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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 9273305" data-attributes="member: 93670">What do you mean by "go back to"?   You are trying to give 5e credit for something it is not due[spoiler="3.5 story awards dmg pg40"]STORY AWARDSThe PCs have rescued the constable’s son from the troll lair. Theyleave the lair and stop their current quest so they can return theyoung boy to his home and parents. Do they get experience pointsfor this?Some DMs want the answer to be “Of course they do.” Toaccomplish this, you need to set up a system in which you canaward XP for accomplishing goals and for actions and encountersthat don’t involve combat.Sometimes you may want to estimate experience point awardsfor actions that normally don’t result in an XP award under thestandard system. These are called story awards, and they shouldonly be used by an experienced DM.[/spoiler]note the care to avoid terms like "encounter" or "CR"that would result in haphazardly misplacing them into rule subsystems where they would cause disruptions.  Immediastely below that you have[spoiler="CRs for noncombat encounters"]CRs for Noncombat EncountersYou could award experience points for solving a puzzle, learning asecret, convincing an NPC to help, or escaping from a powerfulfoe. Mysteries, puzzles, and roleplaying encounters (such as nego-tiations) can be assigned Challenge Ratings, but these sorts ofawards require more ad hoc ruling on the DM’s part.Challenge Ratings for noncombat encounters are even more ofa variable than traps. A roleplaying encounter should only be con-sidered a challenge at all if there’s some risk involved and successor failure really matters. For example, the PCs encounter an NPCwho knows the secret password to get into a magical prison thatholds their companion. The PCs must get the information out ofher—if they don’t, their friend remains trapped forever. In an-other instance, the characters must cross a raging river by wading,swimming, or climbing across a rope. If they fail, they can’t get towhere the magic gem lies, and if they fail spectacularly, they arewashed away down the river.You might see such situations as having a Challenge Ratingequal to the level of the party. Simple puzzles and minor encoun-ters should have a CR lower than the party’s level, if they are worthan award at all. They should never have a CR higher than theparty’s level. As a rule, you probably don’t want to hand out a lot ofexperience for these kinds of encounters unless you intentionallywant to run a low-combat game.In the end, this kind of story award feels pretty much like astandard award. Don’t ever feel obligated to give out XP for an en-counter that you don’t feel was much of a challenge. Rememberthat the key word in “experience award” is award. The PCs shouldhave to do something impressive to get an award.[/spoiler]Although it uses both encounter & CR in it, note how almost half of the section itself is devoted to why & when not to award it.  That set of options didn't end there though because the next two sections are "mission goals" & "roleplay awards". I'm going to jump back a few pages and get to general guidance on awarding experience for the things that are actual sources of resource attrition.[spoiler="3.5 DMG pg 36/37"]EXPERIENCE AWARDSWhen the party defeats monsters, you award the characters expe-rience points (XP). The more dangerous the monsters, comparedto the party’s level, the more XP the characters earn. The PCs splitthe XP between themselves, and each character increases in levelas his or her personal XP total increases.You need to calculate XP awards during the course of an adven-ture, whether it’s one you wrote or one you purchased. You maywish to award experience points at the end of a session to enableplayers to advance their characters in level if they have enoughexperience points. Alternatively, you may wish to give out XPawards at the beginning of the game session following the one inwhich the characters earned it. This gives you time between ses-sions to use these rules and determine the experience award.As part of determining experience point awards, you need tobreak the game down into encounters and then break the encoun-ters down into parts. If you’re using monsters from the MonsterManual, some of the work has already been done for you. Eachmonster in that book has a Challenge Rating (CR) that, whencompared to party level, translates directly into an XP award.A Challenge Rating is a measure of how easy or difficult a mon-ster or trap is to overcome. Challenge Ratings are used in Chapter3: Adventures to determine Encounter Levels (EL), which in turnindicate how difficult an encounter (often involving multiplemonsters) is to overcome. A monster is usually overcome by defeat-ing it in battle, a trap by being disarmed, and so forth.You must decide when a challenge has been overcome. Usually,this is simple to do. Did the PCs defeat the enemy in battle? Thenthey met the challenge and earned experience points. Othertimes, it can be trickier. Suppose the PCs sneak past the sleepingminotaur to get into the magical vault—did they overcome theminotaur encounter? If their goal was to get into the vault and theminotaur was just a guardian, then the answer is probably yes. It’sup to you to make such judgments.Only characters who take part in an encounter should gain thecommensurate awards. Characters who died before the encountertook place, or did not participate for some other reason, earn noth-ing, even if they are raised or healed later on.To determine the XP award for an encounter, follow these steps.1. Determine each character’s level. Don’t forget to account forECL (see Monsters as Races, page 172) if any of the charactersare of a powerful race.2. For each monster defeated, determine thatsingle monster’s Challenge Rating.3. Use Table 2–6: Experience PointAwards (Single Monster) to cross-reference one character’s levelwith the Challenge Rating foreach defeated monster tofind the base XP award.4. Divide the base XP award by thenumber of characters in the party. This isthe amount of XP that one characterreceives for helping defeat that monster.5. Add up all the XP awards for all themonsters the character helped defeat.6. Repeat the process for each character.[/spoiler]That obvious bit was important for ensuring players did not try to use it as a club.It didn't stop there though[spoiler="challenge rating for traps"]Challenge Ratings for TrapsTraps vary considerably. Those presented in this book(see pages 70–74) have Challenge Ratings as-signed to them. For traps you and your playerscreate, as a rule of thumb, assign +1 CR forevery 2d6 points of damage the trap deals.For magic traps, start at CR 1 and then assign+1 CR for every 2d6 points of damage the trapdeals or +1 for every level of the spell the trapsimulates. Traps generally shouldn’t have aChallenge Rating greater than 10.Overcoming the challenge of a trapinvolves encountering the trap, either bydisarming it, avoiding it, or simply sur-viving the damage it deals. A trapnever discovered or neverbypassed was not encountered(and hence provides no XPaward).[/spoiler]It was able to provide such information because between the need to heal every point of damage and vancian casting it actually mattered.  What you are lamenting has its own section on dmg39 though[spoiler="ad-hoc xp awards"]Assigning Ad Hoc XP AwardsSometimes the XP table doesn’t quitecover a given situation. If two orcsare an EL 1 encounter, four orcs EL3, eight orcs EL 5, and sixteen orcsEL 7 (maybe), are thirty-two orcsan EL 9 encounter? A party of 9thlevel characters almost certainlycan wipe them out with ease. By 9thlevel, a character’s defenses are sogood that a standard orc cannot hithim or her, and one or two spellscast by a character of that levelcould destroy all thirty-twoorcs. At such a point, yourjudgment overrules what-ever the XP table wouldsay.An encoun-ter so easy that ituses up none oralmost none ofthe PCs’ resourcesshouldn’t result in anyXP award at all, while adangerous encounter thatthe PCs overcome handilythrough luck or excellentstrategy is worth full XP. How-ever, an encounter in whichthe PCs defeat something farabove their own level (CRs higherthan their level by eight or more) wasprobably the result of fantastic luck or aunique set of circumstances, and thus a fullXP award may not be appropriate. You’re goinghave to make these decisions. As a guideline, the min-and maximum awards given on Table 2–6: Experi-Point Awards (Single Monster) for a group of a givenare the least and most XP you should award a group.Circumstances in your campaign may alter this, however.decide that an EL 2 encounter is worth at least a little to[/spoiler]That bold bit right there, the italic sentence to either side of it serve to ensure that this is truly up to the GM & should absolutely not be used as a way to pointlessly inflate adventuring day metrics in ways that create problems like the ones we are discussing.The 2e DMG likewise talks about many of the same things with more brevity in chapter8 pg66-71 & I'm not going to quote specifics  given that they start getting mentioned as early as the pretty  page 66 chapter introduction.  5e recklessly using the term "encounter" to describe things that are not encounters is not the innovation you are giving it credit for.  All it does it breed the sort of confusion that led to me initially quoting the reddit post earlier</blockquote>

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