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.

 

[Maxperson]

That's what I did and boy did the slings and arrows fly.

Not from me. That's between you and WotC.

 

[Maxperson]

No, it's not and I'm not suggesting it is. Instead, it's taking authority away from an offending DM.

You aren't, though. He still has 100% authority over his game. Even if all of you leave and you get a new DM, that doesn't change. He maintains 100% authority over a very empty game.

The best you can do is leave and continue your characters in another game under a different DM who has full authority over the game. One who very probably who isn't a jerk. Jerk DMs are pretty rare.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

So, does the book state how much time should pass between long ress?

 

[Azzy]

You aren't, though. He still has 100% authority over his game. Even if all of you leave and you get a new DM, that doesn't change. He maintains 100% authority over a very empty game.

Authority over nothing (as he has no game anymore) is no authority at all.

 

[pemerton]

The social contract is the DM can do whatever he or she wants and the players can also leave.

I have never played a RPG - D&D or any other - where this was true.

 

[pemerton]

Not, really. If you have a tyrant DM who makes a final ruling that you don't like, your have two options. 1) keep playing and the ruling happens in the game, 2) quit the game and the ruling still happens in the game as your PC becomes and NPC and is still present.

Neither of those two options stops the ruling from happening, since the DM has the final authority over what happens in the game.

You are trying to argue that the DM has final authority over what happens in the game by taking as a premise the DM has the final authority over what happens in the game (see the "because" clause in the final sentence of the quote). That is obviously circular reasoning.

Suppose that the GM makes a "ruling" - that is to say, suggests that something is part of the shared fiction - that a player doesn't like. The player has the option of not accepting that the GM's suggestion is part of the shared fiction. Other players may or may not join with them. The GM has no authority to compel or oblige anyone to imagine anything.

Authority over nothing (as he has no game anymore) is no authority at all.

RPGing is shared imagination, with a process ("system") for working out what is true in the shared imagining.

A GM imagining stuff to themself is not RPGing. That's just daydreaming!

I've played in games in which the GM was imagining stuff to himself, and the players were largely ignoring it and imagining their own stuff (that pertained mostly but not exclusively to interactions among the PCs). The GM didn't have any "final authority". And when the GM tried to change the setting and backstory in ways that would have largely invalidated/overridden what the players were doing among themselves, the game collapsed as the players were not interested in the stuff the GM was putting forward.

 

[pemerton]

Many wood elves are rangers and can speak with animals. When the players killed one of the animals the others scattered into the woods. I had told the players that there was a flock of birds and deer grazing. I can imagine word of what had happened would get back to the elves from the animals. And because I had explained that the truce between the human townsfolk and the wood elves was fragile, I thought that the players might consider the possibility that the wood elves would be closely monitoring any incursions and outsider activity in the forest.

I felt that if they angered the wood elves then it might prevent them from being able to complete the campaign in a satisfactory manner as future quests I had planned would probably require close interaction and cooperation with the wood elves.

This is a very GM-driven approach to the game: it centres the GM in establishing what it is that the PCs should do and what will happen as a result of what they do.

It doesn't change my impression of what was going on when the player had their PC Firebolt the bird - namely, declaring an action that they thought was fun, silly and/or transgressive in a context where they weren't really engaged by the GM's fiction.

 

[Lanefan]

So, what exactly is the difference between this, where the DM (in order to be a good one) must listen to their players and care about what they want out of the game...and what I've spoken of over and over and over again on this forum, which is that stuff is achieved through dialogue and consensus; that it requires participants both being expected to give respect to others, and fully expecting that others will give them respect too; that everyone actually needs to be participating in good faith, which means hearing out what others have to say (regardless of who is listening), etc.?

Respect or not, the core assumption is that everyone wants to get their way. If they didn't, or they truly have no opinion, there's neither discussion nor disagreement.

The difference in how this is achieved lies in the types and personalities of the people involved.

If the people doing the discussing are stubborn dig-in-their-heels types (I'm highly familiar with these) then there has to be someone who clearly has the authority to just make and enforce a decision, otherwise all you have is an endless argument where nobody budges.

Contrast: if the people doing the discussing are passive-aggressive types (I've met more than my share of these too) who disagree, then the discussion also never ends. Sure, a "consensus" might be reached in the moment but allowing that consensus is merely a ploy to provide space for ongoing low-grade lobbying and opinion-swaying to continue until the same discussion/argument erupts again somewhere down the road. Lather-rinse-repeat until the PA types get their way. And while it's easy to suggest simply telling the PA types to go pound sand when they start/continue their lobbying, it's often hard to notice the pattern until well after the fact when hindsight shows how well everyone got played.

 

[Oofta]

You are trying to argue that the DM has final authority over what happens in the game by taking as a premise the DM has the final authority over what happens in the game (see the "because" clause in the final sentence of the quote). That is obviously circular reasoning.

Suppose that the GM makes a "ruling" - that is to say, suggests that something is part of the shared fiction - that a player doesn't like. The player has the option of not accepting that the GM's suggestion is part of the shared fiction. Other players may or may not join with them. The GM has no authority to compel or oblige anyone to imagine anything.

RPGing is shared imagination, with a process ("system") for working out what is true in the shared imagining.

A GM imagining stuff to themself is not RPGing. That's just daydreaming!

I've played in games in which the GM was imagining stuff to himself, and the players were largely ignoring it and imagining their own stuff (that pertained mostly but not exclusively to interactions among the PCs). The GM didn't have any "final authority". And when the GM tried to change the setting and backstory in ways that would have largely invalidated/overridden what the players were doing among themselves, the game collapsed as the players were not interested in the stuff the GM was putting forward.

The player states "The rule says [insert the player's interpretation that differs from the DM's]". The DM says "no". Who wins? The player can dig in their heels if they really want, but if the DM says they don't rule that way the game either ends or the player agrees with the DM. The players can imagine whatever they want. They can imagine that the small cat I just described was a purple elephant. But when it comes to the game rules? In every D&D game I've play over the decades, it's the DM who makes the final call on rules and what is happening that has any real impact on the game.

I've been playing for a long, long time and games have fallen apart because of how the DM ran the game but over decades of play that happened twice.

 

[Zardnaar]

Respect or not, the core assumption is that everyone wants to get their way. If they didn't, or they truly have no opinion, there's neither discussion nor disagreement.

The difference in how this is achieved lies in the types and personalities of the people involved.

If the people doing the discussing are stubborn dig-in-their-heels types (I'm highly familiar with these) then there has to be someone who clearly has the authority to just make and enforce a decision, otherwise all you have is an endless argument where nobody budges.

Contrast: if the people doing the discussing are passive-aggressive types (I've met more than my share of these too) who disagree, then the discussion also never ends. Sure, a "consensus" might be reached in the moment but allowing that consensus is merely a ploy to provide space for ongoing low-grade lobbying and opinion-swaying to continue until the same discussion/argument erupts again somewhere down the road. Lather-rinse-repeat until the PA types get their way. And while it's easy to suggest simply telling the PA types to go pound sand when they start/continue their lobbying, it's often hard to notice the pattern until well after the fact when hindsight shows how well everyone got played.

I have some hard no's. That's evil PCs (exceptions exist eg evil campaign), no flyers, and no silvery barbs. And ask about Tashas stuff.

Beyond that whatever. Current groups a gith, tortle, tiefling and 2 dwarves go figure.