D&D Unearthed Arcana: Three-Pillar Experience

Latest UA article: Three-Pillar Experience

"Three pillars of adventuring make up the D&D game: exploration, social interaction, and combat. But when it comes to earning experience, the combat pillar often supports most of the game’s weight."

"With all three pillars in mind, Mike Mearls presents an alternative system for awarding experience points, offering a streamlined XP process based in equal part on defeating monsters, exploring dangerous sites to claim the magic and wealth found there, and interacting with NPCs to shape the flow of the campaign."

Discuss.

Can't wait to read through this and see what he proposes, but I'm still drawn to the way I do levelling, to borrow his language. The core experience that makes up any game of DnD is storytelling, with this experience in mind the simplest way to award experience is to allow the characters to develope whenever the plot demands them to...

Post reading edit:
Interesting, seems like the leveling system is a lot more fluid, and also more fast passed, on a quick back of hand calculation the encounters per level ratio becomes increasingly more favourable at higher and higher levels. Might be interesting to give it a go on play by post considering how often at least one of the 'pillars' are neglected by necessity.

I do like that it actually gives guidelines on how to award XP for exploration and social interaction. This was something that was sorely lacking in the base rules. Other than that, I'll probably just stick with Milestone :)

Oohhh this looks interesting.

Exploration
TL;DR: 10 XP for discovering locations or items appropriate to your tier, +10 XP more per additional higher tier.

Social Interaction
TL;DR: 10 XP for converting or allying NPCs relevant to your tier, +10 XP more per additional higher tier.

Murder Hobos (Combat)
TL;DR: 5 XP for defeating a monster, +10 XP if its CR is twice your level and only 2 XP if it is half your level.

The exploration tiers seem to fit quite well with the Western Marches game I'm running. At 10 XP per discovery, these can stack up pretty quickly if the party discoveres a cache of two or three major/magic items in an important new location. Just that cache alone would amount to 30-40% of a new level, which is right in line with balancing the three pillars.

Social vs Combat seem at odds with one another. Killing off an entire tribe of a few dozen goblins would net quite a lot of XP, while converting the leader of the tribe would just grant 10 XP or so. Seems to me that the core problem of D&D as a role playing game that focuses on combat is still there. Maybe I'm reading it wrong and the party would get XP for every goblin in the tribe if they convert the entire tribe? In that case, wow, double the XP for social vs combat - now social is worthwhile.