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.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'll wait to see what the actual pacing advice is.

The adventuring day is a blight on the game, but taking the typical 5e solution and punting to letting the DM just trial and error it out at the expense of everyone's valuable time might be slightly worse than the terrible 6-8 encounter attrition advice.

 

[Charlaquin]

I mean that's what the book says, but I have hard time believing that except at low levels that would be a challenge, given how easy medium encounters are. Granted, I'm not sure I've ever had more than five + couple of traps and other challenges that burned resources (and most of those encounters were definitely not medium, but quite a bit harder.) So eight, maybe? But eight pushover encounters seems like an utterly miserable experience to me, so it is not something I would ever want even to try.

You’re having a hard time believing it because you’re thinking of “challenge” as meaning “carries a significant risk of one or more characters dying.” That’s not the challenge the 2014 encounter building guidelines are aiming for though. The challenge is just in managing your resources well enough to make it through all the encounters without running out. These guidelines expect that if the PCs start running low on resources, they will retreat before they get to the point of being at risk of dying. Thats why I say, the challenge isn’t “survive all the encounters or die” it’s “make your resources last through all the encounters or retreat.”

Well, no, not quite. The attrition still plays a part, it is just that it is over say four rather than six encounters. Granted, there is a higher risk of defeat on individual encounters as well, which makes them more exciting. But I feel you can go significantly above deadly and the risk of total defeat is still pretty minimal, it just might not seem utterly impossible even in theory.

When I talk about an attrition macro challenge in contrast to a gauntlet of individual challenges, I’m not saying that resource attrition doesn’t play a role in the latter. Certainly, the more resources you use in each individual challenge, the more difficult each subsequent challenge within the gauntlet becomes. What I’m saying is that the 2014 adventurering day guidelines are going for a completely different model of challenge. It’s not survive one encounter or die, then survive another encounter with slightly fewer resources or die, then survive another encounter with slightly fewer resource or die, etc. It’s get through all 6-8 encounters you need to get through to reach your goal with enough resources to survive, or retreat before reaching your goal. Death basically isn’t a risk unless you significantly overestimate the resources you have available, or the DM significantly over-tunes the adventure. The attrition is itself the challenge.

Given that overwhelming majority of the users of the product will use it to hammer nails, this seems like a rather significant design issue!

Well, I think it’s an issue of not properly communicating what the product is designed for. A screwdriver being bad at hammering nails isn’t a design issue, because hammering nails isn’t its designed function in the first place. But, if lots of people who want to hammer nails are going out of their way to buy a specific brand of screwdrivers to do it with, the company that makes those screwdrivers is probably not marketing their product correctly.

 

[Charlaquin]

So I actually do not use published adventures, so I don't know, but is there usually something that prevents the characters from just retreating for a bit and camping for a night and then returning to finish the dungeon?

Sometimes. More importantly, retreating for a bit and camping for a night is the failure state of the attrition macro challenge. You have not successfully managed your resources effectively enough to get you through the full adventuring day.

Generally, in this model of adventure design, it is best to include some manner of time pressure, or other consequence for reaching this fail state. Perhaps the rewards for completing the adventure are reduced if it’s not completed within a certain timeframe. Or, perhaps your goal is deep enough within the dungeon that you can’t realistically reach it without getting through or finding a way to bypass at least 6 encounters, and the dungeon gets restocked whenever you retreat and take a long rest.

 

[Charlaquin]

I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like that. I’ve seen occasional “after three days this happens”.

That works. Assuming the dungeon or whatever restocks when you retreat, this basically gives you three tries to complete it before you fail completely.

 

[Charlaquin]

It is moving from "you will want 6-8 Medium Encounters or equivalent per Long rest, with 2 Short Redts, and that is called an adventure Day" to an XP budgeting system thst will recommend a couple Short Rests, which will no doubt shake out to...6-8 Encoutners of what the 2014 book would call an "Medoum Challenge".

So, changing the presentation, but the results should be the same.

Hmm… Yeah, that makes sense.

 

[Micah Sweet]

View attachment 382161

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.

That's certainly interesting! I'd love to read the actual text.

 

[Micah Sweet]

While I find the 2014 6 to 8 encounter recommendation a bit high, people often forget that the term "encounters" includes things like social encounters, hazards, traps, puzzles, exploration challenges, etc.

Of course, those things only count for these purposes if they use up limited resources.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The whole adventuring day thing was pretty poorly explained, yeah. It’s mostly based on hit point attrition: how many rounds of pressure to their hit points can a party of 4 PCs handle before needing a long rest. If you’re not interested in pushing PCs to their limit every day, it’s not that important, and there are ways to pressure the party’s hit points that don’t involve combat. Changing the way this is discussed in the new DMG makes sense, given how often it was misunderstood in the 2014 DMG. I just hope it is still discussed, and that the discussion makes the intent clearer, rather than less clear.

There has often been trouble in a general sense in these books making intent clear. I hope they do a better job with design transparency in 5.5.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I assume its because no one should die in 5E

I wonder if they talk about that in the DMG.

 

[Parmandur]

Given that overwhelming majority of the users of the product will use it to hammer nails, this seems like a rather significant design issue!

But, do they? Some do, we know that from the Internet, but I am skeptical thst it is even a notable minority, let alone any sort of plurality or majority.

Certainly I can imagine people struggling with Encounter design as presented, it is hard. Hence the representstion.