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]

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,

Only if you’re trying to make an individual fight a challenge with the party still at full or near-full resources. D&D’s challenge is built around attrition. Individual fights aren’t built to be challenging, the challenge is in managing a pool of resources across many fights. And it’s built that way so that a dungeon or other adventure can be challenging on a zoomed out scale, without being a series of challenges you have to overcome or die. So you can have a series of small, easily manageable micro challenges that add up to a larger, difficult to manage macro challenge, and in turn the game can be skill-testing without being punishing.

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.

Well, hopefully the advice about pacing will serve this purpose. I’m skeptical that it will, but at least I can huff copium until the book is out.

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 feel you there.

 

[Charlaquin]

5e was never balanced around the adventuring day, anyway.

Huh?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

Right, that's the important thing: have enough fights per long rest that you can put some short rest in between them.

 

[DarkCrisis]

One way I stopped players from abusing short and long rests is “Youve been up 3 hours, you still have 10ish hours to go

 

[DEFCON 1]

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)?

I think they've given up on the idea that most DMs are able to understand what 'guidelines' mean and can use guidelines to make things work for themselves. By removing the recommendations for your prototypical game and prototypical party, they now force every DM to actually learn how encounter mechanics work in relation to the specific characters at their table, rather than taking those guidelines as unchanging gospel and then getting mad when they don't work.

The lazy DMs who couldn't bother figuring out how to align the DMG guidelines to their own table needs over the last decade ruined it for everyone else.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Only if you’re trying to make an individual fight a challenge with the party still at full or near-full resources. D&D’s challenge is built around attrition. Individual fights aren’t built to be challenging, the challenge is in managing a pool of resources across many fights. And it’s built that way so that a dungeon or other adventure can be challenging on a zoomed out scale, without being a series of challenges you have to overcome or die. So you can have a series of small, easily manageable micro challenges that add up to a larger, difficult to manage macro challenge, and in turn the game can be skill-testing without being punishing.

Sure, but I think you need to have crazy number of the encounters at the default difficulty for them to be challenging. Like even if you want three or four encounters (which IIRC according to the recent poll seemed to be most common) you need to go above the deadly quite a bit and for an occasional one nova fight even more so. I think the guidelines should go that far to cover such situations.

Well, hopefully the advice about pacing will serve this purpose. I’m skeptical that it will, but at least I can huff copium until the book is out.

I feel you there.

We'll see, I guess.

 

[Xeviat]

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.

If a typical fight all but required a short rest afterwards, that's good pacing for an rp focused game and would be a reasonable balance point.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sure, but I think you need to have crazy number of the encounters at the default difficulty for them to be challenging.

Well, you need 6-8 medium encounters. And none of the individual encounters will be particularly challenging; the challenge will be in managing your resources well enough to make it through all 6-8 of them without having to retreat and take a long rest. That’s the point, it’s shifting the core challenge from
“survive all the encounters” to “manage your resources well enough to get through the whole day.” Survival is basically not in question after around 3rd or 4th level when you’re no longer at risk of dying to a random critical hit. The question is, will you be able to get done everything you need to get done before your resources run too low to continue safely. This is also one of the reasons time pressure is important.

Obviously, all of this assumes a particular style of gameplay. If you’re not interested in that attrition-based macro challenge, you can try to design your encounters differently. The system just won’t be doing you any favors. And it’s a shame the DMG isn’t explicit about this, because it’s kind of important to understand that if you’re not looking for this attrition macro challenge type of gameplay, you’ll be fighting against the game’s systems instead of working with them.

Like even if you want three or four encounters (which IIRC according to the recent poll seemed to be most common) you need to go above the deadly quite a bit and for an occasional one nova fight even more so.

Indeed, and at that point, individual encounters will be challenging on their own. The core gameplay challenge will no longer be a macro challenge of managing your resources effectively across many micro challenges or being forced to retreat. It will instead be a gauntlet of individual challenges you must survive each of or die.

I think the guidelines should go that far to cover such situations.

I just don’t think that’s really what the system is designed for. To me this comes across as asking for instructions on how to use your screwdriver to hammer nails.

 

[payn]

One way I stopped players from abusing short and long rests is “Youve been up 3 hours, you still have 10ish hours to go

Are short rest actual sleep sessions?

 

[abirdcall]

I don't think this is a change.

The encounter guidelines were always about the risk of a character or the entire party dying.

They just chose to spend their page count on that.

I will wait to see how they talk about pacing specifically. It would be nice to have good advice there.

People definitely did have 6-8 encounters per long rest and will continue to do so. And yes, spellcasters were limited from casting all their big spells all the time and that is working as intended.

At the end of the day saying it is balanced around 6-8 encounters isn't very helpful because not every day will be like that. What is important is that it could be like that so it keeps the party cautious.