Awarding EXP and avoiding combat

I get what you're saying, but it's a hard line to skirt. Classically speaking, the trend has always been 'no kill, no xp' with quests sometimes granting XP and others only treasure. 

The only time it has never made sense is if the enemy runs away. I've always thought you should get XP for an enemy that flees battle, but most rpgs just let them get away and give you jack for that happenstance.

Besides, what you want is unlikely to bear fruit for one reason: loot. 

Can't take that awesome +3 battleaxe for yourself if the enemy is still alive to wield it... unless they actually enable sleight of hand to pickpocket that kind of stuff.

It's great when a game provides different ways for solving quests.
And if XP is granted for overcoming a challenge, it should not matter how exactly you've done it.

A silver tongued diplomat who diffused an explosive situation with charisma and persuasion deserves to be rewarded just as a battle-hardened barbarian who slaughtered everyone to bloody gibs without blinking an ear. Sneaking past, arguably, is not overcoming, but avoiding challenge altogether. ;) 

But basing your actions solely on the reward, disregarding the kind of character you play, is a borderline munchkinism.
This would be the case if the said barbarian started pleading for mercy, just so would get an extra heal potion; or if the diplomat cold-bloodily murdered a guard for that +3 battleaxe. 

A good example of a game that does it right is Age of Decadence.
There are almost always several ways of dealing with quests, from direct combat to trickery and diplomacy.
And, depending on your actions, in additional to "general skill points" that could be used any way you like,
you get either extra Combat or Civil points to further develop battle or socials skills.
So it's important to always play to your character strengths.

Hello,

This issue I have seen tackled in different ways accross different game, and I share your initial statement that it feels unpleasant when you *have to* be a murderwagon because otherwise you just miss half the xp and the loot.

what I have seen that made sense was the quest (or encounter) grants a set number of xp, and only the quest itself, not the kills, not the persuasion, not the bribery, ... therefore whichever your course of action, you do not miss out on xp. And loots working in the same way, of course, or you would still have to kill everybody to get rich and equiped (note that you could not loot the stuff of ennemies you snuk past, but in your sneaking you could stumble upon a hidden cache containing an equivalent value of loots. Bribery being the only one less or not at all materially rewarding but ontherwise it would not make sense, if you get richer by bribing people, your way through would be pretty straightforward : bribe them all to the end !!).

That being said, I agree with Nortar when he says that RP is to be considered too. And it would make sense that someone rather generous and disinterested accumulates less wealth than a greedwagon, and that by avoiding certain ordeals you strengthen yourself less than if you had dealt with them, but when it gets to the point where the difference in xp is as much as several levels at a given point (such was the case in the recent two Divinity) it feels indeed too punishing.

A very different way to approach this can be found in The Age of Decadence, which indeed does it very much right ! But the game is nowhere near D&D in its mechanics. Nor in its paradigm, the game can be completed without fighting a single fight, provided you have other skills to get by, which was never in the spirit of D&D, where fights are a part of the essence of the universe.

So, if I'm getting this right, you are both arguing for more of a 'milestone' like arrangement? So that no matter what you do, or how you go about it, the party is getting the same general XP or Money? That kind of thing generally spits in the face of exploration unless done REALLY well. Even then it would just piss some people off, and at that point you might as well make X-Com: Solasta edition to cut out everything that doesn't relate to the scenarios presented. 

Yes, Age of Decadence did it really well, but it also had a custom system that separated Combat and Civil into two literal separate sources of XP with a general pool on top of that. Additionally, Everything was something you could pick up off of bodies, it's just that combat was really dangerous most of the time and someone who didn't focus on combat was going to die if they messed around and got into fights they shouldn't.

It does not have to contradict exploration at all, because yes, you receive a somewhat identical reward no matter the way you solve situation A, but you still have to meet with situation A in the first place, so you do need to explore to see all there is to see (it concerns not only story progression, but every side encounter too).

And as I mentionned, it does make sense that the reward are tweaked by the way you choose to do things, but granting xp for "situation solving" instead of "slaying monster A" lets you handle situations in very different ways, without having your xp progression completely sabotaged by the fact that sometimes you want to be more subtle, or more discreet, than a bludgeon in the face (not that there is anything wrong with a bludgeon in the face).

And... X-COM does reward by kills, in a given encounter, units making the kills gain way more xp than the other units.

As for pissing people off, whatever TA chose to do there will always be people pissed off by some aspect of it or another. We are formulating an opinion, and trying to know where the dev sit regarding that aspect.

Oh, I know that X-Com rewards the guy who gets the killing blows more, but I was making the comparison that if you were to make it truly milestone in nature with treasure also being a standardized criteria based on game passage there would be no reason to have true exploration with secret boss fights, because suddenly at the end of the level everyone has the same general treasure no matter how much extra they did to try and obtain more.

There would be no need for a town, all you would get is a main set of screens like in X-Com and any given level, which with a true milestone set-up has nearly no bonuses.

In short, I may be being a smartass about it, but i would like to see you two and whoever else is interested in... that... to come up with a good solid system for the implementation of such a a thing using the SRD ruleset before you say you are formulating an opinion for everyone. Because mine, albeit influenced by my OCD when it comes to being a completionist, is that I don't want that sort of milestone BS anywhere near my computer games (unlimited XP for exploration and treasure you can only get by doing certain things is something i like, a lot). However, I don't necessarily mind the thought of it if that's an option for those interested in changing their settings to such a thing. The problem, is that I have no desire to see game resources wasted on that kind of thing until something coherent can be brainstormed by the community, maybe over several polls, in such a way that it would disappoint the least number of people. 

The best place to start might even be something similar to the optional oddity system in Underrail.

I'm a completionist too and I never leave a side quest unfinished or a corner of a map unexplored.
But I fail to see how rewards for "problem solving" instead of "monster slaying", as Alinoria put it, ruins exploration?
Just treat a combat encounter as another problem to be solved, and what solution works best is up to you and the way you build your character.
If anything, it would encourage exploration in my opinion.

I think there is a slight misunderstanding here, because we are not talking milestones. We are talking rewarding situations on other criteria than number of ennemies slain, but, as I said, rewards remaining linked to solving a situation, not to reaching a certain point in the game, so no, not everyone get the same at the end of a "chapter". If you did not meet the troll guarding the bridge (got to love the classics^^) then you won't have earned the related xp when you finish the chapter.

Also, I said we were each giving our opinion, I never said it was an opinion for everyone.

If you have played Expeditions Viking, for instance, then that is an alike system I am talking about, when (if) you unthrone the king, you get a set amount of SP (SP replaces XP in that game) whether you did him away by killing him or through political manoeuvre. But every side quest you don't do, you miss the rewards from.

I agree very strongly that XP rewards should be comparable among different approaches taken for overcoming obstacles and solving problems/quests. So yes, a good approach would be to have encounter XP awards rather than individual enemy XP awards such that you get the XPs for getting past a couple of ogre doorguards, for example, regardless of whether you bribed them, conned/intimidated them, sneaked past them, put them to sleep, or killed them.