Hero Progression

I titled this one: Hero Progression rather than XP because I don't actually give out XP.  Some friends of mine started developing a system that tracks your character's advancement in each skill seperately as it's used.  The idea is that you track the percentage to the next level and every time that you use the skill it gains a percentage to the next level.  So swinging your sword in battle should net you percentage points towards your next level in sword (everything's a skill, remember).  The other idea is that this progression slows over time.  The idea being that from level 0 to level 1 in a skill might take only one or two encounters (netting you 100% or 50% each time) but then slows down to typically 25% until you reach the 6th rank and then 15% at 11, 10% to 16 etc.  Really it's up to the GM what rate he wants to progress you at, but that's what I consider "The Normal Rate" to be.  It allows you to progress quickly through some of the lower ranks w/out taking too long at higher levels of the skills.

There are two more things that you should know about this:
First: Stats go up as well.  So in a combat encounter you might gain percentage points in sword, str, con, and defense.  Defense is a skill and I'll talk about it a little more when I talk about combat later (basically it's a skill that factors into your difficulty to be hit the way armor does in regular DND the closest example I can give you is how star wars does AC using your character level). Your Stats would progress more slowly "The Normal Rate" for stats would be starting around 10% per encounter and slowing from there. 

Two:  You can train.  This is where things get a little more messy and it's important for the GM to keep his hands on the reigns lest his players run amuck.  Basically, if your party is town a character could devote his time to increasing his stats and skills.  Maybe by sparring or hiring a sword master or just by doing a daily work out routine to try and build up his physical stats.  Now, what I define as "The Normal Rate" for this kind of training is very small.  2 or 3% for stats maybe 5 to 8% in a skill.  The idea being that I don't want my players taking two months off from adventuring and walking back out to fight with 20 pts in every stat and skill.  In the end this has to be very cooperative and you really have to look at how much your players are investing in their character's training.  If they're dropping 1,000s on sword masters and spending 10 hours a day training and the GM is ok with it, then feel free to give them entire points in skills.  The important thing to do is remember that balance matters.  I'm going to talk about turns and the gaming day in another post, but what I want it to boil down to is this:  Every player should gain something from their actions.  Whether you're talking politics with the king, practicing the sword at the lists, or just drinking and whoring, every hero should get something out of it.  There are a lot of different ways to reward them: stat and skill progression, favors from npcs, extra information that no one else is privvy to, items.  Now, balanced doesn't necessarily mean equal, but it should be close.

A beautiful thing about this is that if you decide that you haven't been giving out enough progression: you can always give more. 

Also one other thing.  "The Standard Rate" changes.  A lot of times if a new character is brought in or someone has to change weapons for some reason later in the game.  There's no reason that you can't just bump them up to rank 2, 3, or even 4 right off the bat.