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.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The reality is it doesn't matter what the DMG says, and never has. Why? Because as long as you have groups that do short/long rests whenever they want, essentially pausing the game, and groups that play with monsters as being living beings (meaning they react to the environment around them, not being in stasis until encountered), you're going to have problems. One group will complain encounter balancing rules are broken because they are too easy, and the other will say it's broken because it's too hard.

TLDR: No encounter building rules is going to work because the core playstyle is different from table to table

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.”

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.

But ultimately it is the same thing, except the attrition model you describe is just way easier and less risky. Because even if you had spent all your spells and rages and whatnot before you're done with all encounters, you can still choose to push forwards and cantrip the foes to death or whatnot. And as the encounters are trivially easy, there is a decent chance you can do it, but at least now there might be some risk like in the other approach all the time. But ultimately in both "we are so out of juice and beaten that we will die if we continue" is the only thing that actually stops you doing more. It is just that with harder encounters we get there faster.

And ultimately the issue with an endless slog of risk free combats is that it is just boring, so most people do not actually want to play that way.

Well, I think it’s an issue of not properly communicating what the product is designed for.

And it seems they might have made the communication even worse!

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.

I mean it is a design issue in a sense that if you want to sell a bunch of these tools and most people actually want to hammer nails, but you've made a screwdriver then that's a problem!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.


We'll see, I guess.

As has been suggested, perhaps they've simply abandoned the idea of challenging PCs in favor of just having exciting set pieces where everyone gets to show off their cool super powers?

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

Agreed. Though, I suspect that lack of transparency was somewhat intentional. Because 4e had been extremely transparent with its design intent, and people who didn’t want what 4e had been designed for, quit for Pathfinder. One of the lessons they took away from 4e was that, if they kept their design intent bit more vague, more players might still get the game, and use it how they wanted to use it, even if how they wanted to use it wasn’t how it was intended to be used. They realized there was a big market out there for hammers, who would still buy their screwdrivers as long as they didn’t explicitly say they were designed for driving screws.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

We had a poll here recently. IIRC three encounters per long rest was the most common answer. In Critical Role they might have one or perhaps two, and that's what informs a lot of newer people's understanding of the game. Old school monster slaying dungeon slogs just isn't how people play these days.

 

[Parmandur]

And ultimately the issue with an endless slog of risk free combats is that it is just boring, so most people do not actually want to play that way.

What evidence suggests most people feel that way...?

 

[payn]

Agreed. Though, I suspect that lack of transparency was somewhat intentional. Because 4e had been extremely transparent with its design intent, and people who didn’t want what 4e had been designed for, quit for Pathfinder. One of the lessons they took away from 4e was that, if they kept their design intent bit more vague, more players might still get the game, and use it how they wanted to use it, even if how they wanted to use it wasn’t how it was intended to be used. They realized there was a big market out there for hammers, who would still buy their screwdrivers as long as they didn’t explicitly say they were designed for driving screws.

For a hot min, they did want to make a Swiss army knife edition during NEXT. Though, yeah they settled on a tool that can do a bunch of stuff ok, instead of a tool for specific stuff well.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.”

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.

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.

Of course, they're still getting the profit from all those screwdriver purchases, whether the consumer knows what they're buying or not.

 

[Parmandur]

We had a poll here recently. IIRC three encounters per long rest was the most common answer. In Critical Role they might have one or perhaps two, and that's what informs a lot of newer people's understanding of the game. Old school monster slaying dungeon slogs just isn't how people play these days.

I wouldn't consider this site represtative. Mercer is intentionally not challenging his players, which is fine, they don't even realize that.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

The reality is it doesn't matter what the DMG says, and never has. Why?

Because no one reads the DMG.