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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5977268" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think that's true at the moment in the playtest, but I don't think that will or must remain true. I think it's that way in the playtest mostly due to D&D's legacy as a combat-centric game, and that further down the line we'll see more options on how to award XP and advance characters (likely including XP for traps, XP for social encounters, XP for hazards or obstacles, XP for discovering things, XP for accomplishing things, XP for treasure, XP for bringing pizza, etc.). It's one of the earliest and most traditional D&D house rules: DM awards XP for whatever. Independent of XP's use as a reward and advancement mechanism, I think a "budget" of some sort (call them Challenge Points if you'd like to make them distinct from the reward functions) helps account for the challenge of a given obstacle or series of obstacles. A budget is a petty good way to account for differing challenge levels and complexity levels in the challenges you place in your game. Trading this "Challenge Budget" one-for-one for XP to PC's who overcome those challenges is a fine starting point, though I don't believe it is an inflexible or inevitable one, as I point out above.My OP is mostly concerned with this use of XP as a "budget," not as a reward. You seem to be talking about the reward functions of XP, and I don't think that really interacts with the "challenge accounting" functions of XP here. Regardless of your reward paradigm, as long as your challenges in an encounter = the typical challenges expected in a day, this works. If you don't reward XP for combat and instead award it based on the phases of the moon and the babbling of the blind parrot you bring to the table (or whatever), the budgeting functions still work fine.I agree, of course, that XP awards should be many and varied for any reasons the DM sees fit. I imagine 5e will inevitably include such a thing (though I could be mistaken!). But regardless of those reward functions, a "challenge budget" that is spent to purchase challenges for the party in between full recovery is flexible to various timings of that "full recovery." Even if that "challenge budget" never turns into a direct reward for PC's, it is useful in determining how many challenges PC's can face before they need to recover. That's the way I'm employing it.</blockquote>

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