Experience in pathfinder adventures

[Braininthejar2]

I have been trying to DM Council of Thieves recently and I seem to have a problem.
I checked the middle advance track, and the CRs of the encounters, and it looks like the players need to find every encounter and do perfectly on all side goals to advance at the speed the authors envisioned.

Is it by design, or is there some source of player XP I'm missing?

[Alcore]

Specifically council of thieves? Can't say.

Ran a couple of the others and, yes; a party (generally) needs to complete 90-95% of the encounters or problems arise. Kingmaker was the only exception as random wilderness encounters plus an economy/royal treasury to fall back on made the game easier.

Some APs are cited as "too easy" and some are called hard.

[legomaster00156]

It is generally assumed random encounters and other non-book encounters occur, as well.

[MesiDoomstalker]

Having gone through a few APs (and hand-counted the EXP of Iron Gods) I'll say this; the tracker at the front of the book is as accurate as your average darts player at 2 am. Its on the board but never where they say it is. The only time it was ever accurate was the where the PC's end up, level wise, for the ending of a book. Everything else is off by 1-3 encounters (forward or backwards).

That being said; yes. AP's are largely linear. It is assumed that the PC's will handle near everything presented. Unless you have some real out of the box players, I don't think most groups will have issues (and if you do have out-of-box players, treasure them and also maybe try something not out of a book). The most issues you will have is when the writers do the token 'sandbox area' where things aren't linear and also the writers are terrible at directing PC's towards every nook and cranny. These sections often feel weird and awkward (if actually explored as an sandbox, since the writers still make them roughly linear) or are linear and short (as above).