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So my group just skipped the ENTIRE Battlements/dungeon of book 3. I'm trying to adjudicate this as a GM, doing the best I can, but my party keeps driving so hard off the rails I think they've gone to space.
So I explained the complex/battlements/dungeon thing. The place with Cao Shen and everyone. They see it. I explain that there are townspeople going to and fro. The witch uses her flying talking familiar to scout it out from the air, I give her some info. I say that it's crawling with troops so a frontal assault is probably not a good idea.
They decide that they don't want to go in. They start doing explosive fumes+fireball on the outer gates, and I do the math and they bust a couple of them open. The archers shoot them, but after 12 seconds they retreat and heal up and rinse and repeat. And they keep shouting "All we wanna do is talk to your leader!" Eventually I figure the group is going to send some exorcists out in front of the battlements to prevent all the fireballs, and the party fights a group of 2 exorcists and 2 shrine maidens. They beat them (the sorcerer went down, but the kineticist healed her), and the party manages to save and heal all but one of the combatants and basically say "We aren't spirits, see we healed you. Sorry about your friend, go let us talk to your leader."
So I mean, Cao Shen IS willing to talk to them (they got him up to 4 influence points in the seance) so he comes out with all of the mercenaries, the shrine maidens, and the remaining exorcists, and they shout over a large gap of 30 feet while all the mercs are ready to shoot the PCs because they still think they are ghosts. There is an intense conversation, and they convince Cao Shen to bring out the head lumberjack man.
And I mean, in the book, Cao Shen is willing to let them talk to his boss, so getting his boss to come out and talk under heavy guard isn't the most ridiculous thing in the world to me. And they convince him to give them the bell clacker and leave, and he gives them the warning.
I mean, at one part I (out of character) TOLD the party that if they did what they did that they would skip this massive dungeon, and they all kept doing it. So, not sure what I could have done. But they skipped a huge chunk of money and XP so . . . not sure what to do now. I mean, they did it super humanely. Only like, ONE person died . . . they were even super nice to the villagers. (The very nice witch managed to, through many kind words and diplomacy checks, calm the villagers down and get information from them.) So I don't want to punish them for a creative solution but at the same time, they skipped an entire chapter of the book. Kinda at a loss of what to do.
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Interesting approach!
Page 61 of the module has a "Rewards for Peace" sidebar which touches in on how to handle monetary rewards in this sort of situation.
I typically use milestone XP in campaigns to make a situation like this flow more smoothly on the leveling-up front, but even if you're using traditional XP I'd say that the party's solution successfully overcame the challenge they were presented with and, like any encounter which is resolved peacefully, rewards them with the same XP as if they had won the encounter by fighting. In this case their nonstandard solution did successfully overcome a good number of encounters, so they get the XP for those encounters.
Creative Director
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If a group skips a dungeon but still somehow manages to achieve the intended goals that normally you'd need to do the dungeon to achieve, then you should absolutely grant them a big chunk of XP all at once. For this specific case, where a chapter is intended to give out enough XP to level up, I'd suggest just giving the PCs enough XP to do exactly that so they start the next level at 0 XP, with no overflow (the overflow potential being a benefit of doing the tougher route of doing the dungeon).
As for gold, I'd do the same. Have someone give the PCs a reward that includes the plot-bearing or load-bearing treasure they should have earned in the dungeon, along with other rewards to bring them up to the expectations for their new level. Again, any "overflow" they might have earned by spending more time in the dungeon would be lost.
But if a group manages to bypass a chapter of an AP in a way that accomplishes that goal, you shouldn't punish them for being super-efficient.
And then you can stash the unused content for a future game or oneshot if you want.
And also, as AFigureOfBlue points out... this isn't a WRONG solution to the situation. Season of Ghosts allows for plenty of opportunities for the PCs to talk their way out of things without fighting; that's an option I like to put into most of the adventures I develop to certain extents. Hence that sidebar. It's not going to be the common solution, but as you've seen in your game, it can happen.
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Also, just want to point out that the party has determined that Cao Shen has real "Tenured professor energy." They have also coined the term 'spirit-splaining,' for all the spiritualists who kept telling spirits how they should spirit. There were a lot of jokes that were basically:
"I know you're a ghost, but let me, a mortal human, tell you how to ghost."