Experience awarded in HoA? spoliers

[wickedb]

Hi everyone- I'm having a hard time figuring out some of the XP in History of Ashes. My players are blowing through this thing and having a blast but most of the encounters are not hack and slash encounters and although they are earning XP for the creatures they DO kill, I'm not sure what to award them for the accomplishments that don't end in death.

For instance- keeping their totems up for the whole challenge- what did you award there?

or not killing Cindermaw, and instead reenacting the legend exactly as it were told.

Did you give anything for the acropolis besides the XP for whatever tentacles they killed. What if they had managed to get in and out without raising any tentacles- they would have received no XP at all...

I just feel like I missed something and by the time this book is over I'm going to have 2 level 11's and 3 level 10's... and scarwall says it's for level 12's.

[hogarth]

I think the rule of thumb is usually that if you "solve" an encounter with a CR 10 creature (say), you get experience for defeating a CR 10 creature, whether you killed the creature or not. The only snag is what to do in the case of double-dipping (e.g. getting attacked twice by the same creature).

[Revan]

This is why I don't use XP anymore. They're no longer a spendable resource, so there's really no need for players to know exactly what the number is anymore; they just need to know when they get the little plus sign on their character portrait (to put it in CRPG terms). The pinball-like excitement players might get from watching their 'score' climb higher is outmatched, in my opinion, by the possibility of players falling behind the expected curve for whatever reason. So when I GM, I just pick out narratively appropriate points to tell the players they level up.

For Curse of the Crimson Throne, I more or less use the list here.

[MrVergee]

Revan wrote:

This is why I don't use XP anymore.

We do the same, no XP, the DM just tells the PCs when to level. We've actually been playing like this for over a decade.