Dungeons & Dragons Has Done Away With the Adventuring Day

Adventuring days are no more, at least not in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. The new 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide contains a streamlined guide to combat encounter planning, with a simplified set of instructions on how to build an appropriate encounter for any set of characters. The new rules are pretty basic - the DM determines an XP budget based on the difficulty level they're aiming for (with choices of low, moderate, or high, which is a change from the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide) and the level of the characters in a party. They then spend that budget on creatures to actually craft the encounter. Missing from the 2024 encounter building is applying an encounter multiplier based on the number of creatures and the number of party members, although the book still warns that more creatures adds the potential for more complications as an encounter is playing out.

What's really interesting about the new encounter building rules in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is that there's no longer any mention of the "adventuring day," nor is there any recommendation about how many encounters players should have in between long rests. The 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide contained a recommendation that players should have 6 to 8 medium or hard encounters per adventuring day. The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide instead opts to discuss encounter pace and how to balance player desire to take frequent Short Rests with ratcheting up tension within the adventure.

The 6-8 encounters per day guideline was always controversial and at least in my experience rarely followed even in official D&D adventures. The new 2024 encounter building guidelines are not only more streamlined, but they also seem to embrace a more common sense approach to DM prep and planning.

The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide for Dungeons & Dragons will be released on November 12th.

 

[Charlaquin]

Except it seems (?) there is no longer a Deadly encounter type.

I would guess it’s similar to the revised encounter building guidelines in Xanathar’s Guide. Deadly would just be going above the budget for Hard.

 

[ezo]

I assume its because no one should die in 5E

To some people, certainly.

 

[UVAtom]

the only time I’ve used the XP budget is whatever is underlying the encounter builder on DnDBeyond. I mostly run pre-made adventures, so I’m looking there for guidance on pacing. So maybe better guidance in the adventures, like, “a fully rested party should be able to clear out this cave with only one short rest” or something.

 

[BJK Games]

I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to undo the adventuring day and leave it more free-form. I do hope they continue to define what a standard length of time is, though. One of the best things I've pulled in from Dragonbane is the simple idea of a stretch/shift of time, a 15-minute segment and an 8-hour segment respectively. Those really help keep track of stuff for my parties, and I'd love to see that specifically codified in the new DMG.

 

[ezo]

Actually, if the new system is presented well, and MOST IMPORTANTLY shows actual examples of how to use it at different tiers with different groups, etc.... THEN it will be useful and help DMs plan appropriately I think.

 

[Quickleaf]

I'm confused about what has changed. Because based on what Christian has shared here, something fundamental has to have changed, right?

Before, to really threaten the party's resources you needed many encounters – around 6-8 encounters at the 2014 "moderate" difficulty level. This wasn't precise, of course, but the general trend was true – it took a lot to whittle through PC resources.

Now... that 6-8 encounter guideline is gone. The monster multiplier is gone. We're also told monsters will have the same CR that they did in 2014. And by all metrics 2024 PCs have more resources, not less, than their 2014 counterparts.

So what are these Low / Medium / High encounter building guidelines in the 2024 DMG?

Are they very comparable to 2014's guidelines? So the difference is that monsters are soooo up-tuned in difficulty that a 2024 CR 3 makes a 2014 CR 3 look like a chump?

Or are the Low / Medium / High guidelines just that much greater than the old 2014 guidelines, leading to the potential for bloated combat encounters with way more monsters?

Or has 2024 D&D completely given up on the idea that PCs will ever feel resource scarcity (or at least not baked into the adventure/dungeon design)?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I would guess it’s similar to the revised encounter building guidelines in Xanathar’s Guide. Deadly would just be going above the budget for Hard.

This is unfortunate. You need to go way above deadly for any sort of actual challenge, so basically we have only guidelines for meaningless pushover fights, and if the old advice to have mind numbing number of these per day is gone too, the characters won't be challenged that way either. What we needed was about two or three difficulty categories above the current deadly.

And yeah, I am sceptical of this new development regarding adventuring day. If the classes and monsters are still built the same than they used to (which seems to be the case) then omitting this information will just make running the game harder.

 

[I'm A Banana]

5e was never balanced around the adventuring day, anyway. I do like having an expectation of how many encounters the party has resources for so I can pace dungeons, but so many folks got hung up on that 6-8 encounter line that they figured it was essential for balance when it was really just a threshold statement.

 

[Clint_L]

Given that more and more people come to D&D through actual play shows, it makes sense that the rules better reflect the D&D folks are actually seeing: more RP, fewer but more impactful encounters.

 

[Xeviat]

DM: So, lets see here. 2-3 Fights. So... every encounter needs to be Deadly. Well that really didn't change much from 2014.

That's how I ended up doing things in my last long 5E game. I planned for fights to be hard or deadly, with a short rest after 2 hard fights or 1 deadly fight, pushing for 3 deadly fights a day. I wanted to keep the fighter and warlock balanced against the cleric, because if things felt like 1 fight was gonna be all there was in a day, the cleric blew all of his spells, trivializing the encounter and not letting the others have fun.

BG3 feels really balanced with 2 short rests per long rest and the food supply and adventure clock making you want to press on.