Shattered Kingdoms

From the help file.

A few things I have been told over the years take it with a grain of salt.
Using a spell/cord to hurt is worth double XP compare to a weapon.
Non combat spells XP is capped per time. Not sure what the numbers are or even if its spell by spell. I suspect it is a blanket X per hour rate other will say differently.
Gains from teaching seems to be a very low amount, I suspect it has to do with the amount of XP spent to train.
Questing is one of those things a lot of people have different views on same will save a stack of questing for the last few levels between Champion and GM. However you will get more bang for your buck if you do a quest at the level it is expected at. There are some other notes in the Experience help file that are worth reading if you haven't read it already.

Or animals, possibly, depending on how hippie/vegan you make them. At the very least insects since there's no PETA in Pyrathia.

Speaking of insects, correct me if I'm wrong but SK doesn't have a "mandatory" spider area, does it?

You know, a levelling area full of disgusting eight legged freaks, their webs, their young and eeeww... I'll stop now. I managed to self-activate my arachnophobia.

No, but we have a pretty disgusting optional one.

You used to be able to level up by casting spells, but then Dulrik was like, "man there's no risk in that. Better put an arbitrary xp cap on that to keep people from leveling up in a different way than murdering 10 billion NPCs."

Then it'll have to rely on XP awards for roleplay too and possibly questing, and the character got moved from primary to alt. It is what it is. I used to get upset and bitter about admin decisions that I thought made the game I was playing feel worse on a different mud before I quit playing it and came here. I'm sure if I reach that point here I'll wind up leaving as well, I just usually don't broadcast the frustration and upset much since in my admittedly limited experience the only thing it actually changes is how much I'm able to enjoy the game, and at the worst times, how willing staff is to help out/throw you a bone when you want/need assistance for certain plots.

I'm curious as to why you're not even willing to give it a shot. It's definitely possible, but you're being defeated by the forum and not the game.

The fact is that the game encourages conflict, and you wish to avoid it. We have stated that we will include more ways to get experience without combat against sentients, but they're not overnight fixes. In the meantime, however, there is an expert-level area ripe with non-sentient pests for you to eradicate with two quests within it.

To address the first and second parts of what you are saying, the above quote. I didn't retire her. I am just not playing her primarily. And when the goddess of love is opposed by the goddess called the star of slaughter, yes, I do feel the need to try and avoid needlessly killing sentient things because it feels like the right way to play it out, being as slaughtering a bunch of things that can think and feel and suffer for no reason would seem to be in some degree of opposition. Though, and I must stress this before the rest even: that's not the primary reason I'm cooling my jets with her at the moment. The primary reason is that the flavor of stuff going on in her neck of the woods to be involved with is stuff that any sane person would avoid, so... during all this virtual time, she is, and I, not wanting to sit alone somewhere for an indeterminate amount of time, am choosing to take that downtime to someone who is more actively involved in things. Also, as a note I don't wish to avoid conflict. There are many types of conflict. PK is only one of them, and for the record, it's really the only one I am actively seeking to avoid.

There is no "arbitrary cap" on spell XP. You can get an infinite amount of XP from casting spells. There IS a time-limitation such that you can only earn a certain amount of XP per time unit. This was instituted over 15 years ago and plenty of people have used it since then to level up to GM. It's true that you cannot do GM in 30 hours this way. For someone who doesn't want to kill anything and prefers to spend all their time role-playing, it works out just fine. And in fact, I maintain you will have far more fun than using the super-optimized yet extremely boring path that Ardith and other veterans prefer to get there in 30 hours. If both you and a veteran play 150 hours, and you enjoyed all 150, while they hated 30 and enjoyed 120, who really got the better value?

There really is a danger of being defeated by the forums.

We should stop a moment and bask in the QFTiness