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.

 

[Vaalingrade]

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

And that fact that in an effort to undermine the game, people started declaring that balance and fun were 'tyranny'.

 

[pemerton]

And that fact that in an effort to undermine the game, people started declaring that balance and fun were 'tyranny'.

The tyranny of fun is one of the sillier notions I've encountered in discussions about RPGing. Heaven forbid that we have a good time when we sit down for some hobby gaming!

 

[pemerton]

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.

I prefer that a game be designed towards an experience; if I want the experience I'll play that game, and if I want a different experience I'll play a different game.

5e is designed towards a pretty heavily GM-curated experience: it relies on the GM to open scenes, to close them and (particularly for non-combat scenes) to decide what in the fiction results from them.

This feature is reinforced by its general reliance on the GM to manage the pacing of rests and encounters, and thus the way in which mechanical class (im)balance expresses itself.

 

[Zardnaar]

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...

and...

and...

and...


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:

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.

Balance is subjective as is the desire for it.

Even how they do it. 4E threw the baby out with the water and with 70 pages of errata failed at the balance part as well.

It's way more important in PvP games.

 

[Maxperson]

The tyranny of fun is one of the sillier notions I've encountered in discussions about RPGing. Heaven forbid that we have a good time when we sit down for some hobby gaming!

Yep. If the group is having fun, whatever you are doing is the right way to do it.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

The tyranny of fun is one of the sillier notions I've encountered in discussions about RPGing. Heaven forbid that we have a good time when we sit down for some hobby gaming!

I think the 'tyranny of fun' phrase means the DM is having to sacrifice his/her own enjoyment or plans for the game in order to satisfy the players. So the players might be having fun but the DM isn't. It can definitely happen if you have a DM that wants to keep things logical and consistent regarding the campaign world but the players are casuals who don't care about anything making sense.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think the 'tyranny of fun' phrase means the DM is having to sacrifice his/her own enjoyment or plans for the game in order to satisfy the players. So the players might be having fun but the DM isn't. It can definitely happen if you have a DM that's serious about keeping things logical and consistent regarding the campaign world but the players are casuals who don't care about anything making sense.

Recent issue here. 2 players were having fun. Over 2 and DM were not.

2 players now have no game 6 other people are having buckets of fun.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I think the 'tyranny of fun' phrase means the DM is having to sacrifice his/her own enjoyment or plans for the game in order to satisfy the players.

In context, had nothing to do with the DM and everything to do with design philosophy.

Though I'd argue that as an entertainer, the DM ideally would get enjoyment from the players enjoying themselves over telling their (the DM's) story or making the players do this beat they want to see happen or behave this way.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

...as an entertainer, the DM ideally would get enjoyment from the players enjoying themselves over telling their (the DM's) story or making the players do this beat they want to see happen or behave this way.

When I DM, I don't want the players to "tell my story". They have agency over their characters. But the player characters should be making choices that make sense in the game world that the characters are inhabiting. And choices that are consistent with who they have said their characters are.

 

[pemerton]

I'd argue that as an entertainer, the DM ideally would get enjoyment from the players enjoying themselves

For what it's worth, I don't see the GM's role as an entertainer, when I GM.

I mean, I hope that the players enjoy the stuff that I say and do. But it's reciprocal - I enjoy the stuff that they say and do, in the play of their PCs.

I don't see any tension between me (as GM) and them (as players) having a good time when we play RPGs.

I think the 'tyranny of fun' phrase means the DM is having to sacrifice his/her own enjoyment or plans for the game in order to satisfy the players. So the players might be having fun but the DM isn't. It can definitely happen if you have a DM that wants to keep things logical and consistent regarding the campaign world but the players are casuals who don't care about anything making sense.

When I DM, I don't want the players to "tell my story". They have agency over their characters. But the player characters should be making choices that make sense in the game world that the characters are inhabiting. And choices that are consistent with who they have said their characters are.

Whose judgement as to what makes sense is pre-eminent?

If a player chooses to have their PC do <this thing>, then it turns out that <whatever this thing is> is something that is part of the game world, and an expression of the PC's character. It's the GM's job to roll with that, just as it is the player's job to roll with the stuff that the GM presents.