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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6091798" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't tend to place things with the purpose of them being obstacles.  The castle's gate is guarded, not to be an obstacle to the PC's, but because in general castle gates are guarded.  The desert is difficult to cross, because it's a desert, and the desert is there because at certain latitudes and in the rain shadows of mountains deserts tend to form.  They don't have plot purposes per se.   To a certain extent, I'm not really in control of the plot and I'm never in control of what role a particular thing will have in the protagonists story.  Meaning is something that is largely created by the player.   Likewise, since I don't think of these things as being problems specificly for the PC's, I also tend to not think of them as having particular solutions.   It really doesn't matter to me whether crossing the desert is turned into a social challenge, or the PC decides to deal with the obstructive lackey by beating him into unconsciousness in a dark alley.The same is to a large extent true of NPC's.  I place them because someone like them should be there to be true to the setting.  But I'm never sure what role they will have in the story until the players interact with them.   The honorable nobel of martial bearing and a goodly heart I thought might become an ally, but instead he became through a series of mistunderstandings an enemy.  The apprentice clerk who I thought might be a short term foil and appear in one scene, instead became a henchmen who has been one of the more important NPC's.  The adventure that the players are on has always contained backup plans in case the players decide the villains are heroes and the heroes villains.  It is hard not to make guesses at how the PC's will interact with NPC's, but it is a mistake to treat your guesses as facts or plot points and force them onto the story.With all that in mind, I find the above statement just about impossible to parse to understand exactly what you mean by it.  I tend to award full XP to full solutions to a problem - permenently breaking a curse, killing a dangerous foe, turning a foe into an ally, disarming a trap, etc.   I tend to avoid only half XP to temporary solutions - successfully crossing a trapped room without detecting the trap, evading a monster through stealth or speed, driving a monster away without killing it, temporarily abating some magical problem - and then give the remaining XP when or if the problem is fully dealt with.  I don't really care how you deal with a problem fully so that it can't or doesn't reoccur.  In the case of a bureacrat or courtier that made it his mission in life to create problems for a PC, there are any number of permenent solutions to the problem - you can see that he loses his position or is jailed, you can intimidate him to the point he never dares thwart you again, you can discretely assassinate him, you can win him over and convert him to a loyal ally, and probably several other solutions that don't immediately occur to me.   How much XP that is worth depends to me on not just how powerful the NPC is, but on how much interaction there has been and how obstructive the NPC has become.  The NPC has to have risen past the stage of being a nuisance to have the same importance as something actively trying to kill you.</blockquote>

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