The Dungeon Master’s Guide presents some very clear guidelines for the use of experience points as a reward mechanism for overcoming obstacles during an adventure. This is universally-understood to include combat encounters, but is also intended to include puzzles, riddles, traps, and social interactions. This is all well and good, and even the most inexperienced DM quickly learns how to plan for traps and combat, mapping out a dungeon, ruin, castle, village, or forest in which such obstacles are placed, and handling their presentation as a tactical matter. Where does this leave you when the obstacles that need to be overcome are the attitudes of a group of people that are all roughly in the same place?

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