I would like to know what other people's experience is with rewarding XP points. What is the 'right' amount of XP per chapter of an adventure? Has anyone applied any other kind of modifications or restrictions to keep the game challenging? I've played through the Cost of Greed campaign booklet with some friends in the last couple of months. I went with the general advice from the core rulebook of awarding about 300 XP to each player after each play session. It took us about 3 or 4 sessions to get through each chapter. (Perhaps we were playing slow.) This meant that each chapter would get the player around 1000 XP. In our experience this made the characters become quite skilled and powerful (especially in combat) very quickly, easily dispatching npc troopers and not even worrying that much about a nemesis encounter.
I ended up giving about 500xp per adventure (so the whole of "Cost of Greed" = 500xp) after running into the same issue myself.
Wow, that's a very big difference to the recommended standard. Thanks for your response. I'm still curious about other GM's experience.
Did the same for my PbP game here. Only 450 XP and some change after the whole mission was completed. Enough to get what they want or to make a tough choice but not go wild with XP spends.