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[IndigoFenix]

Something needs to be done about the "wrestle a small animal for a few hours in order to become a god of war" exploit.

A suggestion: Combat experience should be gained whenever a combat action succeeds.  The experience gained should then be adjusted according to how likely it was to succeed.  If the probability of success was 100%, no experience is gained.

Fighting enemies on your skill level or higher would level you up the fastest.  Punching an unconscious enemy would do nothing since all attacks are guaranteed.  Grabbing a muskrat and dodging its attacks would stop improving your dodging ability once it became effortless.

This would be best augmented with the ability to spar with teammates or random strangers in Adventure Mode.  You would simply set a combat option to "sparring mode", which would make your attacks deal no damage.  You could then ask another character to spar with you.  Since the experience gained from succeeding in a "touch attack" would also be adjusted by the success in landing the attack just like a real attack, the fastest way to safely gain combat experience would be by sparring with opponents on a similar level to yourself, which is more logical than wrestling wild critters.

[DudeeDew]

Punching an unconscious enemy would do nothing since all attacks are guaranteed.

I believe this is already done. As well as dependency of experience gain on the chance of success performing an attack. I guess Toady might just tweak some numbers to make this suggestion work to some extent.

[gnome]

Agreed, I actually wanted to suggest this awhile back but I forgot to make a thread about it.

[Bumber]

Should the action have to succeed? Don't you learn more from failure, so long as it doesn't kill you?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

+1 to Bumber's revision of the OP. It seems like a simple, realistic, and effective solution to the animal wrestling exploit.

How would this work with non-combat skills? Are they simply outside the scope? It would be nice to solve the Legendary Knapper in a week problem as well.

I think this should only apply above Proficient, though, or something similar. A dabbling archer can shoot at the distant ground and never miss, yet they gain some skill from doing so. Or could we target inanimate objects such as trees?

[GoblinCookie]

Should the action have to succeed? Don't you learn more from failure, so long as it doesn't kill you?

I don't think the person that fails necessary understands why they failed, so failure doesn't always teach people much. 

[Strik3r]

Both are valid points: Learning from failure works when you know or can figure out  why you failed, Learning from success stops when that success becomes routine. Yet i don't think that having 100% chance to succeed should net no experience, even when you do something with no chance of failure, you'll still often by chance find ways to do it even better. Nor should pulling off a ~1% action result in extremely high XP gains as more than likely your adventurer pulled that off by pure luck, not their skill, so they're unlikely to learn much from it.

So that way, the adventurer can learn from anything they do, success or failure, but isn't forced to take pointless or unreasonable risks for max XP gains.