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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 5976103" data-attributes="member: 29398">I've thought about this in the past, and keep running aground on situations where: - there is no clear goal presented (i.e. a true sandbox) and-or the goal presented is a red herring with the real goal being unknown - the party, for any of a bunch of possible reasons, have no way of knowing whether they achieved a known goal or not - the party achieve more than the known goal with or without realizing it - not everyone in the party is aware the goal has been achieved (e.g. the party thief finds, steals and uses the McGuffin without anyone else ever knowing it exists)I don't think I'd ever go this extreme.An example: in a previous campaign of mine, one of the PCs had been kidnapped during an in-town R&R break; the party found out where she was and set out to rescue her - my intent was they'd find out all sorts of other plot-related things in the process.  What happened was by the most amazing luck they found where she was being kept without having to enter the BBEG's complex at all, thus avoiding an entire adventure.  They got their "dungeon bonus" for completing the mission but that was pretty much all the XP they got for that adventure.By your suggestion they'd have received XP as if they'd waded through the whole thing; and this gets into the definitions of what XP represent.  To me the key word is "experience" - you learn from what you do and this is reflected by your XP.  If you don't do it, and in this case never even realize what was there to be done, you can't exactly learn from it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />A secondary problem arises when the party goes back later (which they eventually did) to clean out the place - in your system they'd have already earned XP for that complex, do they then get 'em again?Lanefan</blockquote>

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