Defeating several times the same monster brings XP?

[Conradine]

There's a bulky russian wrestler who trains by fighting with huge siberian bears. But he doesn't kill them, he limits himself to subduing, blocking and / or tiring them. They do their best to rip him into pieces , however.

Should he gain full XP even if he don't kill?

[Zombimode]

XP and character progression by XP is a metagame construct. It has nothing to do with killing. The system is a way of modelling (player controlled) character progression by overcoming challenges. Nothing more, nothing less.

You russian wrestler trains fighting against bears. At the table you'll do this procedure probably no more then one time. If the bears are a challenge, he will get XP.

Seeing that doing such a fight over and over again is not a very realistic gaming situation (doing the same thing is rather boring; also, what are the other players doing in the meantime?), further training fights will become part of the background fluff.

[noob]

Defeating the same monster multiple times brings extra xp only if you need to for your quest.
If you do not try to avoid having to fight multiple times the same monster it means you were taking a roundabout way to your quest and that you probably did not need to defeat the same monster multiple times: you should at least try to make so you do not have to fight the same monster multiple times(for example capture them and throw them in a redeemery)

That wrestler activity is training and so should not bring xp in dnd 3e.
If you were playing ad&d that wrestler would probably gain xp from that training at the same rate as when using trainings of similar cost and I still consider it is a mystery dnd 3e removed gaining xp from training which was a way to turn downtime and gold in xp so that everyone could benefit from downtime.

[Conradine]

So, Zangief didn't got so much xp.

[InvisibleBison]

If the wrestler is a PC, subduing the bears would get him XP unless he was so strong that it wasn't a challenge.

If the wrestler is an NPC, he wouldn't get XP, because NPCs don't get XP.

[Remuko]

Of course. The bears are trying to kill him. He is overcoming that challenge by subduing them. He will keeping getting exp until he levels up enough that the CR of the bear isnt high enough to award exp anymore.

[Saint-Just]

As others have noted XPs are a metagame concept. You get XP whenever DM wants, in fact quite a few DMs on this forum said they don't use XP for fights at all and just give a big chunk whenever some milestone is reached (akin to the quests in CRPG, but unlike CRPG DM can adapt to awesomeness displayed or goals set out by players themselves).

My default assumption would be yes if organically, no if intentionally (So Zangief doesn't get XP, but Batman does), but it's my assumption.

[Crake]

If the wrestler is an NPC, he wouldn't get XP, because NPCs don't get XP.

Citation needed?

[InvisibleBison]

Citation needed?

The rules don't explicitly say that NPCs don't earn XP. However, I believe that to be the most straightforward interpretation of the rules for calculating XP awards on pages 37 to 41 of the DMG, which use the terms "PC" and "character" interchangabley. To me, that seems to mean these rules are only intended to apply to PCs.

EDIT: Actually, the above is wrong. The rules for XP awards use "PC" in examples, guidelines, and statements of intent; all the hard-and-fast rules, however, use "characters". Thus, the rules can be applied to NPCs as well as PCs without difficulty. So my earlier statement is wrong, and NPCs can earn XP.

[Crake]

The rules don't explicitly say that NPCs don't earn XP. However, I believe that to be the most straightforward interpretation of the rules for calculating XP awards on pages 37 to 41 of the DMG, which use the terms "PC" and "character" interchangabley. To me, that seems to mean these rules are only intended to apply to PCs.

EDIT: Actually, the above is wrong. The rules for XP awards use "PC" in examples, guidelines, and statements of intent; all the hard-and-fast rules, however, use "characters". Thus, the rules can be applied to NPCs as well as PCs without difficulty. So my earlier statement is wrong, and NPCs can earn XP.

So there's actually two categories of NPCs: Allies (which include cohorts) and hirelings. Allies are effectively fully fledged characters in their own right, who have agency and character, wheras hirelings are level 1 plebs who simply do as they're told. Allies gain xp and expect a share of the loot as a fully fledged member of the party (cohorts only expect half a share, and instead gain a proportion of their master's xp), while hirelings are paid a wage by the party and gain no xp.

So it depends on which kind of NPC you're referring to, but NPCs can gain xp.

(Source: p104-105 of the DMG)