| Staffan Johansson |
How many of those 13 encounters are avoidable? Either through stealth, diplomacy, or any other non-combat solution? I do not use XP (I use milestone leveling) but if I did, I would award my players XP for avoiding encounters, or more likely just lump all the XP from various encounters like this into a sum and award it when the objective is met, regardless of method used.
Some can be bypassed, but they're pretty much all intent on violence. And while you can get to the "boss" encounter early (either by finding the right key or by being a priest-type of the right god), the adventure still expects you to clear out most of the hermitage.
But I think it would have made for a better adventure if the the chapter was split into two or three parts. Perhaps a first part consisting of getting to the hermitage, then one part rescuing the kidnapped NPC, and then a part dealing with some form of manifestation of the corruption. And now you have three sets of 4-5 encounters each instead, which is much more manageable. But the problem of doing that is that it would likely have eaten additional page count, which the book doesn't have.