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.

 

[Quickleaf]

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.

I think you’re suggesting that, say, a Medium 2024 combat will be worth, for example, TWO 2014 combats?

 

[Parmandur]

I think you’re suggesting that, say, a Medium 2024 combat will be worth, for example, TWO 2014 combats?

Nooooo, not that. Let me see if I can make it more clear.

The 2014 had guidelines for what was called an "Advebture Day", or 6-8 Medium Encounters with two Shorts Rests between Long Rests.

I am saying thaat they might drop the "Adventure Day" terminology and have new guidelines, but that following the new guidelines for Encounters and pacing likely result in approximately 6-8 Encounters of Medium difficulty with two Short Rests.

 

[abirdcall]

Before you could only benefit from one long rest every 24 hours. Since a long rest is 8 hours and 8+16=24, this is only a change for elves.

Yeah, but I think the wording allowed for more stretching of intent.

Now that it is spelled out they need to specifically say they are waiting 16 hours before adventuring.

 

[Quickleaf]

Nooooo, not that. Let me see if I can make it more clear.

The 2014 had guidelines for what was called an "Advebture Day", or 6-8 Medium Encounters with two Shorts Rests between Long Rests.

I am saying thaat they might drop the "Adventure Day" terminology and have new guidelines, but that following the new guidelines for Encounters and pacing likely result in approximately 6-8 Encounters of Medium difficulty with two Short Rests.

Huh. I am understanding the text of what you’re saying, but I’m not parsing how that’s possible.

How, in the 2024 DMG’s encounter design rules (from what we’ve learned from Christian’s preview) do we get to 6-8 encounters per day without saying “6-8 encounters per day”?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

“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.

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 if completing that adventure is actually important, then you will risk that death! "Yeah, we were supposed to toss this stupid ring into a volcano, but it seems that it might be dangerous, so let's go home instead." And yeah, not every adventure needs to be of such importance that you'd risk death for it, but I think many should. Slogging for several sessions through risk free encounters for one mission is bad enough, but doing it for something the characters really do not even care about is even worse!

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.

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.

The fights players seem to find exiting and memorable are the close fought ones, not the speed bumps.

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

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

Sure. But this actually needn't to be an issue. Their tool could easily work as screwdriver too, nothing in the basic design prevents it. All that is needed, is that there are some short rests between the fights and the long rests for the class balance to be maintained. You definitely do not need six, let alone eight battles for that! You can easily do two to four harder fights. It's just that we do not have guidelines for those harder fights, so we need to guess.

 

[Parmandur]

Huh. I am understanding the text of what you’re saying, but I’m not parsing how that’s possible.

How, in the 2024 DMG’s encounter design rules (from what we’ve learned from Christian’s preview) do we get to 6-8 encounters per day without saying “6-8 encounters per day”?

He says there are Encounter budgets and pacing suggestions. Given that WotC has not changed how they build Adventures in the past 12 months nor how PCs or Monsters are built, I have zero doubt what the result of following the budgeting and pacing suggestions bear out, i.e., basically the same, even if the phrase "Adventure Day" and "6-8 Encounters" isn't used specifically.

 

[Oofta]

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.

That hasn't been my experience. Then again, I've used an alternate encounter calculator for quite a while and have never used the multiplier for number of monsters. Maybe it's just because I will have at least 4 encounters between long rests most of the time, the groups I DM aren't lit up like Christmas Trees with magic items, I use point buy instead of generous die rolls, my players aren't hardcore min/maxers, I never use solos and so on. I still knock 1 or more PCs to zero on a pretty regular basis.

I find that 3-4 hard encounters can be quite challenging for the groups I've DMed for and I rarely do deadly encounters. So all I can say is that your personal experience isn't universal, even though you stated your opinion on a regular basis.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think you’re suggesting that, say, a Medium 2024 combat will be worth, for example, TWO 2014 combats?

Something like that would actually be a good idea.

 

[Oofta]

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?

I've been able to challenge PCs in every edition. It's not an issue with the rules.

 

[Vaalingrade]

But if completing that adventure is actually important, then you will risk that death! "Yeah, we were supposed to toss this stupid ring into a volcano, but it seems that it might be dangerous, so let's go home instead." And yeah, not every adventure needs to be of such importance that you'd risk death for it, but I think many should. Slogging for several sessions through risk free encounters for one mission is bad enough, but doing it for something the characters really do not even care about is even worse!

Again, people are capable of caring about things that aren't life and death.

Stakes can exist without being pushed to extremes.

God, this is my writer's group all over again.

"I'm writing a cozy romance between two people working at a coffee shop--WHAT CHAPTER SHOULD I KILL OFF THE MAIN'S BEST FRIEND IN FOR EFFECT?"