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.

 

[Selas]

Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but according to Ginny D’s new video, the new Low, Moderate, and Hard encounter XP budgets are not just 2014’s Easy, Medium, and Hard. At levels 1-5 they track more closely to Medium, Hard, and Deadly, and after that they scale up significantly faster, so that by mid to late game a Hard encounter is multiple times the XP of a 2014 Deadly encounter of the same level. So, good news for folks like @Crimson Longinus who were hoping for guidelines for harder encounters.

I did posted about this since Nerd Immersion covered it, and the new budgets replace medium, hard and deadly; easy was cut out. The big divide in XP starts after level 9... basically T3 & T4 have the biggest increase in xp budget

 

[Oofta]

Look, mate. Sorry for miscommunication then, but I just literally took what you said about your calculations at face value.

And I've not been advocating for triple deadlies. Double might be fine, depending on the composition. Though I once accidentally had about a triple deadly encounter (as I in no way expected the players to fight those opponents) and despite the odds they somehow won, and even rushed into another battle without resting after that. (Though they used some healing spells and potions in between.) At that point I understood that the CR is pretty meaningless.

My calculations work decent for me but I have to keep the group and type of monster in mind. The main group I run for has been playing together for a few years now so I have a good idea what they can handle, and I try to be reasonably consistent on the number and difficulty of encounters. For a while I was DMing for 3 groups and I would basically adjust my spreadsheet to consider one group a level above what they actually were, another was reasonably close and the third I just only ever threw medium or barely hard encounters.

Encounter building has always been more of a swag than anything. It will be interesting to see how well things work, or not, when we get the new MM.

Oh, and I picked this week to cut back oN caffeine so that doesn't help.

 

[Mistwell]

From Ginny Di:

Where the 2014 guide had paragraphs describing the calculations you should be doing, the new DMG has cut all of that math in favor of general practical advice.

There are example encounters demonstrating how the XP budget works and some quick tips about things like adjusting encounters on the fly or how to use CR 0 creatures.

There are also some great little hacks to allow you to quickly judge how a monster's CR stacks up against the party.

For example, if you want a low difficulty encounter, you can just grab a single monster whose CR matches the party's level, and if a monster's CR is higher than the party's level, you should assume that it's capable of one-shotting a character.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I use Xanathar's encounter building guidelines almost exclusively, and this sounds like a bit of a step down from that (XP budget uuuuugh).

 

[Zardnaar]

From Ginny Di:

Watched her video.

DMG sounds good so far.

 

[Rabulias]

Of course, those things only count for these purposes if they use up limited resources.

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.

Yes. The big factor is these types of encounters are not always as directly dangerous as combat encounters, and often drain resources other than HP (they are still on the table, though!). They can drain limited feature/spell/ability uses just as much as any combat can.

Even if the encounters are dangerous (or the PCs make them so...), these can offer the PCs opportunities to take some measures to moderate the threats somewhat, managing the risk. They are not as swingy as combat.

In some scenarios, the time that a social encounter takes up could be a limited resource for the PCs.

 

[Charlaquin]

I did posted about this since Nerd Immersion covered it, and the new budgets replace medium, hard and deadly; easy was cut out. The big divide in XP starts after level 9... basically T3 & T4 have the biggest increase in xp budget

Ah, sounds like I misremembered the specifics. Still, sounds like good news for folks who felt the 2014 guidelines were too easy!

 

[SteveC]

Sigh. I hope this is a misunderstanding from an article rather than what's actually there. I say that because, especially at low levels, the number of combat encounters you run between allowing the party to refresh its resources is vitally important to running a game that you intend to pace out in a session.

I get that there are DMs who will just roll encounters at the group without thinking about balance or planning. I think those are the ones who regularly run 8+ encounters between long rests. I'm using "between long rests," but to my mind, that's what an Adventuring Day is short for.

The moment you intend to pace out what happens during a session, hopefully building it to a climactic moment, and then have a reduction in tension, you're thinking about the Adventuring Day. If those cultists are going to complete their sacrifice in X amount of time, you have a built-in clock going that can reduce or eliminate Short Rests. As the DM, if you have classes based around Short Rests, you need to be aware of that.

And when I say that, I guess you don't really need to be aware of it. You just will have to deal with the party potentially not being able to handle the challenges you hit them with, or not caring about them because they are at full resources. To me, that management is one of the key skills a DM needs to develop.

Ultimately, I would say that how the DM manages the period between Rests largely determines how fun the game is going to be. If you're expecting 8+ encounters during that time, the game plays very differently. If I'm playing a caster, at low levels, I don't cast anything but cantrips for most of the day. At higher levels, it means I work on long lasting concentration spells and use cantrips most of the time. This is, and this is only true for me, not going to be a fun game in the long run. If I have this experience over an extended period, I don't think that campaign is going to be for me. While I say that's just for me, I don't think I'm alone here.

That's why I say the adventuring day is a core part of DMing: for me it's one of the key elements that make a game fun for me. Honestly, all of the good DMs and GMs I've played with have figured this out. I hope there will be a real discussion of it in the new DMG.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, you need 6-8 medium encounters. And none of the individual encounters will be particularly challenging; the challenge will be in managing your resources well enough to make it through all 6-8 of them without having to retreat and take a long rest. That’s the point, it’s shifting the core challenge from
“survive all the encounters” to “manage your resources well enough to get through the whole day.” Survival is basically not in question after around 3rd or 4th level when you’re no longer at risk of dying to a random critical hit. The question is, will you be able to get done everything you need to get done before your resources run too low to continue safely. This is also one of the reasons time pressure is important.

Thing is, putting every adventure on a time clock gets old real fast.

Further, in order to mean very much attrition has to be over a longer timespan than a single day; as in, not all resources (most notably, hit points) come back from just one long rest.

Obviously, all of this assumes a particular style of gameplay. If you’re not interested in that attrition-based macro challenge, you can try to design your encounters differently. The system just won’t be doing you any favors. And it’s a shame the DMG isn’t explicit about this, because it’s kind of important to understand that if you’re not looking for this attrition macro challenge type of gameplay, you’ll be fighting against the game’s systems instead of working with them.

My concern is that 5e has never taken the attrition model anywhere near far enough. Compare, for example, with 1e; where - if you didn't have a healer or lots of potions - hit point recovery was close to nonexistent in the field.

Indeed, and at that point, individual encounters will be challenging on their own. The core gameplay challenge will no longer be a macro challenge of managing your resources effectively across many micro challenges or being forced to retreat. It will instead be a gauntlet of individual challenges you must survive each of or die.

I don't mind that; and sometimes a series of such challenges will come during the same "day" whether they like it or not, which will - one hopes - teach them to not necessarily nova in the first fight of each day.

 

[Lanefan]

One thing I often see come up in these conversations is the assumption that the adventuring day is per game session not per long rest.

I find this assumption utterly bizarre, truth be told.

The at-table session length has nothing at all to do with the in-game day length. During one session 12 days might pass while they travel to the adventure site, while the 13th day where they get into the meat of the adventure might take four sessions to play through.