So I have run into a situation where my players have come across a group of enemies and either stealth, lie or intimidate their way out of a violent encounter. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching my players do this, but I get confused as to figuring out how much XP to give them. Let's say there is an encounter and defeating the enemies will get them 200XP. If they manage to circumvent it, should I give them the full 200XP? More? Less? SOS

 This is the problem that caused me to move to milestone levelling.

However - if you want to keep to XP, then I say that they still "defeated" the bad guys, and give them the 200XP.

To my mind, an encounter is where the Players are being contested, or have to solve a problem. It doesn't matter if their solution is to whack things with swords, or talk their way out of it - they still solved the problems, and came out on top in the encounter, so they "won".

Well, I look at it as a form of social CR vs encounter CR; how hard is it for them to accomplish the task, adjust the CR/XP from there. 

200 XP encounter if they destroy their enemies. That is, for the sake of the numbers, a group of three level 2 characters fighting 2 worgs which is considered a "medium" encounter.

I start by creating a base: any encounter not completed by killing the enemies starts at 50% of the XP that would normally be awarded. So we start with a base 100XP reward for completing the encounter without combat. 

Now we look at what makes the non-combat resolution more/less difficult and adjust the reward per entry. Again I choose a base so that the numbers will be easy to add, each item that affects the difficulty is a +/- 10% of the base XP, in this case 10xp.

Worgs have Keen Sense = +20 (2 worgs)
2 Worgs, increased chance of being seen = +10
Dense forest for cover = -10
Worgs are distracted by fresh kill = -10
No other distractions to cover movement (such as other combat) = +10

Just some very basic examples, but it leads to a total of +20 XP when all is said and done. 

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The players are trying to enter an enemy city:

Guard starts hostile toward characters = +10%
Crowd is entering at the same time = -10%
One Character is of a "bad race" = +10%
Guards intimidated by character = +10% (fear can cause them to attack rather than retreat)
Half the party sneaks in wearing disguises = -10% (the crowd, disguises, and party member distraction make infiltration easier)

In this case they end up with +10% to the scenario, we then take a look at what the encounter would have been like: a fight would be against 2 city guards, their stat block puts them at CR 1/8 so 25xp a piece. That puts the result at 27.5 (rounded up because I'm generous) to 28 XP for successfully avoiding the fight. 

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It's purely arbitrary, the way I do this, but I have found that this approach does give players the feeling that all of their choices have an impact on their growth and the game.

Why do you consider resolving the conflict without killing your opponents, only worth half the experience?

To me that seems to devalue social or diplomatic solutions, and could - in theory - lead to some players thinking "well, I could talk my way out, but I get more XP for combat, so ... ".

I'm not saying you're wrong to only award 50% XP - merely wondering what your rationale is. Perhaps I need to revisit my thinking :)

It's a matter of the end result:

If you enter a potential combat encounter with the intent to fight, the result is combat encounter. The end result is life or death.

If you enter a potential combat encounter with the intent not to fight the result is a social encounter. The end result is no combat or combat (which leads to the first situation).

So either way, if you don't care about a social encounter, or fail at it, you'll end up in a combat which rewards full XP because the risk of death is involved. If you avoid combat, there's no risk of death, technically there's no XP reward for non-combat related activities. It is suggested that XP be rewarded but there's no formula or table to work with, so this seemed the fair compromise.

That was my first thought as well - that XP should tie to risk.

But - I've never heard of a DM giving more XP to the party for combat when they're injured and spell depleted; or giving give less XP to the Wizard or Archer for hanging back out of the fray; or giving less experience points to the Barbarian than to the Rogue for being on the front line of combat. If XP is proportional to risk, shouldn't we be doing these things? This is the reason I moved away from risk-based XP evaluation.

I think the reason you and I are diverging here, and why the OP is confused as to how many XP to award - is that XP is a pretty abstract game concept. How we choose to tie it to in-world behaviors shapes our answers, and how we'd award XP.

You seem to award based on risk. It sounds like that works for you and your players, so no problems. I choose to reward players for achieving their goal in an encounter, regardless of the solution they employ. Sure, that might mean that one, or a few, Players can talk their way out of a situation, and the whole party gets XP - but I don't think that's much different than 2-3 tank characters taking the brunt of the combat ( and honestly, if I'm giving them only socially resolvable encounters, that's a failing on my part - it should all even out in the end ).

And this is where I go and say:

I stopped doing any XP rewards many years ago myself, I got tired of players "level chasing" and looking for the next combat. There was an absurd amount of energy being spent on trying to figure out how to maximize the XP gain and get the next level. So I, just as you mentioned in your earlier posts, have gone to Milestone leveling as well.

While the idea worked well at my table, you aren't the first person to bring up how it can be argued. The arguments vary from person to person, and many of the arguments bring up valid issues that required more and more fiddling with it to make it work. With anything introduced to a game there should be little effort for maximized effect. You should be able to look at your notes, read the details, and then implement it with a simple adjudication. 

The method I gave the OP is simply one approach, but since moving on to milestone leveling I have found the game really does start to focus more on the story and less on the numbers. It removes the question "should I reward xp for this or that action" and allows the players and DM focus more on decision making rather than calculations. 

Milestone is my preferred as well.

But on to the topic...

Are you giving the full party exp for avoiding combat? Did everyone contribute to the avoiding combat? Or was it mostly 1-2 of the players, and the other stood their and picked their noses or scratched their butts? In combat, its rare you'll find a character go "I protest to this combat and will have no part" and he just goes off to the side, leans againat a tree/house and says "I ready an action for if anyone engages with me, but I will not partake in the fight otherwise"

Where as in dealing with a conflict to not have the fight at all. Sometimes people contribute, sometimes people make it worse, and some people do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING at all during the entire exchange. There would be different XP distributions for each of the people depending on what they did in that.

Milestone is better overall for many of these reasons in my personal opinion.

 I use the mile stone system myself, because of situations like this. When you look at exp it's simply the characters getting better at what they do, and get enough they gain a level. That's cool, but my problem is while maybe sneaking past the bad guys would teach the rogue how to use his stealth skill better how does that translate to the wizard learning 3rd level magic, or the barbarian learning more rage abilities? My belief is d&d is designed for stand up combat, and not mechanicaly deaigned for complex social interaction, or combat avoidance.

Long winded way to answer the original question I would give them maybe half at most exp from time to time for avoiding a fight, but what they gain for avoiding a fight is not using up spells or abilities , or loss of hp. Sometimes you have to avoid a fight cause the hill giant would crush your level 2 characters , so the players gain real life game experience in the form of knowledge , and in the above case common sense.

I think all we've managed to agree on is that XP is broken.

Here's a truism about human beings: you get the behaviors out of people that you measure, and reward. I see this 100% of the time professionally. That's how people work.

If you preferentially reward involvement in combat, nerf XP for social encounters, and fail to give XP bonuses at all for the Rouge opening that  trapped door into the tomb, the Wizard using magic to allow the party to travel underwater to the final dungeon, or the Barbarian intimidating crucial clues out of the NPC, ( all, please note, important steps in the adventure ) you tend to get murder hobos, as that's the behavior which gets the most reward.

If that's the kind of game you want, then more power to you - risk based XP awards and 1/2 XP for non-lethal solutions will suit your game perfectly.

It doesn't do it for me. Which is why - like everyone else here - I switched to milestones.

Ironically, milestones reward Players for solving the story or conflict, regardless of how they accomplish it, social or combat. Fight your way through the adventure, or talk your way out, you still get to the milestone. So, it's somewhat odd seeing people say they prefer milestone leveling, but advocating nerfing social solutions if-and-only-if advancement is  XP based.

I fully agree with you that why I use milestones as well. It 

I've done both milestone and xp, but my players definitely prefer getting xp at the end of each session so I go with that now. As to the original question, I do award the same xp for bypassing an encounter through social or stealth/distraction tactics as I would for combat. But...if for some reason they end up having to fight or bypass that same group or situation again they do not get additional xp. For example, if they talk their way past a guard at the front of a dungeon, then kill it on the way out they don't get double the xp.

At the end of the day, if it's a homebrew campaign, you can easily adjust encounters to match their levels. Modules can be tricky, but most modules have xp and milestone options with some having very detailed xp rewards. If your players are good with milestone, that's the easiest to control, but getting xp at the end of a session was always my preference as a player, and is the preference for my current players as well. Just make sure to not shortchange or double dip your monsters/traps/encounters.