Harrowing Experience

So I was catching up on some blogs today and I read this post which references a prior post called Experience Solved from 2009.  I wasn't working on Beacon back then although I was reading blogs which would lead me to Microlite and eventually get me started plugging away on the first edition of Beacon later that fall.  Anyway, when I started reading those OSR blogs that fall I came across the whole XP for spending treasure which was like a flash going off in my head.  This post just hit me the same way.  XP for damage!  It's brilliant, it solves the problem of trying to have monsters of predetermined value when you have no idea how the party will interact with them.  It also lets character run away and still gain XP for their efforts.  I won't get into all the details here since you can and should read the original posts, but it is a real super idea.  Beacon combat XP currently is based on a pretty simple 100* monster HD because I didn't want to have to create XP for every monster because that's a crappy way to do things.  Every monster is not the same even if they have identical stat blocks and it's how the dice go and how what the situation is that really determine how hard or interesting the combat winds up.  Fighting a handful of goblins is a lot different when you are carrying two party members and have no arrows left.  I figured the way to deal with this was to abstract it further - just give out XP based on monster HD, but I can now see another way to deal with this as suggested by that [expletive deleted] Alexis - turn it all inside out and base it on the damage.