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.

 

[Maxperson]

Do you have a preview copy of the DMG that you can assert that with any certainty? We don't know exactly what they say. Even if they do, it's all like the Pirate's Code. More guidelines than actual rules. Every DM has to figure out what works for them which is really nothing new.

I'm going off the person in the OP who does have it and says that there is nothing about an adventuring day in the DMG. They could not possibly have rebalanced the game to get rid of it and maintained backwards compatibility, so it's gone from the book, but not the game. That leaves new DMs to twist in the wind unaware of how the game is balanced.

It's one thing to choose to ignore the guidelines and play an unbalanced game. It's another not to be informed of how the game is balanced and not have any idea of how to play a balanced version.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm going off the person in the OP who does have it and says that there is nothing about an adventuring day in the DMG. They could not possibly have rebalanced the game to get rid of it and maintained backwards compatibility, so it's gone from the book, but not the game. That leaves new DMs to twist in the wind unaware of how the game is balanced.

It's one thing to choose to ignore the guidelines and play an unbalanced game. It's another not to be informed of how the game is balanced and not have any idea of how to play a balanced version.

Random numbers, variable player skill, variable builds, variable magic items, situational abilities. There is no such thing as a “balanced” game, and if there was it would be boring as hell.

 

[Yaarel]

I'm going off the person in the OP who does have it and says that there is nothing about an adventuring day in the DMG. They could not possibly have rebalanced the game to get rid of it and maintained backwards compatibility, so it's gone from the book, but not the game. That leaves new DMs to twist in the wind unaware of how the game is balanced.

It's one thing to choose to ignore the guidelines and play an unbalanced game. It's another not to be informed of how the game is balanced and not have any idea of how to play a balanced version.

In the DMs Guide, perhaps mention of 7-combats-per-Long-Rest isnt in the Encounter Building section ... but is in the section describing the alternatives for Short and Long Rests?

 

[FallenRX]

I'm going off the person in the OP who does have it and says that there is nothing about an adventuring day in the DMG. They could not possibly have rebalanced the game to get rid of it and maintained backwards compatibility, so it's gone from the book, but not the game. That leaves new DMs to twist in the wind unaware of how the game is balanced.

It's one thing to choose to ignore the guidelines and play an unbalanced game. It's another not to be informed of how the game is balanced and not have any idea of how to play a balanced version.

I think the issue is the game was never rly balanced for that

The adventuring day was just a loose limit based on when the party ran out of health/HD.(they themselves have said this)

The actual balance of combat ingame assumes you are near your best, every encounter.

 

[FallenRX]

I'm going off the person in the OP who does have it and says that there is nothing about an adventuring day in the DMG. They could not possibly have rebalanced the game to get rid of it and maintained backwards compatibility, so it's gone from the book, but not the game. That leaves new DMs to twist in the wind unaware of how the game is balanced.

It's one thing to choose to ignore the guidelines and play an unbalanced game. It's another not to be informed of how the game is balanced and not have any idea of how to play a balanced version.

I think the issue is the game was never rly balanced for that

The adventuring day was just a loose limit based on when the party ran out of health/HD.(they themselves have said this)

The actual balance of combat ingame assumes you are near your best, every encounter.

 

[Oofta]

I'm going off the person in the OP who does have it and says that there is nothing about an adventuring day in the DMG. They could not possibly have rebalanced the game to get rid of it and maintained backwards compatibility, so it's gone from the book, but not the game. That leaves new DMs to twist in the wind unaware of how the game is balanced.

It's one thing to choose to ignore the guidelines and play an unbalanced game. It's another not to be informed of how the game is balanced and not have any idea of how to play a balanced version.

It may not be termed as encounters per day, it could be any number of things like target XP budget between long rests or just more general advice on doing what works for the group. Some people don't care if the casters can go nova every encounter.

I'm sure we'll have plenty to argue about when the book is released, I'm just not jumping to conclusions until I have the book in my grubby little paws.

 

[Maxperson]

Random numbers, variable player skill, variable builds, variable magic items, situational abilities. There is no such thing as a “balanced” game, and if there was it would be boring as hell.

This is a cop out. There are levels of balance/imbalance and making it worse by keeping information hidden is inexcusable.

 

[Maxperson]

I think the issue is the game was never rly balanced for that

The adventuring day was just a loose limit based on when the party ran out of health/HD.(they themselves have said this)

The actual balance of combat ingame assumes you are near your best, every encounter.

That's their line to us, yes, but it's very clearly false. The party can't be fresh for every encounter, so if they are building monsters to challenge fresh parries, than a party that isn't fresh would lose PCs or TPK when they are down resources and get into a fight.

 

[Maxperson]

It may not be termed as encounters per day, it could be any number of things like target XP budget between long rests or just more general advice on doing what works for the group. Some people don't care if the casters can go nova every encounter.

I'm sure we'll have plenty to argue about when the book is released, I'm just not jumping to conclusions until I have the book in my grubby little paws.

I suppose it's possible that it's in there by another name, but if it is, the video in the OP is just deliberately crying wolf for nothing.

I'd think that a person saying that it isn't in the DMG would be aware if it was still there by another name and would have made the claim that it was gone.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Because it needed to, but it didn't change enough to get rid of the adventuring day.

The adventuring day does not really matter. The party just goes until they need to rest. The book is supposed to talk about Encounter Pace, but it does not need actual numbers cause those will vary group to group.