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.

 

[Distracted DM]

Of course we won't know exactly and the entirety of what's in the book until it's released, but when previews and snippets and sections of the book are released ahead of the book, why do some folks expect people to NOT talk about it?

The whole reason companies release previews are so people will get talking about the product.
I get that we don't have the whole picture, but only having part of the puzzle doesn't mean that people aren't going to try to solve it with the pieces provided to them...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

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.

I think some players assume game designers use the same ten decimal place mathematical analysis as they do.

They don’t, it’s mostly guesswork.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So...there still IS an adventuring day. Because tons of things depend on it--most importantly spell slots.

They've just....chosen to stop SAYING anything about that?

This does not bode well. At all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think some players assume game designers use the same ten decimal place mathematical analysis as they do.

They don’t, it’s mostly guesswork.

Which is, frankly, shameful.

Not that they aren't using your hyperbolically ridiculous and stupid "ten decimal place math."

But to literally expect people to pay you $50, $60, $70 a book for mostly guesswork? Yes, I absolutely consider that shameful.

 

[Retros_x]

6-8 encounter were never the requirement and measurement. Encounter Balancing in DMG 2014 worked with an exp budget over a day. If you spent the full exp budget you end up with 6-8 medium encounters (and medium is actually easy IMO while easy is doable without resource spending) . Or less hard ones. Or just a wild mix.

This system was appereantly too hard to understand, so I get why they rework it. I hope though that there is still some attempt for a quantification of daily resource spent otherwise balancing games will become even harder for new DMs if now they only have wishy-washy instructions with "think about pacing". I am really curios about this section of the DMG, cant wait to read it.

 

[Retros_x]

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

They don't need to plan anything, they just need to know that DnDs game balance comes through resource atrition over a sequence of encounters and not single encapsulated encounters. Unfortunately DnD is very bad at communicating this and it seems to become worse in the new DMG.

A lot of common complaints over DnD balancing issues just stems from a misunderstanding that we should not talk about "balanced fights" but "balanced adventures".

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Which is, frankly, shameful.

Not that they aren't using your hyperbolically ridiculous and stupid "ten decimal place math."

But to literally expect people to pay you $50, $60, $70 a book for mostly guesswork? Yes, I absolutely consider that shameful.

It’s what Gygax did. D&D was never about precision balanced combat encounters. Trying to make it so was one of the things that made 4e so unpopular.

 

[Parmandur]

They don't need to plan anything, they just need to know that DnDs game balance comes through resource atrition over a sequence of encounters and not single encapsulated encounters. Unfortunately DnD is very bad at communicating this and it seems to become worse in the new DMG.

A lot of common complaints over DnD balancing issues just stems from a misunderstanding that we should not talk about "balanced fights" but "balanced adventures".

We don't know that it is worse, just that they cut the term "Advebture Day" and have advice about pacing. Their advice about pacing likely comes to the same end result.

 

[Parmandur]

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

It's not about "planning the day" but providing an adequate number of opportunities to drain player resources. Not draining their resources is fine, it just makes the game easier and throws balance a bit off.

 

[tetrasodium]

They don't need to plan anything, they just need to know that DnDs game balance comes through resource atrition over a sequence of encounters and not single encapsulated encounters. Unfortunately DnD is very bad at communicating this and it seems to become worse in the new DMG.

A lot of common complaints over DnD balancing issues just stems from a misunderstanding that we should not talk about "balanced fights" but "balanced adventures".

It's not just that d&d is "bad at communicating it", there are multiple design choices made with 5e to exacerbate it. Some of the biggest ones are

• By switching to flexible neovancian casting and doing away with the far more restrictive vancian prep it dramatically expands the gas tank available for ignoring the pinch of a short adventuring Day with higher cr monsters or careless players.
• There was never as much need to design around enforcing an adventuring day before 5e because without at will unlimited cantrips the players themselves hit a wall around 2-5ish encounters with casters running low or dry on their staple and daily driver spells.
• By having PCs with classes designed for two different rest cycles it makes it harder for the GM to clamp down on the 5mwd
  • Wotc even exacerbates this by setting the bar so low on what is needed to start/finish a rest and not bothering to provide rest/recovery rules that set a higher bar for GM's to use without taking player ire as the creator of such a house rule

Removing the mention alone and continuing to fail at providing the gm with tools does not remove the reasons that it is important to provide tools to the GM to manage it rather than tools to the players to thwart the GM's efforts.