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.

 

[MichaelSomething]

The point is that if you tell them, they can make an informed decision on whether to follow it or not. If you leave it out you're punking new DMs who will have no idea that the game is balanced around attrition over several encounters. They're going to stumble about trying to figure out what's wrong and some may end up leaving the game over the frustration.

Huzzah! For the strong to be free to play as they see fit, we must remove any and all restraints on the DM, including suggestions or information telling them how the game works. This may filter out the weak from our hobby, but this is also to be celebrated. For D&D to remain pure and strong, we must regularly eliminate weakness from our ranks!

 

[Charlaquin]

It pretty much is.

You tell a lot of people 'you need 6 to 8 encounters a day' and either they're going to try to do that--which a lot of people do not enjoy going through--or just ignore it.

They're restructured something (we don't have actual information as to how) about the pace, but we at least know it's not the 6-8 encounter expectation, which to some is cause for celebration.

It's like knowing Palpatine is dead, but not knowing who's in charge now.

This will be an especially fitting analogy when it turns out to actually be the same system, just with less clear explanation.

 

[GMMichael]

The point is that if you tell them, they can make an informed decision on whether to follow it or not.

WotC tried that in 5e. It sounds like few people agreed with what WotC told them.

If you leave it out you're punking new DMs who will have no idea that the game is balanced around attrition over several encounters. They're going to stumble about trying to figure out what's wrong and some may end up leaving the game over the frustration.

You make it sound like monsters won't have Challenge Ratings anymore.

Or that new DMs are going to say, "oh, man. I just can't challenge my PCs. But when I do, they all die. Oh well, I'll just keep running monster encounters purely by die rolls, stat blocks, tables, and Matt Mercer advice. Fie to Rule Zero!"

Oh, wait. That does sound like WotC's latest mantra...

 

[Lanefan]

What if my players have impaired my judgment and made me second guess my instincts by plying me with whiskey and subverting my expectations?

I'd say that means both they and you are doing it right.

 

[Li Shenron]

Honestly I never really followed the guideline. I don't endorse the idea that the DM should "plan the adventuring day" at all.

 

[Maxperson]

WotC tried that in 5e. It sounds like few people agreed with what WotC told them.

Nah. For the most part people didn't like that WotC balanced around the adventuring day at all. Removing the warning that it exists is just going to exacerbate the problem, not fix it. You can't pretend it doesn't exist and hope that no one notices that they are having troubles.

You make it sound like monsters won't have Challenge Ratings anymore.

You make it sound like CR actually means something.

It has been borked in every incarnation that WotC put out. 5e is also resource attrition balanced, so it's very hard to challenge a party with only one or two encounters without killing PCs or having a TPK.

 

[Maxperson]

Huzzah! For the strong to be free to play as they see fit, we must remove any and all restraints on the DM, including suggestions or information telling them how the game works. This may filter out the weak from our hobby, but this is also to be celebrated. For D&D to remain pure and strong, we must regularly eliminate weakness from our ranks!

 

[Distracted DM]

Honestly I never really followed the guideline. I don't endorse the idea that the DM should "plan the adventuring day" at all.

I don't plan the adventuring day, but knowing how the system was designed can help with challenging a party appropriately- even if you're running something off the cuff.

 

[Distracted DM]

i wonder how many less issues it would've caused if they'd just originally named it 'the adventuring week'

Yup! Whether it's a couple days or a week or whatever, just don't make going to sleep = long rest. When you separate sleep and resting, to whatever degree you desire (I use two uninterrupted days by default after originally trying a week), it solves the problem of challenging the party's resources. This also means that on a journey, the party isn't going to be getting long rests! Say it's a couple weeks journey: you can punctuate it with interesting events and encounters on different days and the party won't be able to alpha-strike every one of them just because they're sleeping in-between encounters.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Maybe people should wait to see what stuff actually says. The Encounter Building guidelines have changed.