If you're used to D&D 5e but have [wisely] switched away from Wizards of the Coast, then you might be playing Pathfinder 2. And if you're the Game Master for a Pathfinder 2 campaign, then you might notice your players staying at level 1 for a lot longer than you're used to. D&D 5e and its unofficial successor Tales of the Valiant keep level 1 characters relatively simple to manage, but they promote you quickly to level 2 possibly after just 300 XP (probably 1 or 2 combat encounters). Pathfinder 2, on the other hand, doesn't promote players until 1,000 XP. It's easy to fall under the illusion that D&D 5e rewards players quicker and is therefore "kinder" to the players. More dopamine, more often. But I think there's a lot to be said for Pathfinder's philosophy on progression. In fact, I think there are 3 things to be said. I'll count down to the most significant point, to make it more exciting.
Before that, though, I do acknowledge that milestone leveling exists. I know some people love that system, and that's great. Personally, I don't find it satisfying, and neither does my gaming group, so this blog post is exclusively about XP, under the assumption that milestone leveling is not an option.
Leveling-up isn't inherently good, but most modern players understand that a bigger number next to the word "level" is better than a lower number. And better feels good. But new players also don't know how fast leveling-up should happen. As a Games Master, you don't have to feel bad for not giving your players their second level after 300 points.
Usually when I tell a new player in 5e that they've gained a level, they're totally surprised. They might inherently know that there are levels in this game, from experience with computer games and the general reputation of roleplaying games, but they don't have a sense for how much XP a monster is worth or how much XP they need to gain a level.
And bizarrely, in 5e leveling up can sometimes feel like punishment. You've only just learned your character's abilities, and suddenly your Games Master tells you that you've gained a level so you have to write down a bunch of new abilities and learn those, too. And then there's the dreaded 3rd level, where you have big important life choices to make for your character, and you're only 900 XP in!
It's fast, and that's a real rush, but is it sometimes maybe too fast?
When playing Pathfinder 2, a new level happens every 1,000 points. It's clean, and steady, and players are oblivious of it until they hit 2nd level, at which point the dopamine hits and they start asking when they'll get another level. Now players have a new goal aside from the goals their player characters have. They're playing the game for a steady supply of XP so they can gain another level, increase their stats, and defeat more evil.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, both the movie and the book, the first few chapters establish the central characters, and Tolkien does it with amazing efficiency. We get to know Frodo as a responsible, kind, and good-natured hobbit, we understand that Sam is fiercely loyal, and that Merry and Pippin are carefree but also too curious for their own good. Even when we meet Aragorn (or Strider, as they call him in Bree) late into the book, Tolkien manages to use misdirection and suspicion as a sort of reverse-introduction to his character. By seeing him as a possible threat, we quickly learn that looks are deceptive, and that his true character is the opposite of how he was first presented. My point is, a good story gives you time to get to know a character, whether it takes a few dialogue scenes at a party or a few death-defying heroics in the face of danger.
Not that character development ceases at level 2 in D&D, but a little extra time at level 1 can feel like good focus time. Without adding a bunch of new features onto your character sheet, you can concentrate on, well, staying alive first of all, but also on who your character is in any variety of social situations or in peril. Level 1 is the closest to being an ordinary person that your character ever gets. At even just a level 2, you probably have some pretty fantastic powers at your disposal, but at level 1 it's pretty much just your character's, well, character. If your character is prone to negotiation instead of fighting, that's going to show up while you're at the bottom of the food chain more than when you're an all-powerful unstoppable force. If your character is given to exploration and investigation, that happens in a more tangible sense at level 1 than at level 10 when it just takes a spell to learn everything you need to know.
A really long time ago, you got 1 XP for each gold piece you found. Or at least, that's what I've heard. I wasn't playing the game, then. Gamers started noticing that tying XP to gold forced the game to focus on finding gold, but it seemed like, for instance, saving an entire town from an incursion of evil lizardfolk deserved XP, too.
So the game migrated away from the gold standard and assigned XP values to monsters. Now you got XP for killing evil creatures. Now killing monsters for the good of your village resulted in XP, and killing a monster because it stood between you and a treasure chest was financially lucrative.
Then gamers started noticing that rewarding XP exclusively for combat forced the game to focus on combat. You could have the most amazing character doing the most selfless acts, but if that character didn't kill a monster then you did not progress.
People started talking about "pillars" or "modes" of play, and game systems today often encourage the Games Master to also reward players for things they do that aren't combat. Pathfinder 1st edition had a whole book for social encounters, and D&D 5e eventually published an Unearthed Arcana article on the topic. In both cases, these systems were optional, and sometimes arguably they were either over-complex or under-explained.
Pathfinder 2 explicitly defines different modes of play to help clarify and accentuate that players ought to be earning XP for certain kinds of successes. More importantly, though, it sets the XP rewards for monsters at pretty low numbers. If you were to insist on using only combat to reward XP to players, then player characters are going to be stuck at level 1 for an uncomfortably long time. That's because you're not meant to reward XP just for combat in Pathfinder 2. And there's no better way to reinforce that than through the mechanics of the game.
Pathfinder 2 is designed so that the Games Master can reward players for cool and fun stuff they do outside as well as inside of a combat encounter. More than that, it's designed so that the Games Master must reward players for more than just combat. With every goal post placed way out there at 1,000 XP, and a monster equal to your party level granting just 40 XP, there's almost no way around. Accordingly, the same page with the monster XP values in the core rulebook (that's page 508 in my copy) contains tables for the XP values of hazards and accomplishments.
A level 1 character is the raw material, the core of your player character. You can sit with that character through 300 XP or through 1,000 XP. Sometimes, lingering a little longer at level 1 is kind of nice.
Badlands illustration by Justin Nichol. Creative Commons BY-SA.