Experience should be awarded for overcoming challenges, not killing wolves. Killing wolves is one way to overcome some challenges, but I think that a sleeping dire wolf could reasonably be a cr2 challenge even if the party killed it, and even if they woke it up, provided they has the information required to know that it was there and asleep.
Asleep or awake it is still a CR3 creature.
Would he have ruled that you did not get full exp for making a CR3 human fighter sleep by using the spell?
Experience awarded for an encounter, and situational modifiers to the CR are very arbitrary values that can have as much to do with the desired pace the of game the DM wants to run as with the actual challenge of the fight.
So sit back, let the DM worry about experience and challenge ratings, and buy the tavern a round of drinks as you brag about your exploits.
(Seriously, micro-managing experience points detracts from the fun in the long run. Trust that the DM has a story, a plan, and that if he is holding back on experience; he is doing it to make a better game.
Reasons to give reduced experience include but are not limited to:
Discourage side-tracks away from the main plot,
Prevent side-tracks from leveling the characters high enough to trivialize the main plot,
Discourage solo endeavors,
Minimize level differences from solo endeavors,
Discourage sleeping murder-hobo munchkining for easy experience (not pointing at you, just giving examples),
He just likes low level play and wants to drag it out,
He has a goblin encounter planned and does not want a lvl 2 trivializing it,
He has rewards planned out and does not want to adjest them for a higher level,
He has a plot progression planned that needs a huge rework if the party keeps leveling on side quests,
The creative side endeavor ruined a planned plot, you just made him extra work and he is full of spite,
Ad Hoc CR Adjustments: While you can adjust a specific monster's CR by advancing it, applying templates, or giving it class levels, you can also adjust an encounter's difficulty by applying ad hoc adjustments to the encounter or creature itself. Listed here are three additional ways you can alter an encounter's difficulty.
Favorable Terrain for the PCs: An encounter against a monster that's out of its favored element (like a yeti encountered in a sweltering cave with lava, or an enormous dragon encountered in a tiny room) gives the PCs an advantage. Build the encounter as normal, but when you award experience for the encounter, do so as if the encounter were one CR lower than its actual CR.
Link as requested. As much as I like rule lawyering, this is not the place for it.
Yes you might run into problems in the future if the DM equates character suffering and HP loss with CR and penalizes clever solutions, but that is a new conversation. And you did receive 75% exp. and loot... so I don't think you are at risk for that situation. (A cruel DM would give 0 exp because you didn't kill it, and then place an assassin vine on your return path for the folly of splitting the party. A fair DM would run a bandit encounter with the absent party to compensate them for lost game-time as one player went on a solo adventure in a team game.)
Ad Hoc CR Adjustments: While you can adjust a specific monster's CR by advancing it, applying templates, or giving it class levels, you can also adjust an encounter's difficulty by applying ad hoc adjustments to the encounter or creature itself. Listed here are three additional ways you can alter an encounter's difficulty.
Favorable Terrain for the PCs: An encounter against a monster that's out of its favored element (like a yeti encountered in a sweltering cave with lava, or an enormous dragon encountered in a tiny room) gives the PCs an advantage. Build the encounter as normal, but when you award experience for the encounter, do so as if the encounter were one CR lower than its actual CR.
Link as requested. As much as I like rule lawyering, this is not the place for it.
Something important to note here, though, is that these are all things that the Game Master does, not that the player does. Challenge rating is an estimate of the challenge posed by a monster/encounter to a generic group of characters, viewed in isolation before the encounter actually begins. An ogre with sorcerer levels is more powerful than a stock ogre, hence a higher CR. An ogre with the Young template is less powerful, hence a lower CR. A fire elemental standing in six inches of water is much less powerful, hence a lower CR.
But this doesn't apply to changes that the players can themselves impose. Althougn I can't figure out a way to retroactively make an ogre Young, I could easily see a clever party figuring out a way to put six inches of water into a room and thereby wipe out the elemental. They should get full xp for a creative solution to an encounter.
So add me to the the part of the chorus saying that having brains enough to sneak past sleeping goblins or hide from a wolf should be rewarded at the same level as brazenly kicking in the door and swinging your sword around.
Full xp. The wolf wasn't asleep, it was awake and was given rolls to find you to murder you. It failed them.
Let's put it this way. If it was awake and missed every attack would you have defeated it and got full xp? Yes.
This is no different. It was awake and could have killed you but failed the roll. You shouldn't be punished for being lucky. You even woke it up using cunning rather than a coup de grace.
Full xp and a hearty RP handshake is what you deserve.
Except he minimized the risk/reward aspect, by the time he woke up the wolf he was ocmpletely out of its range and wasnt able to be threatened by it. he got he XP. he got the loot. then he sauntered back to his party and if they choose they could hunt down the wolf and use their new loot against it and still get the combat XP.
I would be very shocked if you come upon a sleeping enemy, coup de grace it and get full XP.
NO HE DID NOT
he purposefully exploited it's weaknesses just as much as using alchemist silver to fight werewovles is. the dire wolf could not climb well and had limited perception he defeated the creature through a means other than hit points.
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There's two separate things to consider here
1.)Should you still get XP for overcoming a challenge if you do it without combat
2.)Should the CR rating of a creature ever be adjusted because of conditions that affect the difficulty of facing it
I say yes to both questions.
Your GM says he gave an adjusted CR to the wolf because it was asleep but he might be offering that explanation because it has more support. There's a possibility there are other factors making him feel inclined not to give a full XP award here.
-Was this an individual XP award to you alone? That is mostly a holdover from AD&D, it really doesn't suit Pathfinder well at all. Level disparity is rarely fun in a standard PF game.
-Was this dire wolf encountered while you were striking out on your own? Again here there are some groups and tables where this sort of thing is expected and ok, but it could violate table etiquette in other groups where splitting the party is frowned upon.
There's no doubt when a challenge is placed before the party they should get full XP for overcoming the challenge, but was this dire wolf actually a challenge that was placed before the party? Or was it just some scenery the GM had to insert when you went off for a jaunt through the woods while everyone else waited to get on with the adventure? And by scenery I guess I really mean "warning sign to get back with the rest of the group before you become wolf meat". Not saying that's the case but those sort of things do happen sometimes.
Every table is different so we don't know, table top games have a very fluid social contract. In any case, adjusting the dire wolfs CR by one because it was asleep when it was met wouldn't be unheard of even if it had been placed as an obstacle for the party to overcome.
Adjusting it just because it was overcome by another means other than combat would not be too cool, but even with that there are cases when I have wondered what was best to do. For example if it was something that would eventually be faced again, do you just get awarded the full XP multiple times? I'm not sure what's best in those cases, but as long as there's trust between the players and GM and things aren't devolving into an adversarial state, then it usually isn't too hard to come up with something that works for the needs of the particular adventure.
I recently had a team come across a few Minotaurs who were sleeping and unarmed. The party coup de graced a couple of them and combined on the last unarmed one.
I gave them CR - 1 XP for the encounter, simply because the sleeping wasn't caused by the party (different if they were put to sleep by Deep Slumber or something) and because they didn't have their large great axes.
My rational for this was that the large great axe is built into a standard minotaur's CR, so a disarmed, disadvantaged foe should be worth less (again, unless the PCs are the cause of the disarming or disadvantage or strategize to attack when they are at a disadvantage).
In your case, full XP probably should have been awarded, because you overcame (tricked) a fully alert and aware creature.
However, the GM can award whatever he wants for encounters...so you could always just ask him how he would rule things. Even bring up the goblin situation and ask about it.
If that was my game, I would have awarded 0 immediately, because I would have the wolf return to camp, and start making perception/survival rolls to track you back. If it made it back then you would defeat it in combat and got the XP OR it would have lost the train and you would have got the XP.
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To the OP, if you came across a sealed box labelled "Minotaur, insert sword for 1200 xp", would you feel like you earned that much xp?
Showing my age, (sigh) I remember this very comic featured in a Dragon magazine 25 years ago or more.
Frankly, the GM is encouraged to scale encounters (and rewards) to the game he/she is running for a wide variety of reasons.
I wouldn't even confront him about it.
If you are having fun whats the point in complaining over 200xp?
also consider,
If you aren't having fun over 200 xp, why are you playing in that game?If you don't have basic trust in your GM, you aren't going to have fun no matter what.
I apologize if I come across as flippant, (it's not my intention) but the GM should be cut a lot of slack to help them weave a better story for everyone including you.
You should get XP for completing the challenge, but you did not successful beat a CR 3 challenge. Think of the wolf being asleep as something similar to favorable terrain, which is a clear example of when the CR of monsters is lowered (or raised when it's in their favor).
Experience is total the purview of the GM, it is meaningless to argue overly much with them on it. It's also a reason I got rid of XP and tell players when to level based on plot points.
Regardless, there aren't any specific rules about reducing XP for a sleeping creature or not. But I think it's completely reasonable.
It would be different if you had a witch with you who used the slumber hex on it and then you proceeded to kill it or sneak around it. That I would award full XP for. But the wolf started at a distinct disadvantage by being asleep. Just like terrain in your favor would.
You played it smart, but that doesn't mean you should get CR 3 experience either, because it wasn't really a CR 3 challenge.
This scenario wasn't really me just strolling off. We got attacked by a group of wolfs, and I expected the party to follow me, but then they started doing other things. (Like the alchemist went on a quick search of alchemical components instead, and the other 2 party members went back to sleep or something.) When they said they weren't following me, thats when I decided to go by myself.
We were actually out in the forest looking for some missing merchant wagons. For the lootz. I went off to see if these wolfs might be the cause of the wagons going missing. But nobody followed.
Ok well with that information, I guess what I would have done is award the full unadjusted 800 xp (but to the whole party). The reason I would, is to encourage outside the box thinking because I think the strategy you used was awesome and the possibility of play like that is one of the reasons tabletop rpg are so great. But the way he did it is not so bad, give him a little leeway. He might have written right in his pre-written notes "sleeping dire wolf, CR2" or heck that might have been even written in a pre-written module he was using. That's really not unheard of to adjust the CR because of circumstance or environment that make it less or more difficult than encountering the creature normally.
Come to think of it, what matter more than the XP is this... was it a high five moment at the table when you basically solo'd a dire wolf with wits alone? Because that would be high fives all around at my table I bet if someone did that.