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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 7651663" data-attributes="member: 386">I think there's a slight tension between some XP systems and PCs vs. bad guy plots.  Sometimes the best way to disrupt a NPC's plot leaves you with little XP.  For example: In my current 3E game (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil) I wanted to give the players a lot of choice as to how to defeat the Temple's plot.  Which meant that I needed to actually give the NPCs things to do and avoid the module's linearity.  I knew that "smart" decisions - such as not fighting your way through hordes of flunkies - were actually poor ones because of how the XP system works.  (I think it even says in the module that the big dungeon is there to make sure the PCs have enough XP to face the temple's top brass.)  In other words, grind.I estimated how long the dungeon crawl grind would have taken, then I gave the NPCs tasks to complete that would take about the same amount of time.  Then I set XP amounts for disrupting those events equal to the amount of time the PCs were taking away from the NPCs (based on the grind metric).So far it's worked out: the PCs have avoided fighting for the most part, instead choosing to disrupt the temple's activities and setting them against each other.  When the temple's brass took notice of them, they had enough XP to deal with it.</blockquote>