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.

 

[Zardnaar]

Careful now, I never said WotC promised it, I just said they discussed deigning it. Some of the topics were tactical combat, alignment, etc.. Not using feats or simple subclasses are the bare minimum. Im not denying they are modular, just that they are not to the level some folks hoped to see.

Yup pretty much. 2E was the only one that even attempted that. Great if you're creative, have the time and players are on board.

 

[Zardnaar]

I dont "expect" WotC to create new modules. Their business goal is to make the most people as happy as possible.

The result is actually fantastic for a game engine. 5e tends to be blandly "vanilla" and remarkably mechanically robust.

It is a perfect engine to modify via a modular setting. The setting can add specific mechanics, while the robustness of 5e can normally handle the mechanical wear-and-tear.

I expect indy publishers (including homebrewing DMs in Enworld and DMs Guild) to supply the modular settings.

What 2024 does is provide all the core mechanics in one book, the Players Handbook, in a way that friendly to DMs who want to tweak it or even a setting that dramatically overhauls it.

5E engine could power an OSR, 3E or 4E game.

Just depends on how much work you want to.

 

[Minigiant]

Sure, as long as they have attrition similar to a combat encounter. A social encounter that costs no resources isn't part of that equation regardless of how fun it is or how much it advances the story.

I think in 2014, the designers, besides being rushed, were corting veteran DM who mostly had "I know what I'm doing.Just give me the conversation formula. I'll do the rest. DON"T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" mentality.

But 5e was surprisingly successful with new players and they never told them that D&D 5e is based on "grinding out a lot of your PCs resources.". Anything that doesn't consume resources is not a challenge.

 

[Yaarel]

5E engine could power an OSR, 3E or 4E game.

Just depends on how much work you want to.

Yeah. 5e versions of 0e, 1e-2e, 3e, and 4e wont be identical to the earlier versions. But I wouldnt want them to be either.

There are many things that 5e does better, to be candid. For example, I love 4e, and it is probably more flexible narratively, but 5e is more flexible mechanically. Perhaps 3e is the most flexible mechanically, but its mechanical balance is awful. 5e is hardy and hearty.

Having a 5e setting that borrows freely from the most desirable aspects of an earlier version, is the best way to do grognard anyway.

 

[tetrasodium]

5e was never balanced around the adventuring day, anyway. I do like having an expectation of how many encounters the party has resources for so I can pace dungeons, but so many folks got hung up on that 6-8 encounter line that they figured it was essential for balance when it was really just a threshold statement.

There is also the very real problem where there are various ways to condense the adventuring day down but all of them create new problems with some class getting big gains in effectiveness and others big losses. Wotc never provided guidance or tools to mitigate those problems. That absence creates an especially tight pinch when so many of the rules seem designed to make the gm look adversarial and hostile if they say no or try to create the solutions wotc failed to provide by house ruling offending mechanics

 

[Oofta]

I didn't say that. I said you make encounters about twice as hard as suggested, which not using the multiplier for several foes, yet using several foes does. Difficulty multiplier for several foes ranges from x1.5 (two enemies) to x4 (more than 14.)

For example seven (CR 1/2) orcs is 700 XP encounter by your math, a hard encounter (600 XP) for four level two characters, but according to actual rules, it is 1750 XP encounter, which is over twice the deadly encounter (800 XP) for such a party! By actual rules three orcs would be a hard encounter for such a party.

So yes, I am not surprised if characters feel somewhat challenged by your encounters!

This is an example of the calculation. "Encounter" is from the PHB, PEL is the one I use. They both show "hard".

I could show a couple more where mediums also tend to line up. Even the deadly encounter is less than 20% over the deadly threshold of 5,000.

So please stop telling me I don't know how to read my own spreadsheet.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So please stop telling me I don't know how to read my own spreadsheet.

I don't know what this "PEL" is, or how it is calculated. I was merely going by what you said:

Then again, I've used an alternate encounter calculator for quite a while and have never used the multiplier for number of monsters.

Which cannot actually be how this calculator works, if the difficulties line up!

 

[Selas]

Since we're still talking about the xp per encounter: the article mentions that the new table is split between Low, Moderate and Hard in 2024. According to Nerd Immersion, the Easy column was completely removed from 2024, and the new column tags replace the 2014 medium to deadly columns. Like I said in my previous post, up to level 9 the xp is similar to 2014 across the table, but above 9 it increases until it nearly doubles the xp required at level 20 for Hard/Deadly.

 

[Minigiant]

Since we're still talking about the xp per encounter: the article mentions that the new table is split between Low, Moderate and Hard in 2024. According to Nerd Immersion, the Easy column was completely removed from 2024, and the new column tags replace the 2014 medium to deadly columns. Like I said in my previous post, up to level 9 the xp is similar to 2014 across the table, but above 9 it increases until it nearly doubles the xp required at level 20 for Hard/Deadly.

I find it appropriate that the list diverges at level 9.

It's usually at level 9 when cheesy optimization can be leveraged reliably.

1. Full caster get 5th level spells
2. Full casters no longer rely on 1st level spell slots for damage
3. Half casters get 3rd level spells
4. Most Single class PCs have received their 2nd sublclass feature by now.
5. Single level dip multclass PC have 2 general feats.
6. 3 level dip multiclass PC have 1 general feat, a 2nd subclass, and maybe Extra attack
7. Cantrips are buffed last level

 

[Oofta]

I don't know what this "PEL" is, or how it is calculated. I was merely going by what you said:



Which cannot actually be how this calculator works, if the difficulties line up!

My only point was that I mostly throw hard encounters (even based DMG calculations) and occasionally ones that are slightly harder than that - although I double checked XGtE a couple of times and they were still ranked "hard". I have never thrown an encounter that was double deadly that I expected the PCs to take out all the enemies, those are reserved for having some other clear goal. I do not and have never needed to throw double or triple deadly combats where defeating the enemy was the goal. No matter how much you try to "prove" that I do.

I'm done with this argument.