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.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

Well to be honest I just didn't understand what is fun about killing a non-threatening animal for no reason? And why the characters would want to that?

I mean if the players were bored then there were things they could do to make something happen that would still be logical in-game.

For example the druid could have used her speak with animals spell to talk to the beasts of the forest and maybe learn some helpful information about the brigands' camp (I had prepared some information for this possibility). Or cast find familiar and use the familiar to scout out the surrounding area.

They could have carefully examined the tracks of the brigands to try to determine how many there are and also what race/species they are from the sizes of the footprints.

Or if the players were keen to get into combat as soon as possible they could have just told me "We pick up our pace and charge forward with our weapons drawn to try to reach the brigand camp as quickly as we can".

 

[abirdcall]

Well to be honest I just didn't understand what is fun about killing a non-threatening animal for no reason? And why the characters would want to that?

I mean if the players were bored then there were things they could do to make something happen that would still be logical in-game.

For example the druid could have used her speak with animals spell to talk to the beasts of the forest and maybe learn some helpful information about the brigands' camp (I had prepared some information for this possibility). Or cast find familiar and use the familiar to scout out the surrounding area.

They could have carefully examined the tracks of the brigands to try to determine how many there are and also what race/species they are from the sizes of the footprints.

Or if the players were keen to get into combat as soon as possible they could have just told me "We pick up our pace and charge forward with our weapons drawn to try to reach the brigand camp as quickly as we can".

On the subject of pacing it isn't even necessary for them to 'pick up the pace' to get to the brigands sooner in terms of session time.

You can just narrate that they get there. In game time is completely different than out of game time.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

Well the wizard is chaotic evil and the rest of the party are neutral at best.

I think if they were honest with their characters the DM would have known that during character creation.

I had specifically told them that their characters could not have evil alignments.

 

[abirdcall]

I had specifically told them that their characters could not have evil alignments.

That is what I would have brought up.

And if they protested that randomly killing animals isn't evil I would ask them how they would feel if they saw their friend kick a cat that was just lounging on a yard.

Sounds like they weren't treating it as an RPG at all either.

 

[tetrasodium]

Or if the players were keen to get into combat as soon as possible they could have just told me "We pick up our pace and charge forward with our weapons drawn to try to reach the brigand camp as quickly as we can".

I've seen players so the kind of chaos monkey behavior you described earlier and think that I can explain why they behave like that rather than doing the bolded bit. If Alice was leading the sneaky sneaky plan and Bob wants to "get into combat as soon as possible" they have a couple choices on how to pretty much guarantee it happening. The first is by doing that bolded bit and the second is to summon a chaos monkey into Alice's sneaky sneaky plan where they expect to be N steps removed from the eventual fallout and get the results without the responsibility.

If Bob chooses the first option and does the bold action or similar there are a couple obvious results. One of them is that Alice and possibly other players argue about that being a poor choice because [whatever reasons that might have consequences]. Another is that the group just goes along with it and runs into some form of consequence that might have been avoided or mitigated. Either way Bob is responsible for those consequences and the other players will blame him for the results in ways that make his next try at skipping to the fight more difficult.

On the other hand that bolded chaos monkey method of skipping to a fight allows Bob to repel any and all responsibility and blame with the option of pinning it on the gm later if there are consequences. Bob can do that by claiming he couldn't have known or expected that result and getting some of the other players to agree that he would have done something different if only the gm had better described whatever critical domino that seems a good place for him to hang responsibility.

/Yes all the chaos monkey links go to the same description.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

I don't know what was going on in their heads.

When I am a player and one of my fellow party members wants to do something like that, I just say "Hold on, what are we trying to achieve here? What are the ramifications of our characters doing that? Why would our characters want to do that?" Not in a rude way, just emphasizing that we should be making decisions based on some kind of logic. The characters should have some kind of reason for doing what they are doing. We should be imagining what the characters are thinking and feeling based on their situation, abilities, experience, loyalties and surroundings.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Well to be honest I just didn't understand what is fun about killing a non-threatening animal for no reason

I suspect the “fun” was in getting a reaction from the DM. How old were these players?

I had specifically told them that their characters could not have evil alignments.

And were your players actually happy with that?

 

[Maxperson]

Man, if Rule 0 was ever just left at modifying the game instead of elevating the DM to Daddy Who Always Needs To Have Their Way, that'd be great.

Bitterness doesn't help your position. If you find the rare abusive DM, find a different game to play in. The vast majority of DMs just use it to modify the game.

 

[clearstream]

Well to be honest I just didn't understand what is fun about killing a non-threatening animal for no reason? And why the characters would want to that?

I mean if the players were bored then there were things they could do to make something happen that would still be logical in-game.

For example the druid could have used her speak with animals spell to talk to the beasts of the forest and maybe learn some helpful information about the brigands' camp (I had prepared some information for this possibility). Or cast find familiar and use the familiar to scout out the surrounding area.

They could have carefully examined the tracks of the brigands to try to determine how many there are and also what race/species they are from the sizes of the footprints.

Or if the players were keen to get into combat as soon as possible they could have just told me "We pick up our pace and charge forward with our weapons drawn to try to reach the brigand camp as quickly as we can".

It may also be that your players assume that you are there to engage them in an entertaining story and they are there to be entertained by that story. It might be foreign to them to understand their job (as players) to include saying what the story should be about. In that, I agree with @CreamCloud0 that they might not have said enough about their characters.

If the wizard had said "I want power, plain and simple; that which is found in lost or forbidden tomes." From there you'd know that slaying brigands is unlikely to be their thing. The player with that in mind might never have entered the forest in the first place, or you might have found a good reason for them to ardently desire the brigands' downfall.

At the same time, there's an impulse to diagnosis the wizard's action as mistaken or problematic: it can be taken instead as saying something true about their character. It seems they can't help breaking stuff and bringing things to a head. It's your job as DM to extrapolate from that. Perhaps something like "After all the scampering and such, the forest goes quiet. Too quiet. You know your stealth is well and truly broken, and somewhere in here are protective elves who know the forest far better than you." Take what they do and turn it back on them. And why play nice? If they push on the elves can ambush them right after they tangle with the brigands.

 

[TiQuinn]

Bitterness doesn't help your position. If you find the rare abusive DM, find a different game to play in. The vast majority of DMs just use it to modify the game.

Rule zero has always been part of the game as far back as I can remember, but the problems was that it was paired up with other directives that were much more antagonistic in nature, and the pairing led to the abusive DM style.