Our starting point is Paizo's Organized Play program. How do they dole out XP in the Pathfinder Society Scenarios? They have a massively simplified system compared to normal PF rules.
Paizo wrote:Typically a Scenario rewards 4 XP, while Quests and Bounties earn less. Every time your character earns 12 XP, they level up!
And that's it. That's the PFS XP system lol.
Why is it so simplified? I am sure they have explained it somewhere, but I haven't come across the explanation yet. My speculation is that it is impossible to craft the scenarios to dole out equal XP, which means that some scenarios give more XP, and more easily, which would lead to feelings of "unfairness" by players going into these scenarios blindly. So by standardizing XP to the point where you just need to complete the scenario—any scenario—and you get the exact same XP as any other player completing any other scenario, they free up the players to engage with any scenario they want instead of trying to game the system by gaining advance knowledge of the scenarios (e.g. by playing them with alts) and tackling only the ones that can be milked more easily for more XP.
All this stems from the fact that Organized Play, unlike the roleplaying adventures and campaigns, is a competitive event, if not directly at the table with your partners for the day (though it is that too), then with the entire community tackling scenarios and leveling up.
It also doesn't hurt that this massively simplified system makes the GMs' lives easier in the busy conventions and game stores where PFS Scenarios are run.
Where does that leave us?
Well, first of all, as aforesaid, a full PFS Scenario gets 4 XP, and you need to complete 3 of these to level up. But SriK's Skeleton King's Crypt is not a PFS Scenario at all, let alone a full-length one. I would say it's about 1/4th the size of a normal scenario, if not less, so I'll be giving it 1 XP.
In addition to the scenarios, Paizo has tried some more formats over the years to complement them, and though most of those were introduced far later than the PF1 Season 0 scenarios we'll begin with, they can give us a good idea of how XP gain scales with game length. Roughly then, this is how things are RIGHT NOW in the season running in 2025 PF2:
Bounty: 1 hour/1 XP
Quest: 2 hours/2 XP
Scenario: 4 hours/4 XP
So with this scheme it looks fitting that Skeleton King's Crypt should give 1 XP. This means that a hero would have to complete 12 "bounties" of this length in order to level up. So by dividing the 2nd-level's (Medium Track) 2,000 XP requirement by 12, we get 167 XP gain for completing a bounty or bounty-level challenge. Obviously the XP gain will vary depending on the level. (As for the Medium XP Track, we're starting out with that because most adventures and campaigns run on it. We'll see if it makes sense to modify it as we play.)
We NEED to convert Paizo's simplified XP scale back to the full PF1 XP scale because in our 4X layer that Paizo lacks players will be gaining XP from many other sources, such as random encounters etc. So we need much more granularity than Paizo uses in their Organized Play program. That said, we're keeping the simplified system for the bounties, quests and scenarios, at least to start with. I want to check it out in play for a while and gain some experience (pun!) running it before I decide to trash it and run all the scenarios with full PF1 rules. Which is almost certainly what I will end up doing. But let's give ourselves a break to start with, and in the process try out what Paizo has been doing for almost two decades now. It never hurts to explore more systems, especially if you plan on messing with and re-engineering them.
