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My Pathfinder 2e Post-Mortem
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<blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8869761" data-attributes="member: 907"><p>One of the devs told me over on the Paizo boards that they, at least for the early APs (this was in the context of Extinction Curse, the second PF2 AP), filled them with encounters and didn't assume milestone leveling because they didn't want people to complain about not getting their money's worth out of the adventure. You paid for an adventure that starts at level 1 and ends with you getting to level 5, you should get four levels' worth of encounters from it.</p><p></p><p>A contributing factor is the adventure path cadence which is fairly specific. The standard AP is six books long and gets you from level 1 to where 21 would be if it was supported (i.e. it supports not just ending at level 20, but playing for a significant period there). That's 3.33 levels per book, or four books covering 3 levels and two books covering 4. Each book has ~64 pages of actual adventure (96 total pages, but the last third is peripheral material like setting information, new items, and so on - good stuff, but it won't put XP on your character sheet). Non-fighting XP usually requires a lot of description and setup of a non-combat encounter, but fighting XP can be as easy as saying "2 vrocks (Moderate 9), Bestiary p. 78" and be done with it. So dungeons are very efficient at delivering XP onto character sheets, page-count-wise.</p><p></p><p>None of these things is likely to change because of business realities: 6 books means 2 APs per year, and 64 pages is about what you can get out of the freelancers who write these, as well as what the assigned artists, editors, layout folks, and other staff can handle. Changing these things would require significant alterations to the business of APs, and APs are the core of what Paizo does. They're <strong>very</strong> conservative with changing those. The most they've done have been introducing half-APs that are either 1-10 or 11-20 in 3 books, but those don't really change the overall structure of delivering 3.33 levels of adventure per book.</p><p></p><p>I understand that they've gotten somewhat more generous with non-combat XP in later APs, so I'd be interested in checking those out. However, my group's experience with Agents of Edgewatch has soured us somewhat on the game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Staffan, post: 8869761, member: 907"] One of the devs told me over on the Paizo boards that they, at least for the early APs (this was in the context of Extinction Curse, the second PF2 AP), filled them with encounters and didn't assume milestone leveling because they didn't want people to complain about not getting their money's worth out of the adventure. You paid for an adventure that starts at level 1 and ends with you getting to level 5, you should get four levels' worth of encounters from it. A contributing factor is the adventure path cadence which is fairly specific. The standard AP is six books long and gets you from level 1 to where 21 would be if it was supported (i.e. it supports not just ending at level 20, but playing for a significant period there). That's 3.33 levels per book, or four books covering 3 levels and two books covering 4. Each book has ~64 pages of actual adventure (96 total pages, but the last third is peripheral material like setting information, new items, and so on - good stuff, but it won't put XP on your character sheet). Non-fighting XP usually requires a lot of description and setup of a non-combat encounter, but fighting XP can be as easy as saying "2 vrocks (Moderate 9), Bestiary p. 78" and be done with it. So dungeons are very efficient at delivering XP onto character sheets, page-count-wise. None of these things is likely to change because of business realities: 6 books means 2 APs per year, and 64 pages is about what you can get out of the freelancers who write these, as well as what the assigned artists, editors, layout folks, and other staff can handle. Changing these things would require significant alterations to the business of APs, and APs are the core of what Paizo does. They're [B]very[/B] conservative with changing those. The most they've done have been introducing half-APs that are either 1-10 or 11-20 in 3 books, but those don't really change the overall structure of delivering 3.33 levels of adventure per book. I understand that they've gotten somewhat more generous with non-combat XP in later APs, so I'd be interested in checking those out. However, my group's experience with Agents of Edgewatch has soured us somewhat on the game. [/QUOTE]
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