives you newer toys.
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why does it take the exact same amount of time/exprience to get from levels 19 to 20 as it does from levels 1 to 2?
Because that is the amount of time to master the most recent abilities of the character and to start to long for the next level of abilities.
Most players don't want to repeat the same fight over and over again. They are willing to repeat a fight occasionally. Maybe the plot insists that they fight through a set of same-strength enemy groups to reach their goal. In the first fight, they are busy learning about enemy tactics and how to apply their own abilities against those tactics. Eventually they would hone their tactics to perfection and the difference between fights would be the whims of the dice. The fights would become boring.
To keep the game fresh, the player characters level up and gain new abilities. Then they can face new challenges, such as flying creatures or incorporeal creatures or fields of lava or interdimensional travel.
The amount of time between level-ups is about the same because any longer would cause boredom from too much similarity.
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wow I can't help but feel as if every reply missed the point of the question. I think it's "why is the XP requirement constant", as in "why does it take the exact same amount of time/exprience to get from levels 19 to 20 as it does from levels 1 to 2?"
It doesn't necessarily take the same amount of time - it's perfectly reasonable to say that appropriate threats are more rare for a 19th level party than a 1st level party, so in-narrative it takes longer. If you mean out-of-game time, I don't know why it would take longer? I don't think it really has historically either - or for a current comparison, level 9 is much longer in 5e than level 19 is (when I did the maths a long time ago, you needed ~2 APL = Challenge encounters to level from 1-2, ~12 from about level 5-12, back down to ~8 past level 12 because they knew the game falls apart at higher levels). In terms of experience required, why would that change? The logic is that you get the same amount of learning from fighting an enemy the same relative challenge to you throughout the game; at level 1, fighting a level 3 enemy is a highly informative experience. By level 19, you need to be fighting a level 21 enemy for it to be similarly informative, but if you are why would you learn less?
Every time I've converted a PF1 adventure to PF2 (4 APs with varying levels of completion), the XP conversions lines up just about perfectly so you level up at the same point in either version. So I'm not sure why we are talking about time here.
Some game systems that I see have fixed amounts of XP for enemies or other challenges based on the level of those challenges. And they also have a variable amount of XP needed for each level where lower levels require lower amounts of XP to gain and higher levels require higher amounts of XP to gain.
So in those systems defeating a challenge when you are at a lower level will gain you the same amount of XP as defeating that same challenge when you are at the same level as the challenge, and when defeating the challenge when you are at a higher level than the challenge.
However, when accounting for the amount of XP needed to gain a new level, the percentage value changes. Defeating that challenge at a lower level gives a large percentage of the XP needed to gain a level. Defeating the challenge at the same level as the challenge gives a moderate percentage of the XP needed, and defeating the challenge as a higher level character gives a very small percentage of the XP needed to gain a higher level.
PF2 does indeed have this switched around. The amount of XP needed to gain a new level is fixed. But the amount of XP gained by defeating a challenge changes. If the challenge is a higher level than the character, then it gives a larger amount of XP. If the challenge is at the same level as the character, then it gives a moderate amount of XP, and if the challenge is lower level than the character, then it gives a small amount of XP.
So as a percentage needed to gain a level, the two systems are roughly equivalent. The only difference is in where the math is being done and where the values are being tracked.