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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

Clear design intent in the books would IMO help with that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

All true. And I find that very unfortunate and manipulative. I'd much rather know what I'm getting into before I throw money at something.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

I think a major strength of 5E organizing around a maximum logistical standard for balance, is thst if a group wants to undershoot that...that's perfectly fine. The game won't explode, though Paladins and Wizards will shine stronger. People can have fun not pushing the limit.

 

[maeve]

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".

While improvements in the wording are clearly needed to clarify intention (e.g., they should probably get rid of the 6 to 8 encounters wording), I am unsure how "an XP budgeting systems that recommends a couple Short Rests" meaningfully differs from what is presented in the Adventuring Day section in the 2014 DMG. It seems to me that the "Adventuring Day XP" table already covers what you are describing.

 

[Charlaquin]

But ultimately it is the same thing, except the attrition model you describe is just way easier and less risky.

“Ease” and “risk” are relative to what’s at stake. It’s not easy to get through 6-8 medium encounters without getting low enough on HP that someone in the party might actually die. But death isn’t really what’s at stake. Not completing the adventure is what’s at stake.

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.

Right, and you’re expected to recognize when you’re at risk of someone dying and retreat at that point. The risk isn’t of death, the risk is of not completing the adventure.

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.

Well, no, if each individual encounter is a challenge in and of itself, there is a risk of someone dying before you all run out of juice. That’s why it’s a challenge individually. But, yes, you will likely also get to the point of being out of juice 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.

That’s a matter of taste. I certainly don’t find it boring, nor do the people I regularly play with. What most people want, I don’t know, but my experience has certainly been that the players I’ve encountered who want to play D&D 5e tend to like winning encounters and don’t like when their characters die. A model of adventure design where they can win lots of encounters, their characters are very rarely at risk of dying, and completing adventures is still difficult, is perfectly suited to those players’ tastes.

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

Possibly. I’ll have to see what the actual text of the book says.

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!

Which is not much incentive for them to be more transparent.

 

[M_Natas]

Hrm, it is now speculation on what they will actually explain in the encounter building rules. Maybe their pacing advice is better the their explanation of adventuring day.
But usually hiding what is actually happening and what the system is designed around (namley the time between two long rests - the adventuring day) leads to worse explanations.

What I have seen so far of the DMG is, that the organisation is better, but the actual rules are not (as far as the previews allow to tell).
Now the encounter building rules hide the design intent of the adventuring day. The worksheet templates (NPC, campaign tracking ...) don't look well thought out, Bastion rules are more of a mini tabletop game then part of the RPG experience. The Magic Item pricing seems to be the same as in the 2014 DMG and I haven't seen anything that suggests that they explain the gold economy of adventuring (like how much money an adventuring party can expect per level, if you use the random treasure tables) that a DM actually need in order for magic item prices to make sense. You can't just set prices and not talk about expect income. The crafting rules seem boring (like, at least add an exotic material to each magic item that is needed for crafting ...) - but so far most things that I've seen previews for, so far I've seen better done in blog articles, DMs Guild products and foren posts here at ENworld - except for the organisation ...

 

[Parmandur]

While improvements in the wording are clearly needed to clarify intention (e.g., they should probably get rid of the 6 to 8 encounters wording), I am unsure how "an XP budgeting systems that recommends a couple Short Rests" meaningfully differs from what is presented in the Adventuring Day section in the 2014 DMG. It seems to me that the "Adventuring Day XP" table already covers what you are describing.

Exactly, that's my point. I don't think theybhave changed the fundamental mathematical pace of the game, but rather massaged the language around the guidelines to help DMs follow them or depart from them as desired.

 

[Nefermandias]

Nobody ran 8 encounters thst were combat heavy per day with wizards in the party else the adventuring party runs out of spells too fast.

Guess I am nobody then...

On another note, the XP budget method of encounter building is straight up lifted from 4e.

That does nothing at all about addressing the resource management problem that inevitably arises when tables insist on having only a couple fights per long rest.

 

[OB1]

Don't know if it's set up this way, but what would really be helpful is if it was broken down like this

Hard - A challenge for PCs at near full resources, potentially deadly if at half or below
Medium - A challenge for PCs at half resources, potentially deadly if at low
Easy - A challenge for PCs with low resources

 

[Parmandur]

Guess I am nobody then...

On another note, the XP budget method of encounter building is straight up lifted from 4e.

That does nothing at all about addressing the resource management problem that inevitably arises when tables insist on having only a couple fights per long rest.

That's not really a problem, though: if people want an easy game they don't have to push themselves.