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.

 

[TiQuinn]

Very, very welcome news.

 

[abirdcall]

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.

Yeah, in my experience of how people on forums describe their easy experience with the game there are a few factors that come up:

Resting whenever you want with no repercussions.
All monsters played like zombies.
Having difficulty figuring out how to run monsters because their stat block is confusing.
Players rolling until they get high scores and choosing magic items.

And a big one: party size of 6-8. Having 6 PCs is at least twice as powerful as having 4. Focus fire and being able to cover many situations makes bigger parties a lot more powerful.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

But if you're not using multiplier for the number of monsters and are always using several monsters, those "hard" encounters of yours are not actually RAW hard, they're way harder, way above deadly in most cases in fact! Which is exactly what I said one needs to do!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

I know. You seem to never have any of the issues with 5e others report. Good on you.

 

[Parmandur]

But if you're not using multiplier for the number of monsters and are always using several monsters, those "hard" encounters of yours are not actually RAW hard, they're way harder, way above deadly in most cases in fact! Which is exactly what I said one needs to do!

Right, the game isn't really designed for individual combats to be the pivot of challenge. It is attrition of resources.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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?"

How many swordfights does this coffee shop story have? I don't think romance novels and violent action adventures really are comparable in this way.

 

[CreamCloud0]

"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?"

i'd say chapter seven

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

Some of them might certainly have such stakes, though personally I’d be more inclined to have such stakes be for higher level adventurers. Regardless, it’s up to the players to make that decision.

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!

Obviously the PCs should be invested in the adventure. There are many ways to build such investment, and it’s rather a tangential point to the matter of encounter balance.

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

Those tend to be the most memorable, yeah. I find that ideally you want a dynamic engagement curve, with more exciting moments and more relaxed moments. If everything is exciting and memorable, nothing is.

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.

Possibly! I don’t know if that’s what WotC is going for though.

 

[Minigiant]

The 6-8 encounters thing was overblown

The core points were

1. You need to have 20-30 rounds of meaningful combat for at-will classes to catch up in damage and skill use with long rest classes.
2. You need to have 2-3 short rests for short rest classes to catch up in power with long rest classes.

That was how 2014 5e was designed. It didn't matter how many or how hard the encounters were. Just that you encouraged hitting those benchmarks.

2024 just might have lower numbers.

15-25 rounds of combat and 1-2 short rests.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I know. You seem to never have any of the issues with 5e others report. Good on you.

I mean in this instance they have no problem with the encounter difficulty, as they have actually houseruled the encounters to be about twice as hard than suggested!