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.

 

[pemerton]

Rule zero makes no sense.

We're talking about a voluntary leisure activity. The participants can establish, among themselves, whatever rules they like. A commercial publisher like WotC offers to sell them a set of rules that present themselves as offering a fun time if followed. The purchasers of those rules can use them - or not - as they wish!

Not only is there no need to confer express permission on them to use them - or not - as they wish, but such a conferral is redundant, because it has no effect unless the published rules are adopted by a group - but then, as I said, there is no need to adopt those rules one doesn't want to use.

To the extent that rule zero tries to make the decision about rules adoption etc a unilateral matter for the GM it also makes no sense, as by definition no single member of a group can set the rules that govern a voluntary group activity. There needs to be consensus.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Rule 0 is the rule that lets you override, add, subtract or create new rules for the game. That's it's purpose. House ruling falls under that purpose.

Again: no. It only covers the first thing, override. Everything else is separate: the freedom to write new rules, which every game always has because nobody is mind-controlling you.

"Rule Zero" is the rules saying, explicitly, "We might've messed up somewhere along the line, because rules made by imperfect beings are imperfect too. If the rules tell you something that doesn't make sense, make it make sense."

See the analogy I made above. "Rule Zero" is like judicial review: it isn't there for writing law, it's there for having a check on the possibility that the law is flawed, broken, or outright contradictory. Actually writing new law is a genuinely distinct thing, and requires genuinely distinct experience and effort.

As another way of putting it: It is quite possible, potentially even desirable, to apply "Rule Zero" silently, if it's a minor issue that doesn't require explicit attention. You really shouldn't silently apply house rules--because that means you're straight-up deceiving the players about what game they're actually playing.

 

[pemerton]

"Rule Zero" is like judicial review: it isn't there for writing law, it's there for having a check on the possibility that the law is flawed, broken, or outright contradictory.

In case it's helpful for future discussion: that is not what judicial review is, in the US legal system (or most other contemporary legal systems). Judicial review refers to the power of the courts to hold certain actors (generally, public actors) to legal requirements, whether by striking down administrative acts or legislation, or (in some jurisdictions, such as Italy and arguably the UK) by rewriting certain legislative generalisations so as to ensure that they conform to constitutional requirements (eg by broadening out what otherwise would be discriminatory conferrals of statutory benefits; this is one arguable interpretation of the US Supreme Court's same sex marriage decision).

You seem to be referring to a notion of "equity", that is, the power of an adjudicator to suspend or vary the operation of the law when its application would produce an unfair or absurd result. In modern rule-of-law systems, the scope for the exercise of such power is generally pretty limited if not absent altogether.

In the context of RPG adjudication, there is no need for such a rule, because rules are binding only by consensus, as a shared basis for working out what happens next in the fiction. If everyone is agreed that what the rules say should happen next is not what they actually want to happen next, then they can agree to imagine something different from what the rules tell them they should imagine. No special permission is needed to do this.

(When it comes to law, the situation is different because law generally purports to bind parties at the moment of adjudication even if they would prefer not to be bound.)

 

[Lanefan]

So, in a post that you made 10 or 15 minutes after this one, you said that:

That is, in this near-contemporaneous post, you seem to treat it as sufficient to show that something is subjective that not everyone would necessarily agree.

If it's an opinion, it's subjective.

Objective fact: the level-advancement rules were changed between 2e and 3e such that all classes advanced at the same rate.
Subjective opinion: those changes were or were not an improvement.

So let's apply that standard to consistency of character and of setting. Do you think there is scope for disagreement - even reasonable disagreement - over what events are consistent with what past events?

Assuming that you accept that this is so, then you seem to be saying that the GM is licensed to impose their own subjective opinion as to what is consistent onto the player.

In 1e as written this was in fact the case - the DM had to evaluate the roleplay of each character in light of its declared alignment in order to properly assess training costs at each level-up - which means such things are not unheard-of in D&D design.

The DM is, ideally, responsible for consistency of setting.

The player is, ideally, responsible for consistency of character.

On perceiving a failure to do so by either party, IMO the other has the right to call out said failure.

Where it gets subjective is determining the line beyond which "failure" is perceived to have occurred.

 

[Lanefan]

We should be careful about both an over-commitment to consistency and the abuse of consistency.

That is: over-commitment to consistency means characters cannot grow or change. Growth requires that you become inconsistent with your past self. Character development is necessarily the breaking of at least one pattern in order to do something else. A new pattern may or may not form thereafter.

Agreed, to a point.

Growth and change within a person rarely happens in a flash. More often it's a slow measured thing that the person might not even realize is happening until after the fact, or comes as a result of extended exposure to new and-or different things and experiences.

Which means, when a role-played character suddenly does something that's inconsistent with its own established patterns it's usually pretty obvious.

Abuse of consistency has several forms. The most prominent is "that's what my character would do," meaning, the petulant excuse for being an annoying little $#!% to the other players.

That's not an abuse of consistency at all. In fact, "that's what my character would do" is closer to the pinnacle of consistency: because of patterns and precedents already established through playing that character you already know what it would do in that situation and are just having the character do it, consistent with what it's done in similar situations before*. Whether the result or outcome is good, bad, or indifferent for the other characters and-or players is IMO unimportant; it's on them to "do what they would do" in reaction.

* - the only time this doesn't hold water is during the first few sessions of a character's career when its personality, traits, quirks, preferences, and so forth haven't yet been fully established in play.

But there are others. "It's in my backstory" is another, where someone exploits their voluminous (and likely unread) backstory for undue benefit.

I haven't hit this one yet, perhaps because backstories here are usually done in consultation with the DM if-when they are done at all.

 

[Lanefan]

It is the difference between a judge ruling narrowly on precedent for one particular case, and a legislator passing a local law which diverges from regional or state law in a jurisdiction or situation where the local law supersedes general law.

The former is not denying the validity of the law, but rather, saying that there's clearly an issue, and thus we must find a way to make the situation make sense. The latter is actually creating new law which replaces or supersedes existing law.

Or, if you prefer to use the currently hip lingo: "Rule Zero" is rulings. House rules are, as the name implies, rules.

So Rule Zero is what allows a DM to make rulings that then, due to the precedent thus set, become house rules for that campaign.

Hypothetical example: Magic Missile can only target a creature, so what happens if someone casts one when there's no other creatures around? Does the caster have to shoot herself with her own missiles? Can she just fire them into the ground? If yes, do they have any effect on the ground e.g. char marks or chipped stones etc.?

Rule Zero allows me-as-DM to rule on the fly that untargeted Magic Missiles can be fired into the ground, with each missile possibly leaving a small char mark where it hits.

That ruling sets a precedent for the campaign - now that I've ruled one Magic Missile works this way, that's how they'll all work henceforth - and so I put it into the spell write-up as a house rule.

Is that about right?

Homebrew is a subset of house rules.

I think it's the other way around: house rules are a subset of homebrew. With house rules, you're just tweaking what's there while leaving the root system pretty much intact. With homebrew, you're adding or removing or kitbashing or (re-)designing core elements of the root system and-or setting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Agreed, to a point.

Growth and change within a person rarely happens in a flash. More often it's a slow measured thing that the person might not even realize is happening until after the fact, or comes as a result of extended exposure to new and-or different things and experiences.

Which means, when a role-played character suddenly does something that's inconsistent with its own established patterns it's usually pretty obvious.

Sure. Change happens over time. But even then, you have to have something which first breaks the pattern. A character who has never given two figs about mercy finds herself disturbed by the fact that she's unhappy about doing that to someone. A character who has always been blasé/happy-go-lucky can't stop thinking about a thing that upset them. A jaded character finds surprising beauty and poetry in an NPC's heroic sacrifice. Etc. Something has to break the pattern in order for character development to happen. All of the things I just described are intentionally developing an inconsistency between what a character is feeling or doing in the present vs what they have felt or done in the past.

You cannot grow without breaking the pattern of what you were before, to at least some extent. Enforced, unrelenting consistency means character stasis. As Emerson said, "a foolish consistency".

That's not an abuse of consistency at all. In fact, "that's what my character would do" is closer to the pinnacle of consistency: because of patterns and precedents already established through playing that character you already know what it would do in that situation and are just having the character do it, consistent with what it's done in similar situations before*. Whether the result or outcome is good, bad, or indifferent for the other characters and-or players is IMO unimportant; it's on them to "do what they would do" in reaction.

Yes, it is--when it is used as an excuse for crappy behavior. Which was my whole point. People use it as an excuse to get away with being crappy to their fellow players. That cannot be tolerated. Even if it's what the character would do. Don't. Don't be a rude jerk to your fellow players. It's not hard or complex. You can still play a rude, crass, uncouth, uncaring, churlish lout of a character without being a rude, crass, uncouth, uncaring, churlish lout of a player.

* - the only time this doesn't hold water is during the first few sessions of a character's career when its personality, traits, quirks, preferences, and so forth haven't yet been fully established in play.

Functionally irrelevant for the thing I was pointing out. Enforcing that an established personality, trait, quirk, preference, or so forth must always remain consistent no matter what necessarily ensures that character development cannot even begin. You must, to at least some extent, break with some part of what the character used to be, in order for them to even begin becoming something else. A thing that has grown, by definition, is not identical to what it was before it grew--which means there must have been at least one point where it stopped having some characteristic it used to have.

I haven't hit this one yet, perhaps because backstories here are usually done in consultation with the DM if-when they are done at all.

It's uncommon, but it happens. I've seen it in a couple PbP games where someone went well beyond the requested "skirt-length" backstory and the DM basically signed off on it because they didn't have the time or energy to read the whole thing.

 

[pemerton]

Change is sometimes quite rapid - see, eg Paul the Apostle.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Whilst in theory it would be jarring if character suddenly started to act out of character for no reason, thus constituting a problem for a game, thus perhaps implying need for some sort of enforcement mechanism to ensure that this doesn't happen, at least in my experience this is not a genuine problem that actually occurs, so any solutions are completely hypothetical and ultimately unnecessary. During all the years of playing during my adult life, (I discount games played as kids, because kids) I can't recall this ever being an issue. Players tend to be pretty good at playing their characters consistently, at least at sufficient degree that it would not come across as jarring and destroy the suspension of disbelief at the table.

 

[pemerton]

Whilst in theory it would be jarring if character suddenly started to act out of character for no reason, thus constituting a problem for a game, thus perhaps implying need for some sort of enforcement mechanism to ensure that this doesn't happen, at least in my experience this is not a genuine problem that actually occurs, so any solutions are completely hypothetical and ultimately unnecessary. During all the years of playing during my adult life, (I discount games played as kids, because kids) I can't recall this ever being an issue. Players tend to be pretty good at playing their characters consistently, at least at sufficient degree that it would not come across as jarring and destroy the suspension of disbelief at the table.

Furthermore, isn't it the players' prerogative to play their PC? I mean, seriously, where does the GM - in the structure of a typical RPG - get the authority to unilaterally tell a player how their PC acts?