XP should be awarded for progressing the story, the XP from CR is a helpful guideline for how much XP progressive encounters should award but killing random peasants or forest animals without progressing the story shouldn’t award anything.
If creatures were to award xp, then all mages’ colleges wouldn’t be about learning / books / spells. Intro to magic 101 would be “alright class let’s slaughter us a bunch of goblins”.
Ye, that’s the difference between pen and paper and a game. Unless it’s a singleplayer experience, gating stuff behind story progress doesn’t bode well with players and ends up generating less repeatable gameplay. But for pen and paper, you have a DM that can adjust on the fly. They can give out a level for a daring escape, they can give inspiration based on player behavior, they can have a talk with players and hear their expectations on how their character should perform at this stage (i.e. “we have slain a dragon, and my dude is a paladin that isn’t strong enough to wear a damned shield!”). They can give magic items that introduce novel ways to play a character. A game isn’t advanced enough to do that yet.
Jokes aside
If creatures were to award xp, then all mages’ colleges wouldn’t be about learning / books / spells. Intro to magic 101 would be “alright class let’s slaughter us a bunch of goblins”.
that’s how goes in like every mmo i’ve ever played
Ye, that’s the difference between pen and paper and a game. Unless it’s a singleplayer experience, gating stuff behind story progress doesn’t bode well with players and ends up generating less repeatable gameplay. But for pen and paper, you have a DM that can adjust on the fly. They can give out a level for a daring escape, they can give inspiration based on player behavior, they can have a talk with players and hear their expectations on how their character should perform at this stage (i.e. “we have slain a dragon, and my dude is a paladin that isn’t strong enough to wear a damned shield!”). They can give magic items that introduce novel ways to play a character. A game isn’t advanced enough to do that yet.