How do you award experience points to your players? The book says 20 XP per session is a good guideline. But do you just give them as a lump, no matter what? Do you track what your players do and award them accordingly (i.e., rewarding them for great play and penalizing them for poor play)? In this case, do you award different XP amounts to different players? Or do you just keep track of major goals and milestones and award the party for accomplishing those? Other ideas?

I'm probably going to continue to use the Jay Little method; 5xp per hour of play/advancing the story. Keeping in mind that a quarter of game time can sometimes be people just shooting the breeze and joking around. so for a 4 hour game session they might get 15xp. Now, if they're hyper focused and on the ball with the game and their characters, I'll give them full xp; 20xp for a 4 hour game. Or 30xp for a 6 hour game.

You can also totally give PCs a bonus of 5 xp for role playing their motivations. That's a great way to encourage it.

I give 5 XP per encounter completed. This tends to amount to 15–20 XP for a 3–4-hour game.