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.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The second, which I oppose, is "things being made precisely equal or distributed perfectly identically." This is an almost exclusively pejorative view of balance, as almost nobody actually wants this, almost everyone agrees that it is bad TTRPG game design, and to the best of my knowledge no actual games work by such a standard on anything but a very small scale.

who has even said this? this feels like a gross misrepresenation of the position, i would more accurately present the second stance as "at the end of the day all build options contribute an aproximately equal value to the game, even, or perhaps especially when the implementation of their value differs"

in the heist game metaphor, you might have the safecracker, the hacker, muscle and the getaway driver, and they are all required and contributing components of the team for a successful heist, and there isn't this 'master criminal' class who can manage to replicate all of the safecracker's, the hacker's and the driver's jobs to the point of making them redundant, plus also doing more of their own set of skills.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

who has even said this? this feels like a gross misrepresenation of the position, i would more accurately present the second stance as "at the end of the day all build options contribute an aproximately equal value to the game, even, or perhaps especially when the implementation of their value differs"

Because that's what keeps coming up. Over and over and over and over, when you drill down on someone being opposed to "balance," they trot out comments like...

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.

and...

It’s what Gygax did. D&D was never about precision balanced combat encounters.

and...

Players like the experience of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. That’s why the game has so much randomness. They don’t want to feel that their victory was inevitable because the encounter was precision balanced.

and...

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.

Would you not say that these are a pretty clear insistence that "balance" means a "ten decimal place" "precision" thing? That "balance" is automatically and axiomatically "boring"? That "balance" means victory is guaranteed? (Of course, there's the irony that a game which was actually "balanced" in this sense would indeed be very un-fun...because the vast majority of parties would not survive six to eight truly "balanced" encounters where each side has an equal chance of winning--1.5% to .39%, to be specific.)

Edit:

In the heist game metaphor, you might have the safecracker, the hacker, muscle and the getaway driver, and they are all required and contributing components of the team for a successful heist, and there isn't this 'master criminal' class who can manage to replicate all of the safecracker's, the hacker's and the driver's jobs to the point of making them redundant, plus also doing more of their own set of skills.

But...that IS what I am articulating as the first position. Asymmetrical cooperative design: each person contributes something useful and relevant, but different. Of course, there are pitfalls for this design too (see: the "everyone sits around while the Decker is being awesome in the 'Trix because they have nothing to contribute outside it" problem, or the "Magicrun" problem, which is SR's equivalent of the caster/martial disparity problem).

What you have described is, in and of itself, designing to fit an experience. It is not the characterization, as above, that "balance" is always diamond-perfect mathematical precision where everything is calculated to "ten decimal places", where every outcome is known in advance, where every PC force is met by a precisely equal and opposite enemy force, etc., etc.

 

[abirdcall]

The bolded bit makes the last sentence moot, in that while you can choose what the adventuring day might look like the final choice is up to the players based on how - or how much - they want to engage with what you're trying to put in front of them.

The final sentence doesn't say "As a DM I make all of the choices of what the adventuring day looks like."

It says the DM makes choices.

The DM creates the structure. They decide what the outcome of different possibilities will be. The DM could actually take away all agency of the players to make any choices in the adventuring day though I don't think that would be good for them to do.

But then within the framework the DM has set up the players make choices, some of which might be to end the day early.

Both making choices doesn't mean the DM doesn't make choices.

 

[Maxperson]

Let me put it this way: I've played a lot of modded games in my life. Mods can be absolutely great. But they also bend the experience. Bend it too far, and it's...not the game anymore. And something which makes one specific class horrendously, ludicrously overpowered is pretty much exactly that. No class, caster or not, should be that powerful for the kind of game D&D purports to be.

Well, I did say that the rogue damage thing was exaggerated.

Even so, let's go with it for a minute. Imagine a game where the entire group wants to play rogues for the campaign. Perhaps they want to start a guild or something. Enhancing the damage doesn't create any sort of PC disparity and could be very fun for the players. The DM doesn't mind because he can always include more creatures to create a challenge, or perhaps combat doesn't play a large part in the campaign. It could still be lots of fun under certain circumstances.

As for bending the game experience to the point where it's no longer "the game"(which I assume means D&D), that line is going to be different for every person and group. For some if you don't play RAW or very nearly RAW, it's not D&D. For others you can take the rules and stretch them, wrap them together again, stretch them some more, and create a weird taffy concoction which is still D&D to them.

D&D purports to be a general sort of game that isn't great at any one style, but is decent to good at all of them, AND is eminently customizable. That last part makes it D&D for the group no matter how much is changed, so long as they are happy with the changes.

What you have experienced may bend the game to the point where it no longer feels like D&D to you, but that doesn't make that particular bending point a general break in what D&D is. It's a personal thing, which is absolutely fine. We all have our lines in the sand about various aspects of D&D from races to classes to house rules to realism, and beyond.

The key is finding a like/similar minded group to play with.

I'm not speaking of the DM only doing it to their own stuff. I'm speaking of the game that prompted me to actually become a proper GM myself. Specifically, a friend of mine, call them Adam, went through a very very bad breakup about seven or eight years ago now. As part of working through his emotions regarding that breakup, he decided to get in on this whole "D&D" thing everyone was talking about (given we're all MMO players, we're all already D&D-adjacent anyway.) Adam's first DM was brand-new to the game. I don't know the specifics, but one of the players had the DM wrapped around their little finger, basically the DM giving that player and only that player anything they wanted and more.

So...in Adam's very first actual TTRPG game...there was a player who was playing a custom demigod race that gave a ninth-level spell as a racial feature. And that was only the MOST egregious thing. I vividly remember Adam discussing it with me and being, frankly, emotionally shredded by it. He didn't have the heart to complain because (a) first-time player, (b) first-time DM, (c) he genuinely wasn't sure if TTRPGs were worth this sort of experience. After only like two sessions, he was VERY much on the "bad gaming is worse than no gaming so maybe TTRPGs just aren't for me" point.

Ugh. Games like that are awful. That reminds of during 4e. I had read the rules and had discussion here from the playtest well past the release of the game, and I was told time and time again that the game plays very differently from how the rules read, and was very fun.

Along comes one of the local Los Angeles game conventions and one of my players and I were hanging out trying to decide whether to just do some open gaming or get into one of the scheduled convention games. I suggested we try out a 4e game to see if it really did play better than the rules read. We got to the game and the DM had about a dozen players(first bad sign at a con game) show up. He handed out a bunch of 30th level PCs, as well as some special characters. I got handed an ancient gold dragon. As you can imagine, the game became more and more absurd as time went on.

About an hour or so in, he took a short break. During that break my friend and I quietly packed up our dice and extended that break to forever. If that had been my first experience, I probably would have tried again to see if it was a fluke, but I can see where someone else might just have walked away from D&D.

That was what finally kicked me in the butt to actually GM. I was, for a very long time, afraid of doing it wrong. Of having precious DMPCs and eyeroll-inducing storylines and cheap, trite drama etc., etc. Impostor syndrome at its finest. But I took one look at that and knew, beyond any doubt, that I could not possibly be THAT bad as a DM--and that I could do better for Adam than what he'd endured. So I did. Turns out I'm a pretty good DM (at least my players think so; I'm always doubtful.) And Adam paid me one of the finest compliments I've ever received when, for IRL reasons, he needed to pull out of all of his TTRPG games. He said that my game was the only one that it actually felt difficult to leave. That meant a lot to me.

I feel you here as well. I've been DMing for as long as I've been playing, 41 years and climbing. I know that I'm a good DM as I've been told so for decades, but I still feel that anxiety and doubt during a campaign. A lot of that stems from the pressure of wanting to provide a fun experience I think.

So....yeah. The thing you described is pretty much identical to the unequivocal rank abuse of Rule Zero that I have personally known. I'm really not in favor of anything like that. Doesn't mean I don't think people should work together to make the rules sing for them. I just think there need to be some reasonable limits. As @Micah Sweet said, Rule Zero is best deployed to fix the places that don't quite work, or that do something bizarre or inappropriate. Homebrew is totally fine, but homebrew is quite distinct from Rule Zero and merits a clearly different approach and understanding vis a vis Rule Zero.

Here's where I'm going to depart from agreeing with you. I've been using Rule 0 to house rule the game since I started DMing. Have the changes always been good? Hell no. Some of them have been downright bad, but when that becomes apparent, I change it to get rid of the bad. A lot of them have been neutral. They change the game, but it only makes the game different, not better or worse. Those I ditch at the end of the campaign. If different doesn't equate to more enjoyable, there's no point in it being there. A lot of them, though, have improved the game and made it more enjoyable, and those times alone make all the rest worth it.

If I had feared the bad or neutral changes and stopped tinkering, I would be playing a less enjoyable version of the game than I play now. And so would my players. Making improvements upon the game is worth the speedbumps that you encounter along the way.

 

[mamba]

Exactly. All a DM needs is their judgement and instincts.

maybe, but WotC sure would like to sell that book, so they will need to offer something better than what you are offering

 

[mamba]

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.

if there is a mathematical formula / analysis then game designers should bloody well use that instead of guessing

Guesswork / experience is for when there is no applicable formula, no more

 

[mamba]

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.

Gygax did not know any better, and I do not think that being able to have balanced encounters is what killed 4e, at most it is how they accomplished that rather than the fact that balance was achievable

 

[mamba]

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.

that assumes you can rest whenever and wherever you want, which I do not subscribe to

 

[mamba]

the vast majority of parties would not survive six to eight truly "balanced" encounters where each side has an equal chance of winning--1.5% to .39%, to be specific.)

balance does not mean either side has a 50% chance of winning, it means that when the DM designs an encounter they can pretty accurately predict how much resource attrition the party suffers to overcome it

 

[Lanefan]

You're using two different senses of the word "balanced"--and only one of them is one I consider valid or appropriate.

The second, which I oppose, is "things being made precisely equal or distributed perfectly identically." This is an almost exclusively pejorative view of balance, as almost nobody actually wants this, almost everyone agrees that it is bad TTRPG game design, and to the best of my knowledge no actual games work by such a standard on anything but a very small scale.

"Precisely equal" will never happen. Within view-through-binoculars distance of equal, however, is worth shooting for; be it in the here-and-now moment or looked at over a longer term.

The first, which I embrace and have explicitly said so many times, is "things being set in such a way so as to achieve a desired result."

Which is at cross purposes with balance if the "desired result" is itself imbalanced.

I mean, I can't read Gygax's mind but if it was his intent that Thief be a weaker class overall than the other core classes then he achieved it well.

For Gygax, as I noted in my spoiler block, one of the key considerations was heist-focused play. The principle of a heist is that you are a comparatively weak invader, trying to sneak in and abscond with that which doesn't belong to you. It's pointedly not war, because in war, you'd be marshalling forces approximately comparable to those you fight against. Instead, it's spec ops! You are a small, crack team of experts trying to leverage that expertise just right so you can get in, get the goods, and get out in one piece.

In order to achieve that end, it is absolutely essential that the forces you oppose be overwhelmingly powerful...IF you play by their rules. Because that's how any bank-vault heist works. That's how any Great Train Robbery works. That's how any Mission: Impossible story works. We pay attention because it is awesome to watch a weak-but-clever figure overcome a far stronger opponent.

From this perspective, the thing you call "intentionally...unbalanced" is not unbalanced. You are absolutely correct that it is not a perfect 1:1 matchup (indeed, it's pretty much the antithesis of a 1:1 matchup!), but equality of forces is not what "balance" means in game design.

With this last bit, I agree; though I also think Gygax-era D&D (particularly 1e and later) was designed with the intent of doing considerably more than supporting heist scenarios and from experience can say it was quite playable in ways other than heist-stealth.

What it is, is intentional design to evoke a particular mental and emotional experience: the fear of being discovered, the certainty that you cannot play by the defender's rules, the thrill of finding a clever way to defeat overwhelming opposition. And all of those things can be pretty cool! But they do, in fact, require that you be going up against opposition that you cannot defeat on its own terms. Hence, balance within that context requires that the odds be, in a sense, "only just surmountable," rather than "totally insurmountable."

That's just one of many forms of balance, however: PCs balanced vs opposition.

More important to players, I think, are various types of PC vs PC balance be they perceived or real. And some of us (and the designers) put far more emphasis on some of those balance types than others. For example, having the starting stats of different PCs be balanced against each other via a point-buy or fixed-array system is of low-to-no importance to me* but it's of great importance to others and, it would seem, to the designers.

Another type of player-side balance is the ability to meaningfully contribute in different situations, however each player might define "meaningfully". Some want every character to be able to (mechanically) contribute equally to every situation, others (like me) want different characters to mechanically shine in different situations and have it be on the players of those who don't shine at the moment to either find ways for their PCs to contribute or to stand down and let the shining PC have its moment.

* - in part because my own numbers show me that starting stats play at most a minimal role (quite possibly within statistical error) in projecting a character's career length.

Other experiences require other approaches. This is why an effective, well-designed game does not provide loosey-goosey "ehh, eyeball it" rules that barely rise to the level of suggestions, let alone guidelines. Instead, it provides clear, concrete advice on the ways its tools may be turned to various ends, what you can do when testing its limits, and what effect there will be from twisting stuff in a direction well outside designed parameters.

A well-designed D&D-like game, that recognizes the historical importance of the heist-centric model with the understanding that that model is not what most people actually want out of a D&D-like game, does not tell you to make wildly unbalanced combats, as in, combats where you have absolutely no idea whether they'll achieve the desired experience or not. Instead, it tells you "this is the experience this tool was designed for; these are the factors that went into that choice; these are the common places that that can break down, and ways you can address them; these are additional tools you can deploy when seeking adjacent but distinct gameplay experiences."

5.0, instead of doing any of that, defaults to, "You could do X. Or you could not do X! It's up to you to decide." Other than the CR-generation rules (which, based on reports I get from others, are not particularly useful), the few places where they actually deign to give any advice at all, it's worthlessly vague, e.g. the thing saying how to give XP for non-combat encounters quite literally says to pretend that it IS a combat encounter and then award XP commensurate to that combat, without even the slightest hint of, y'know, HOW to translate a non-combat encounter into the rules of a combat one! It's ludicrously bad. If you're already a skilled DM, you already know how to do this stuff far, far better than such a lame and worthless suggestion; and if you aren't a skilled DM, that advice tells you nothing whatsoever.

Gygax presenting "only just surmountable" threats IS balanced, in the context of a dangerous heist. Because you expect a dangerous heist to be extremely risky, and prone to failure if any of the steps of the plan go wrong. You expect that if you get caught by the guards, things can go south extremely quickly. You expect that there is little to no reward for doing anything except getting out with the goods in tow. Etc. The encounters are, in fact, balanced, not because they put two forces in precise equilibrium (a ridiculous and strawmanning mischaracterization of balance), but because they correctly make the heist opposition too dangerous for a frontal assault so that the players must find another way.

For my part, I'd rather the game's design be loose enough to not shove everyone toward a particular playstyle and thus fight against using it for other styles. 0e-1e pushed a survivalist playstyle, 2e pushed a storytelling (or story-writing) playstyle, 3e pushed a number-crunching optimizing playstyle, 4e pushed a grid-and-minis playstyle, and 5e...well, other than being too nice to its players overall and thus fighting hard against survivalist play, 5e doesn't really push toward any of those; which in my view is a feature rather than a bug. You can use it for the 2e or 3e or 4e style, or a combination of those, and it works well enough to be good enough for what most people seem to need.