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.
I've no idea what Rule Zero has to do with this, other than a specious "because you can rewrite the rules, the rules can't actually cause problems!" argument. But DMs have been saying exactly that about 5.0 for its entire decade-long run (really, decade-plus, since there were rumblings about this even during the playtest!) Being very charitable, I suppose I could read this as "new DMs are going to continue saying..." but that's a pretty weak argument, because the expectation of continuity with the past unless clearly overridden is hardly weird. That's what "backwards compatible' is usually understood to mean.
I was replying to a comment that basically said, "DMs can't play without WotC's help." And with all the new 6e rules, WotC is basically saying "look, we know you can't GM, so here are more rules to fill the gaps." Both parties seem to suggest that Rule Zero is worthless, hence, "fie to Rule Zero."
We gamers are the congresswoman's daughter. We were lured in by a seemingly innocent, needy ploy, and now we're trapped in the bottom of a well, surrounded by walls of rules. There is no escape. But every so often, WotC is going to lower some lotion down for us, providing a moment of fragrance and comfort. But that's not why the lotion is really coming down the well.
While that is very fast I've been pretty okay with the narrative conceit considering we are talking about a magical story world.
To bring up The Wandering Inn series again it has solidified my view that quick levelling is okay as long as the heroes are doing amazing things.
Most people in the world level very slowly but they also don't usually have encounters which both test their limits and have a large effect on the world.
In a world governed by magic this is completely believable for me.
Now, actually doing things every 3 in game days would be a blisteringly fast narrative that I probably wouldn't be interested in but to pull it back a little bit and say 6 months to go from level 1 to level 10? That would probably still feel very fast to me but also be okay if I felt the narrative weight of what they were doing justified it.
I guess it also depends on whether the PCs are the only adventurers or heroes in the setting or whether such people are a bit more common than that. If there's other adventurers out there, having an expected advance rate as fast as that would see a lot of 20th+-level people accumulating after a while, particularly among the longer-lived species*.
Whe compared to 1-20 in 2 months, 1-10 in 6 months (or 1-20 in a year, same thing) looks better; though - as you say - it's still fast.
A 2e model, or 1e with xp-for-gp stripped out, where advancement is fairly quick for the first three or four levels then slows dramatically as the levels get higher, helps here...though it's still not perfect. With travel time plus enforced downtime for training you can fairly easily spin out 1-10 into taking at least a few in-game years...and even that is still fast.
* - in 1e-2e the rather ham-fisted means of ensuring long-lived species couldn't get to stratospheric levels was demi-human level limits; I'd rather that they could in theory get there but that it would take them a bloody long time to do it.
I wouldn't say it's necessary. I know and play with plenty of DMs who are perfectly fine doing 1-2 hard encounters per long rest, and happily ignoring or accepting that inter-PC balance is thrown off.
The amount of players that are pretty much immune to balance concerns is not at all small.
Sure, you can engage in illusionism if you want. I have done that. I tend not to do that anymore, as it is more boring to me as GM. I too want to see what happens, not just fudge it!
But it's not illusionism if there is no deceit/misdirection.
If the encounters are just mathematically easy, so that the (low) risk of death is a property of the (moderately transparent, in typical D&D play) mathematics, than there's no illusionism.
Yeah. I think the alternative resting variants will still be in the DMG. The problem is that the DM isn't informed about why they may need to use them. It's the lack of information for new DMs to identify the issue that's the key here, not the inability to fix the issue.
Do we know that that's actually the case? I haven't heard if there still resting variants and if they give guidance for using such variants. We're only working with secondhand information.
No one is criticising Gygax’s design skills, but the concept of “balance” simply did not exist in the 70s and early 80s (unlike you, I was playing then), and Gygax was quite deliberately unfair.
And you can be unfair in 5e to. The encounter guidelines provided are designed around a heroic narrative, where heroes rarely die, because that is the style of game that is currently popular, but there is no reason you can’t double the encounter budget and set out to kill PCs like Gygax did.
Sure. But that's explicitly not what they were suggesting. It was you can say the death is possible even if it isn't.
And I totally get it. Players tend to like the excitement and the feeling of peril that the possibility of character death brings, but might not like the actual death that much. So leading them to believe their characters might die, but secretly fudging so that they actually don't, is an effective solution.
If the encounters are just mathematically easy, so that the (low) risk of death is a property of the (moderately transparent, in typical D&D play) mathematics, than there's no illusionism.
I was replying to a comment that basically said, "DMs can't play without WotC's help." And with all the new 6e rules, WotC is basically saying "look, we know you can't GM, so here are more rules to fill the gaps." Both parties seem to suggest that Rule Zero is worthless, hence, "fie to Rule Zero."
I do not believe Rule Zero is useless. Instead, I think it reflects poor design on the designers' part to depend upon Rule Zero in order to do the basic things that the game is, supposedly, designed to do.
Rule Zero should be there for the bizarro edge cases. As an example, two general rules that almost always work fine on their own, but a special exception to one of them causes something obviously, unavoidably borked under just the right conditions. Something granting infinitely many attacks, for example. That's a clear case where the DM not only can and should, but (IMO) must step in and say, "This clearly isn't supposed to be happening, so let's make it make sense, even if that means openly defying the rules."
The rules of the game are stronger than the rules of writing, but only somewhat so. The main disanalogy between the rules of writing (or really any art) and the rules of a game is that you can very much write while not obeying any of the rules of writing (though the result is likely to be not-very-good writing in most cases!). Conversely, I think most would agree that if you never made use of a single rule from (say) blackjack, then you couldn't validly call the game you're playing "blackjack". That's why game-rules are stronger, but only somewhat so: there is a sense that you need to follow at least a reasonable/sufficient portion of the rules a reasonable/sufficient portion of the time, or you aren't really playing that game anymore. ("But don't go callin' it 'doubles'!")
I mean, if you told your friends you were going to run a game of D&D for them, and then showed up with a deck of UNO cards, I don't think they'd take kindly to your insistence that "D&D" is whatever you feel like doing as "DM." Whereas with writing...like...as long as you're inscribing letters onto or into something, it's pretty inarguably writing, it just might not be very good.
Under those lights, your response feels uncharitable at best. Rules are tools. They exist to serve a function--by definition, they are teleological, made for some end. WotC furnishing additional tools to the player and/or DM is not saying, "We know you're idiots, so here's your idiot-proof box." Instead, it is admitting that some tools can be well-made and other tools can be poorly-made, and that they can improve upon the tools they published in 5.0.
We gamers are the congresswoman's daughter. We were lured in by a seemingly innocent, needy ploy, and now we're trapped in the bottom of a well, surrounded by walls of rules. There is no escape.
So...I hope you understand how disparaging this would seem to someone who sees rules as useful tools. Like...this is more than just being annoyed that rules might get in your way. This is straight-up presenting rules as inherently bad and wrong from the word go, and that any addition of rules is at best coercive and manipulative, and at worst outright evil.
Completely agreed. Illusionism requires that you be pretending that something is other than what it actually is. You cannot have illusionism if you play with your proverbial cards face up.
If the encounters are just mathematically easy, so that the (low) risk of death is a property of the (moderately transparent, in typical D&D play) mathematics, than there's no illusionism.
Well, there's no inherent illusionism. The rules aren't pretending to be something other than what they are. But the DM may still insert illusionism by pretending that it's something other than what it is.
No one is criticising Gygax’s design skills, but the concept of “balance” simply did not exist in the 70s and early 80s (unlike you, I was playing then),
Except that it absolutely did. Heavy armor was an XP penalty you could wear to increase survivability. That trade-off, right there, is a form of balance condsideration. When you operate within a paradigm of GP=XP, carry weight = XP penalty, and heavy armor has higher carry weight but better defense. Same with heavy weapons. They do more damage, but they also weigh more.
And you don't have to look much further to see the same ideas in action elsewhere. The Cleric class was specifically created to nix a player character who had become a vampire and was, thus, largely free of most of the weaknesses PCs face (not eating, sleeping, or AFAIK breathing, resistant or immune to many threats, etc.) That, too, is a form of seeking balance--creating counters for things that don't have them. The same issues cropped up in Gen 1 Pokemon, for example, which is why Gen 2 introduced two new types and split up the single "Special" stat into Sp. Atk. and Sp. Def., because Psychic was stupidly OP in Gen 1 (for a variety of reasons, both intentional and accidental)--and nobody argues that Pokemon wasn't trying to balance out the strength of the various types by doing that.
Other examples: If you recruit monstrous hirelings, they instantly lose their darkvision; if you play a monstrous being yourself, you must start off weak/young/depowered (e.g. a balrog stripped of its powers, a young dragon, an angel that must keep its identity secret, etc.); and differential XP tables, which pretty clearly favored advancement for some classes (Thief) over others (Magic-User) because the latter was a higher-powered option over time, and thus you had to "earn" your power.
"Balance" does not mean absolute diamond-perfect harmony where every single thing is precisely and perfectly countered or whatever. That is the pernicious strawman claimed by so many people who want to rag on balance as if it were a four-letter word. Balance does not even require that things be equal--often, it requires that they be unequal. Because the goal, in TTRPG, is not perfection of any kind, and certainly not perfect equality. The goal is a particular intended experience. And Gygax was very good at pursuing an amoral but not asocial, asymmetric, heist-focused, logistics-driven exploration-and-mercenary-company experience. (I say "amoral but not asocial" because the old alignments were Law and Chaos, not Good and Evil--social conformity or disconformity.)
By its nature as a heist, you are invaders breaking into a stronghold. You expect stiff resistance, and you generally do not want to face any threat that you don't have a planned escape route, a planned thorough counter-strategy, or preferably both. (In this sense, Shadowrun is actually much more similar to old-school design sensibilities than modern D&D is, because it preserves the heist basis.) In being amoral but not asocial, there were still frequently consequences for actions, and players tended to be rewarded for doing things that were useful to authority figures and punished for doing things that were annoying or detrimental to authority figures (until, of course, they became authority figures themselves). The asymmetry is all over, the monsters, the dungeons, the different classes; asymmetrical balance is of course much more complicated than perfectly symmetrical balance, but most games recognize that excessively symmetrical balance is usually not very interesting. (Even chess and go are not perfectly symmetrical, though they come very close.)
A focus on logistics arises naturally from the end-goal of the heisting, but it also rewards players who think in terms of a "campaign," by which I mean the actual military term--a campaign is you, in a sense, besieging a series of locations and eventually building up a fortification of your own. The exploration and mercenary-company aspect reflects that you are not soldiers of the crown, or at least you don't start that way, but rather soldiers of fortune, striving to find things to make yourself rich and let you pseudo-retire into comfortable minor landed nobility.
Point being: Gygax knew the experience he wanted to craft, he knew that there were game elements that would negatively affect his ability to achieve that experience, and he put quite a lot of effort into making that experience happen. That's functional game balance. It's not the ridiculous strawman many like to paint balance as. It's rules-as-tools to achieve a desired end.
"Fairness" has nothing whatsoever to do with "balance" unless fairness is part of the desired experience. Gygax's desired experience had nothing to do with fairness, and everything to do with fantastical treasure-vault heisting. During a heist, you are a clever underdog wresting vast wealth from those who keep it hidden in the vault. The vault will be extremely well-defended, that's what vaults are for, so you need to overcome that entrenched strength with guile and manipulation. "Fairness" would ruin that experience--just as "fairness" would ruin the experience of much of Shadowrun, as noted in the spoiler above.
In modern D&D, which is not particularly concerned with heistery except incidentally, the issue is not so much "fairness" as it is a satisfying overcoming of worthy odds. Worthy odds are not the same as "you have a low chance of success" odds. Instead, it's a matter of whether the goal is worth pursuing, whether the steps along the journey make sense, and whether a dramatically and thematically satisfying conclusion is reached. Total story termination is unsatisfying, and thus it is either unlikely or off the table entirely.
I guess it also depends on whether the PCs are the only adventurers or heroes in the setting or whether such people are a bit more common than that. If there's other adventurers out there, having an expected advance rate as fast as that would see a lot of 20th+-level people accumulating after a while, particularly among the longer-lived species*.
Whe compared to 1-20 in 2 months, 1-10 in 6 months (or 1-20 in a year, same thing) looks better; though - as you say - it's still fast.
A 2e model, or 1e with xp-for-gp stripped out, where advancement is fairly quick for the first three or four levels then slows dramatically as the levels get higher, helps here...though it's still not perfect. With travel time plus enforced downtime for training you can fairly easily spin out 1-10 into taking at least a few in-game years...and even that is still fast.
* - in 1e-2e the rather ham-fisted means of ensuring long-lived species couldn't get to stratospheric levels was demi-human level limits; I'd rather that they could in theory get there but that it would take them a bloody long time to do it.
I think the vast majority of parties going that fast will all be killed because of the dangers they are taking on.
The rules aren't meant to be simulationist. They are specifically for the PCs which makes it easier to make rules that are simple.
So in my world there are an unlimited amount of classes and subclasses NPCs could be, they just aren't confined to what is available. PCs are limited because it is more difficult to write game rules.
By that same token it isn't possible to keep gaining levels by killing giant rats. I envision needing ever greater challenges. The way the XP curve works as well, most adventurers if they find success are going to be stuck in the 5-10 range. Getting to 11+ will be very rare.
