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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5264477" data-attributes="member: 3448">There are still incentives to chase the loot because loot provides a substantial portion of your power.  Even if the PCs will then want to fight the monsters, they have an incentive to steal the magic sword first--it will make the fight easier and faster.Re: what constitutes defeating an encounter:  my basic approach is to analyze what the encounter is there for.  In a dungeon (without some external plot like "go in and find and kill Acerak"), some encounters are about guards to areas, some encounters are about guards to treasure, and some are just hazards.  For the guards to areas and guards to treasure, it's pretty clear what defeating the challenge means:  get into the area behind the dreaded hydra?  Have some XP.  Get the treasure out of the temple of the bugbears?  Have some XP.  It doesn't much matter whether you killed the hydra or bypassed it (although it is important to avoid double-counting, which can be particularly problematic with multiple expeditions into the dungeon/multiple parties going into the dungeon.)  Random threats (wandering monsters, the monster in a room without treasure, reactive threats that attack the PCs because they have done XYZ) don't fit well into this-- there, I guess the question is did the PCs successfully escape?That said, XP for challenges versus XP for treasure definitely changes the incentives.  If you want to reward getting treasure, not fighting fights, why not do so directly?  Nothing about Pathfinder or 3.x will break if you switch to giving out XP only for treasure.  (You can set the exchange rate as you like to get the speed of advancement/amount of wealth by level you want--if they should get about 8500 gp worth of treasure from level 1 to level 2, why not define 1 gp as 1 xp and set the amount of xp required for second level (for the party size you describe) as 8500 xp?)  If they only get xp for treasure, it will certainly focus their goals on getting treasure, since that's the only thing that produces any mechanical reward, and they will have no interest in fighting random encounters that simply take time and provide no or little reward.</blockquote>

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