XP for "good roleplaying" and the "story award" started in AD&D 2nd Edition, and this is when original D&D and AD&D "XP for GP" was buried and put out to pasture. XP were given for HD of monster defeated, plus the vague concepts of roleplaying and story awards pushed characters along to higher levels almost automatically.
While my groups like "XP for good roleplaying" awards, really the system is vaguely written enough to be specific, whatever that means. What it is telling dungeon masters is "just level characters as you see fit" and it throws the entire old-school very defined and specific XP system out in the bin.
How I feel about it is this, don't make a soft system that doesn't really mean anything. Either we are going to give hard XP for definite actions and awards, or just dump the soft system and say "give a level every three adventures" and be done with it. Why invent soft XP rewards and have everyoje track them when what you really want to do anyways is level everyone up after a fixed number of adventures.
Some of the old D&D Expert sets (red box era) had this chart where the DM calculated how many adventures you wanted the players to play before they leveled up, and it did all the math for you. It seems kind of silly to do all that math when you if all you wanted was "players level up in three adventures" then um, just level them up in three adventures. You could even level them up in one or two if the adventure was worthy.
D&D has always had a strange attachment to legacy cruft, and then some systems they keep reinventing and never really getting right. The CR system in 3rd Edition's D&D comes to mind, where you do a whole lot of math trying to figure out if the monsters you are fighting should give you XP or not. It pains me when the players make their characters do this math by roleplaying it out, "Oh wow, kobolds? Gee guys, they are not really worth fighting for a party as powerful as us, right?"
Get in there and be heroes. Please.
Besides, CR doesn't really tell you how hard a fight was, it is only a guess before the fight begins. If the party ambushes the other side and TPKs the enemies in one turn, should that really award full CR XP? Again, there are guidelines for this, but it really feels like they are trying to patch something that just needs a complete rethink.
My feelings? If a single fight is good, give each participating member 10% advancement to the next level. If it was easy you could halve it to 5%. If the fight was a total blow-out, you get 0% advancement. If the fight was a near TPK, you could double it to 20%. At 100% advancement, you get a level and the counter goes back to zero.
You can optionally include "story awards" in this system of 5-20% for the completion of a mission, or if you want your progression to be "lessons learned in danger" you could skip this. Skill rolls done under pressure with a real chance of failure (and significant risk) could award 1% per successful skill roll, to like a maximum of 10% per adventure for skill roll xp. Safe or repeated skill rolls with no consequence of failure give 0%, always.
There, it's simple enough for a referee to tweak based on how fast they want progression to be by just adjusting the base "per fight" and optional "story xp" awards (and the 10% skill and rolepaly caps). It also doesn't worry about scaling progression based on monster difficulty versus PC power. What I like about it is that you determine XP after a fight by this one simple question, "Was the fight challenging?" If so, give the party a full reward. If not, reduce it. You don't need to do the CR calculations and then have them be wrong because somebody in the party used a sleep spell to nullify the encounter and turn it into a cakewalk.
Fine, 0% XP, as that was no challenge.
You could give a tiny reward for blowouts that still were dangerous but had consequences if they were left unchecked, like the group of kobolds, like 1% and still feel you have given a reward.
Oh, and you can also award creative problem solving and good roleplaying if you wish, just keep the awards low like 1% to 2% per major interaction and cap it to 10% for the adventure, just like skills.
You could also optionally slow progression as the party's level climb.
To me, pre-calculating CR math that doesn't take the party's power and creativity into account doesn't make much sense, and at least in my experience, it's wrong most of the time anyways. Going the other way and doing the math that will get you a level in X adventures and awarding XP on that scale is also a lot of math for a predetermined outcome that you should just "say happens."
For me, I like the 100% XP system. It is simple, fast, lets me control progression rate, and it caps silly exploits. It can be "only combat XP" if you choose, if all you want is lessons learned in the school of hard knocks. Most importantly, it is calculated after the fight is over based on how difficult the fight was for the characters - so it scales with level. A difficult fight at level 1 is going to be different than a difficult fight at level 8, but to the party and their abilities, you will know and have a good feeling of how it went after each of those fights.
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