Wednesday, 13th June 2018, 08:44 by bel
Well, nobody in this thread has defined what "trivial" means, yet they make claim that the XP is not negligible. As Voltaire is alleged to have said: "if you wish to converse with me, define your terms".
I would suggest that one definition of "trivial" would be, if you did not train weapon skill (at all), and did not train defensive skills (much), then you should be almost always able to kill the monster one-on-one. Try killing some of the "easy" monsters and tell me how you fare. As I said, a hobgoblin on D:1 is "easy". A jackal pack on D:1 is "easy", and might well be "harmless" depending on when you encounter it. Kobolds (even with a dagger of venom) are "easy". Gnoll packs are typically "easy" when you encounter them. Bee packs are often "easy". Does anyone hold that the right way to deal with these monsters is to melee them with zero weapon skill and no summons?
As for the experiment being true almost by definition, that's not true. One can design XP systems where "harmless" monsters give a non-negligible proportion of XP. There's no Commandment that says that an Ogre should give a hundred times more XP than a goblin, or one which fixes the proportion of "harmless" monsters. And, as you can see, at least one person was vastly misled about the XP "harmless" monsters give. This is because, as a number, there are lots of "harmless" monsters (about a third of all monsters killed, in my example), but they give very little XP.
As for whether even 1% more XP is intolerable, one should look at the counterfactual. The counterfactual is not "you get more XP for free", but that you kill the monster more slowly and with more tedium. It is quite possible that some other non-"trivial" monster walks in while you're dispatching the "trivial" monster, or when you're recovering your HP from a "trivial" fight. The "optimal" way, in the vast majority of the cases, would likely be to kill the "trivial" monsters ASAP.