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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1922789" data-attributes="member: 812">Ah, but the ONLY way provided to determine the Encounter Level of any encounter is by referring to the Challenge Rating of the creatures involved -- and the Challenge Rating is specifically a description of how difficult a particular creature is to kill. CR increases as Hit Dice, effectiveness of attacks, AC and other special abilities increase. Creatures that are harder to kill have a higher CR, and so are worth more XP.Of course you CAN determine EL any way you choose, and you can award XP for any sort of ad hoc scenario you like, but that's not the RAW. Under what you're given, killing creatures ALWAYS gives you maximum XP for their EL. Other tactics MIGHT, or they MIGHT not, according to each DM's whim.And that's exactly what I'm talking about -- how do you as a DM alter the system by which XP is awarded, OR what other awards do you provide, in order to encourage other kinds of behaviour. It sounds (though I'm not entirely sure from what you've written here) as if you award full XP even if your players don't kill their enemies, upon which case you tend to provide them with other, less tangible awards.I'm interested in the more tangible awards here -- game mechanics designed to reward particular kinds of behaviour. But of course ad hoc rewards will also promote certain kinds of behaviour (for example, any time one of my players gives up some details about their character's background, I try to work it into the story, so that they feel some ownership of the campaign and are thusly more encouraged to come up with such details -- which works great).I used to award XP for writing. Any in-character writing my players did, be it journal-keeping or letter-writing to NPCs, records of dreams or little off-screen scenes with each other or NPCs, was worth a certain amount of XP. I abandoned it when it became clear that two players had time to write between EVERY session and the rest did not, and those two PCs were pulling way ahead in the XP sweepstakes.Okay. Thanks for pointing that out.</blockquote>

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