How do award experience for social and skill challenges

[Sir cryosin]

Light the titles asking how do you calculate or figure experience for players when you do a lot of social or skill challenges.

[Cespenar]

Light the titles asking how do you calculate or figure experience for players when you do a lot of social or skill challenges.

Rate the social encounter difficulty level in your head as a DM, and then use a combat encounter of the same difficulty as an example.

I'd personally just use milestone xp variant instead, but that's something else.

[DivisibleByZero]

Don't bother with XP. Just tell the players when they level up. It's a better experience for pretty much everyone that way.

[Sir cryosin]

I usually just tell them when they lv up. But I got into a bad habit of leveling them up really quick. And I just want to keep track my self. I'm not giving them any XP. I'm keeping a number just to see were they are at.

[Cybren]

Don't bother with XP. Just tell the players when they level up. It's a better experience for pretty much everyone that way.

Except when it isn't. XP for combat, or social encounters, or XP for treasure, or milestone XP each and all encourage different kinds of gameplay, and not just gameplay, but different ways of engaging with the game at a meta level too. In some games you want to reward & encourage murder hoboism. In others you might want to encourage players to think up clever work arounds and guile for looting treasures without fighting

[DivisibleByZero]

The way I do it is simple. Whatever level they are, that's how many sessions it takes to level up.
One session at level 1. Two sessions at level 2. Etc, etc.
I don't keep track of XP, I keep track of how many sessions they've played. Some players level faster than others.

[Cybren]

Which I think is totally valid, but I also think using a reward mechanism to encourage desired behaviors is also valid.

[Tanarii]

Rate the social encounter difficulty level in your head as a DM, and then use a combat encounter of the same difficulty as an example.BtB this the way to do it. I've found that in most cases, 'social' encounters don't have an associated Resource use cost, so they're (at best) Easy encounters.

Of course, many times they aren't really 'Encounters' at all, in the sense of a challenge to be overcome. They're just an interaction. Any XP you decide to give for that aren't Encounter XP at all, they're something else. Typically a Talky-Time & Funny Voices XP awards, which are often mistakenly called Roleplaying awards.

Edit: It's worth noting that milestone awards only work if you assume a very specific kind of group & playstyle: One group of players, with one group of PCs, that all stay together for the entirety of the adventure(s), and all level in lockstep. This is sometimes called a campaign in more modern times, although it certainly doesn't qualify for that under the traditional meaning, it's certainly a subset of them. The term Adventure Path Campaign or Adventure Arc Campaign is probably the best way to describe the specific kind of campaign involved.

[Sir cryosin]

Ok so my last session a little girl went missing form here house with all doors and windows still lock when she was discovered missing. So my PC's there's three of them split up one check inside the house the other one checked the property around the house and the other one check the right outside of the house. After finding clause to how she got out. And putting together some of the rumors together. My next session there going to be a timed challenge were they are going to roll skill checks to proform tasks and depending on there roll and how much more or less roll to the DC's will affect the time it takes.

[Dr. Cliché]

How about just giving them Inspiration?

[Tanarii]

Ok so my last session a little girl went missing form here house with all doors and windows still lock when she was discovered missing. So my PC's there's three of them split up one check inside the house the other one checked the property around the house and the other one check the right outside of the house. After finding clause to how she got out. And putting together some of the rumors together. My next session there going to be a timed challenge were they are going to roll skill checks to proform tasks and depending on there roll and how much more or less roll to the DC's will affect the time it takes.
Honestly, if you want to encourage them and keep them engaged in non-combat challenges, rate them according to both time invested and difficulty of overcoming. Not resources expended. That's kind of counter-intuitive when the majority of things gained from XP help with overcoming challenges that require spending resources, not those that don't. But as someone else said up thread, XP awards influence what players will be interested in doing, whether at a conscious or subconscious level.

[Breashios]

I tend to look at what a challenge will accomplish, then assign a fixed value to overcoming it successfully.

Say it was worth 2,000 xp for accomplishing something in a social engagement. The award is split between all of the characters under the assumption that if a character did not contribute, he or she at least used their wisdom to stay out of the way of the others. A particular good solution by one character receives a bonus and a character that almost caused the endeavor to fail should also have learned something, so no penalty. Only characters that are absent (usually the player missing the game) miss out on experience. If it were judged their character would have logically been present even if the player was not, that character would get half the xp of the present player's characters.

[MrStabby]

I don't.

I give XP for defeating significant threats only. Wandering monsters, an army of mooks? Nothing. If it has a name you would know you can get XP for defeating it. This keeps the players with their eyes on the objectives of the adventure. If you can find, sneak in and kill the bad guy without fighting your way through an army then that is a fine way to defeat them. If you infiltrate their organisation to get close to them then poison their food - also a valid way to progress. If you go to the next kingdom and persuade them to raise an army/hire mercenaries to fight the threat - then job done.

I treat social encounters like destroying an horde of low level enemies. Only worth doing (in terms of XP) if it gets you closer to your final objective. This isn't to say they are not important. This is how you find the treasure to raise the army or to persuade someone to tell you the secret that lets you infiltrate the castle or whatever.