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]

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.

And none of the swordfights need to actually hold any real threat to the main characters' life because death ends their story.

Death isn't necessary stakes even in stories with combat. Would Karate Kid have been a better movie if the Kobra Kai kid kicked in Daniel-san's sternum, then stomped his head to make sure like double-tapping DM's advocate?

No. It's not that kind of story.

And that's what DMs--and anyone trying to entertain people--need to learn: identifying what kind of story they're trying to tell and what actually works with that kind of story.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

Sure, not every fight needs to be super dangerous. Then again, combat is dangerous business, so it rarely should feel super safe either, unless you're intentionally engaging with something you seriously outclass. But I find that when I shoot for, "kinda big challenge but hopefully not a TPK," I end up underestimating the characters about half the time anyway and it ends up being a pushover. And I think the game could help me to be a bit more reliable and intentional with this. I am basically operating off the charts most of the time, as most encounters I use are above deadly.

 

[Oofta]

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!

They still aren't double or triple deadly. The spreadsheet I use shows me both calculations. Some are deadly, some are not. The tool I use is close to XGtE.

 

[Oofta]

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

So rather than complain about it, perhaps we should discuss what's different.

 

[Oofta]

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!

No.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

So many spellcaster it usually meant one of them casts sonething cool every encounter. Assuming you paced it.

No one actually did that of course but you could.

We did early on when we were doing it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And none of the swordfights need to actually hold any real threat to the main characters' life because death ends their story.

Sometimes you find out you were Boromir!

Death isn't necessary stakes even in stories with combat. Would Karate Kid have been a better movie if the Kobra Kai kid kicked in Daniel-san's sternum, then stomped his head to make sure like double-tapping DM's advocate?

No. It's not that kind of story.

It indeed isn't. It is about non-lethal martial arts. D&D isn't. It is about characters constantly engaging in combats with lethal magic and weapons, and killing crapton of things. It somehow feels a bit grotesque if they're doing this just for sport, without their life being on the line also!

And that's what DMs--and anyone trying to entertain people--need to learn: identifying what kind of story they're trying to tell and what actually works with that kind of story.

Absolutely! And I think D&D's genre of violent action adventure sort of implies that we're dealing with dangerous business here! But of course one doesn't need to play it that way if one doesn't find that appealing, and there are others, potentially more interesting defeat conditions. But I'd argue that for most people for things to remain interesting, there needs to be some defeat conditions.

And BTW, I am not a killed DM at all, I don't particularly like character death, and none of the characters over the 41 sessions of my current campaign have died. But it is still possible that they could.

 

[dave2008]

So um... How have they changed to offset the removal? Wotc has long waffled between expressly admitting that things were designed with the expectation and that the game was not designed to expect it. We have the new PHB (complete with some near identical monsters) where there's no drastic overhaul on that end of the things assumed & mapped to the 6-8, simply removing the words without restructuring the monster design leaves the big question of how the encounter building itself was restructured on a mechanical level.

Well if they have changed to only 3 levels of difficult, then it is likely the XP budgets have changed. That is really all you need. I can make a combat hard or easy primarily* by adjusting the XP budget I use.

*It also helps to think about what your group is capable of and what you need to do to threaten the specifics of their abilities.

 

[Zardnaar]

All hail thr return of the five minute adventuring day!

It never really left.

PCs generally rest once they're done. 5MW is abusing that but it's kinda rare IRL outside low level.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

They still aren't double or triple deadly. The spreadsheet I use shows me both calculations. Some are deadly, some are not. The tool I use is close to XGtE.

Right. But still way harder than what suggested, mostly above deadly. Which is what I said is needed. You're doing the same thing than I am.

No.

You literally have. You explained yourself how you've done it. Not using the multiplier but still constantly using multiple monsters does this.