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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gibili" data-source="post: 7743467" data-attributes="member: 6682820">As with many of these discussions, I find myself thinking why do people feel they have to "stick to the rules".  No one is going to arrest you if you decide not to use what is written in paragraph X on page Y.  If as a DM, if you don't want to reward players with XPs derived from the number of monster hits points they've taken down, then don't.  It might be necessary to let the players know and get agreement before hand of course.A big caveat on what I'm writing here is that I am part of a group that has been playing together for over 30 years, so we're both hugely experienced players, DMs and super comfortable with each other, so that is totally different to playing with a new group, or a temporary group.  I can't remember the last time we actually awarded experience based on kills.  We certainly joke about it and sometimes a DM will do it, but only to wind a player up because they didn't get a hit in.There are plenty of other methods for avoiding the kill/reward cycle.Make capturing the information the enemy has the key thing.Make the enemy a key person in guiding the players to their goal.  They can't achieve it without the enemy's co-operation.Put enough enemies in the way to make the violent option a non-option, forcing the players to work around them, figuratively and literally speaking, rather than ploughing through.Ensure the players are hampered in some other way, disease, lack of equipment or ammo etc to make the violent option too risky.Give extra rewards for people who do things non-violently, especially where you have a player who insists on kiling everything.  Tempt them away.  Even more so if non-violence or lethality makes the most sense given the setting of your game.Make the punishment for violence too great.  If someone persists in violence, have them arrested.  Have their equipment taken away.   Ensure that the enemy beats the living daylights out of them.Confuse the players so they are not sure whether those people or creatures are enemies or not.Make classic, traditional foes not enemies afterall.  Instead of that group of orcs being a violent war party that must be cut down, make them refugees, downtrodden innocents.  There's nothing that brings a party to a moral grinding halt quite like them wading in all guns blazing, only to discover that they are actually klling the very sorts of people they ought to be saving.   Boy are they cautious after that.Ensure there are plenty of women, children or other innocent folks around.  The gung-ho attitude will just not work.Something I often do is not kill the enemies.  Once an enemy has taken enough damage I say they go down, injured and unlikely to get up anytime soon.  Players generally then ignore that enemy from that point onwards, rather than administering a coup-de-gras.   The enemy becoming incapacitated is a more realistic outcome anyway.Put a dirty great battle in, but make it non-lethal because the conditions mean that lethal weapons are not allowed and all damage is effectively bruising.   The local laws are extremely punative against carrying weapons.   The bar doesn't permit weapons.  There is a powerful magic suppression field in place.  You can still have a fantastic roller coaster, ding dong of a fight that everyone finds really fun and exciting but the players have to think a bit harder, improvise a bit.I haven't awarded XPs based on killing things ever I don't think.  I much prefer storyline over mechanics but not everyone plays the same way, especially in these days of computer games, MMO, Battle Royale etc, where the simple rule tends to be kill=reward.Finally I would say that for players carrot is better than stick.</blockquote>

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