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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercutio01" data-source="post: 5958463" data-attributes="member: 37277">I lost a post because I hit backspace, dammit, but my personal experience with RAW in 2E, 3E, and 4E turned out differing levels of swinginess, with 2E hitting the preferred niche of both players I had and myself (both as DM and as player) better than the others. 4E just took too much work to challenge the parties, but that's because I only played a year and wasn't about to give more money to a system that I wasn't enjoying. And by the time MM3 came out and fixed the math to make the system more challenging, it was just too late. Suffice to say my personal experience doesn't mirror your own at all.As for the XP for combat thing - you're just flat wrong.  2E had a huge list of things that DMs should keep in mind for awarding XP, including traps, diplomatic encounters, story/quest awards, individual experience awards, group awards, individual class based awards, and even an optional rule to use XP = gp. 3E's list is slightly shorter, but it too includes traps, story awards, and the XP there is not for engaging NPCs in combat. That's only one of the ways to beat an NPC, and the DMG even goes so far as to encourage beating encounters specifically outside of combat. And to go even further back, BD&D gave XP for a list of things other than combat just like 2E. The smallest list of ways to gain xp rests in OD&D and 1E. They pretty much only gave xp for gold, with minor bits for beating monsters.What those previous systems don't have are uniform tables of exact XP to grant. But it's completely disingenuous to pretend that previous editions only granted XP for killing stuff. As far as I can tell, no edition only gave XP for killing monsters, and the system that has the most options to earn XP outside of combat seems to be 2E. Experience awards has one whole chapter devoted to it, with a lot of different ways to earn XP that aren't reliant on killing stuff.</blockquote>

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