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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercutio01" data-source="post: 5958515" data-attributes="member: 37277">Did that. No one died in a year of gaming with monsters at prescribed levels. Not on me at all. I ran the creatures extremely effectively, but they just didn't do enough damage to make a difference, and healing was so available and usable that there wasn't really any way to challenge the players over any length of time longer than 1 day. What fighters are best at--fighting. That's not really a fair comparison. But here's the list again - Noncombat encounters, fun survival, character improvement (as in the player becoming a better player), group cohesiveness, adventure completion, story award, individual experience award, individual class award, and XP per GP. The XP for individual experience can be up to about the same as the XP awarded per monster up to 7 HD. So, not minor at all compared to killing stuff.Some of them were, sure, but Neonchameleon wasn't saying that. He was saying they didn't exist. As you did in the post before this one.No, Fun, Survival, and Improvement were all core, and the other stuff was optional. But under survival is also noncombat encounters, just as 3E and 4E had XP for noncombat encounters.You're right that 2E has a few tables, but many of the entries in those tables also have variable ranges, and the advice in the text blocks implies a lot of DM control, just like the rest of 2E.Once again, your feelings on 4E being more expansive to give XP outside of combat is simply not true. You're suffering from a case of recentism, and when presented with evidence that you're wrong, you then seek to say, "Yeah, but it was optional." Its status as optional or not (and there are three "Constant Goals" that reward XP, with five "Variable Goals" that reward XP--including killing monsters, incidentally) has no bearing on whether or not rules existed to provide XP for things other than combat.Hell, you can go all the way back to OD&D and XP for combat was ridiculously minimal. XP was granted specifically per GP of nonmagical treasure found, and it didn't really matter how you gained that gold. So, no, 4E is not the only system to reward noncombat encounters. It's definitely not the first to do so, and it's not even the most expansive. It does have the benefits of being the most hard-coded and standardized. Anyway, the way XP is awarded in 4E is not one of the things I have problems with. I think 4E does an admirable job of rewarding experience for things other than combat. Where I break down is with the idea that it is somehow better at that than previous editions, which is simply not the case.Again, at least not in my experience. Especially since I generally have fewer combat encounters because combat is so deadly, and thus as much as, if not more, experience is awarded outside of combat as it is during combat, especially if you take into account "beating" a monster to gain its XP award without resorting to combat.EDIT:You're right, but I don't think anyone was implying "not killing stuff" as the way they play, but rather that killing stuff wasn't the only method of earning XP. It is the most codified rule (now), but DMGs since BD&D have provided rules for XP awards based on things other than killing stuff.EDIT2: There's this link I found after posting earlier - <a href="http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-550348.html" target="_blank">http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-550348.html</a> - which seems to imply that 2E and 4E are nearly equal with noncombat awards, and I think I'd probably agree with that.</blockquote>

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