Xp

I am currently running a game at home, my first. I just wondered how does everyone else award xp for none combat and and how much.

I rarely track xp, and grant levels when it seems appropriate in the story. When I do track xp, then for non-combat encounters (that advance the plot) I call it a CR equal to the parties level (Pathfinder/3.5). Not quite as easy in 5e, but you could do the same.

I generally always do milestone leveling. Generally parties earn XP equally, so individual leveling is seldom a thing. Plus with milestone leveling I don't have to try and make sure I stuff enough encounters and junk into any section or arc of an adventure to hit a level to keep my other encounters level appropriate for the party. Less ratcheting encounters on my part.

Usually for good non-combat encounters or RP I will give out Inspiration or sometimes other small bonus items or gold in the story. Gives that little bit of tangible reward without having to work out all the XP stuff.

What they both said. XP is really a thing of the past and not needed. In older editions, it was important because part of the "balance" of each class was how much XP it took to level up. Fighters needed more XP per level than rogues, for example. But in 3rd edition, they normalized the XP progression for all classes, so splitting XP gained meant that, barring death, magic item creation (in 3e/3.5 crafting magic items cost XP), or level drain, everyone leveled at the same time.

4e did away with losing XP all together, and used XP as the challenge level budget, which is really what it still is in 5e.

TLDR: XP is not worth it anymore, just hand out levels as you see fit. The DMG (page 261) says that, "[a] good rate of session-based advancement is to have characters reach 2nd level after the first session of play, 3rd level after another session, and 4th level after two more sessions. Then spend two or three sessions for each subsequent level."

I am kinda surprised to see these sort of opinions.

I'm of the mindset that XP (and advancement in general) should be tailored to the style of game being ran. If you are running an OSR style game, where the PC's are dungeon delving and the goal is to get treasure out, I will most likely use a Gold as XP system with the condition that the gold must make it back to the safe place (normally town) and be spent before counting as XP. This makes a great gold sink in older style games and keeps the pc's broke enough to keep wanting to delve for treasure (and die trying :D).

In games like Dungeon World and other games where XP is rewarded for very specific actions, I use the rules to a T and make sure that it runs like butter.

I find the D&D exp system to be annoying, honestly. Not very accurate and it's too hard to really know how much exp is appropriate for non-combat xp. That said, I do like XP as a measure of progress toward your goal. One system I just tried that does this well is Dungeon Crawl Classics. Any encounter can award between 0 and 4 exp based on how hard it is: this makes deciding exp amounts easy and keeps you from getting bogged down in huge numbers while making it so that higher levels take significantly longer (something I really missed about old school D&D when I moved to Pathfinder and 5e).

Yea, I hadn't mentioned the system used by the modern iterations of D&D. I frankly hate them, and one of the first things I tend to do when running one of them is rip it out and replace it with something more usable, like Milestone or Session XP (Each level is given a 1 - 10 number to reach, and it requires that many sessions to get there).

On DCC.. I love that game, but never could find a good group to play with. The last group I tried it with loved it, but couldn't get together to play again.

I'm actually getting ready to run a DCC game on here!