I knew HMM serie since I was six, but today a realization hit me with the strength of a charging elephant - why exactly giving away gold grants you experience? All the game has to tell us about it is :

After scouring the area, you fall upon a hidden treasure cache.
You may take the gold or distribute it to the peasants for experience.
Which one do you choose?

Ok, distribute it to peasants for experience? Do they pickle experience in jars? Do they harvest experience every autumn?
Maybe those are not some peasants, but the Peasants, the mystical order in service of Uugan, the God of memory. Maybe this is some kind of moral lesson we are being taught here - that sharing enriches a man beyond measure. Or maybe our heroes looks at his empty tresure, shakes head and says - you know, maybe I should not give away all my shit in the middle of a war - and bam! psychological maturation new level achieved.

What do you think?

I think you should go and do some volunteer work for other people. Or give some money to charity or for the cause you believe in. Then you will see if you gain experience by doing things like that.

The simplest answer is that the designers wanted to give you a choice between building better armies/towns (using gold) or building a better hero (using experience). From that need, they invented an explanation for why refusing the gold would grant experience.

If you want a slightly more in-universe explanation, I've always preferred the idea that you spend the gold paying the local peasants to train you, whether through recounting stories of past battles or participating in mock battles with your army. After all, you can also gain experience in some games from adventure map sites (Gazebo in HMM2; Learning Stone in HMM3) and, in the case of the Gazebo, the text specifically says that a local knight comes out and you gain experience from conversing with him. Paying peasants for a similar experience makes sense in that context.

Kerebron - I think you should stop assuming what I do or don't do in real life.

The interesting thing is that the only logical explanation (if you want one) for a treasure chest buried under every other tree is war devastation - people hided their valuables before fleeing. That would mean that we are actually looting innocent civilians. The second - and more disturbing - theory as to the strange prevalence of chests filled with gold on the map says that they are that what "birthday gift" was for Gollum - a fiction created to assuage guilt of our heroes for acts of evil they committed in order to hire and maintain their armies.

And yes, I am overthinking it.

This is a holdover from Heroes of Might and Magic's ancestor game, King's Bounty. In that game, collecting a treasure chest gives two options:
A) Take the X gold
B) Distribute the gold to the peasants, increasing your leadership by Y

Heroes doesn't really have the same concept of "leadership". In King's Bounty it was directly related to the maximum amount of creatures you could recruit into your army.

In terms of narrative, I think it made more logical sense in KB, but I'm not complaining :)

Things are worse than you describe, Opuszek. Suppose you are lord of a non-knight castle and your hero is non-knight too. Both necromancer, say. First question should be, "What peasants?"

Fair point.

Haha. This made me chuckle. Thanks for the laugh.

Or, you might really be a Post-Mortem Communicator (See Dr. Hix of Unseen University in the DiscWorld books.) and be enlightened enough to understand that it's not a Good Idea to kill or scare off all of the local peasants.