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.

 

[Yaarel]

An important consideration from reallife flight is "cruising". In D&D terms, it is equivalent to running. The flyer if concentrating on flight alone and using the Dash Action and able to "run", can keep on adding the speed accumulatively each round, until flying at 10 times the base Fly speed. The cruiser has disadvantage on maneuverability checks, but can travel great distances swiftly.

 

[Maxperson]

Why would a dm ruling be inherently tyranical? In my game whenever there is a conflict of opinions over rules, we operate on "I make the call niw to not easte time, we can check it after the game and if I was wrong, we will use correct rule in the future". Is that tyranical?

I have no idea. I never said a DM ruling is inherently tyrannical. If that's what you got from what I said, I have no idea how to respond.

 

[Azzy]

No. Suppose they run across a bull that will charge anyone wearing red. The bull doesn't charge. If all the players are going along this is just mass delusion.

If bad guys are wearing red hats, and the player tries to say he is wearing a red hat the bad guys won't see it and they will attack.

The DM is the campaign world's reality. What the DM thinks IS reality in that campaign world.

Any DM that insists on controlling the color of a PC's clothes is a DM that needs to be yeeted.

 

[Yaarel]

5e's flight "rules" are so incomplete that it feels like they were omitted by someone who never played in a game where flight factored in prominently to any meaningful degree & that's a shame.

Each method of flight should supply its own parameters. For example, what an "Airship" can and cant do, should be clear.

The Fly spell describes its own parameters.

Something resembling a paraglider vehicle should explain its parameters.

There dont need to be "rules", but each method should make itself clear. Some methods cannot "hover", and that can be a big deal since Speed 0, or sometimes even Half Speed, means Falling.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Any DM that insists on controlling the color of a PC's clothes is a DM that needs to be yeeted.

Although a correct observation, it misses the actual point being made in the example.

 

[tetrasodium]

Each method of flight should supply its own parameters. For example, what an "Airship" can and cant do, should be clear.

The Fly spell describes its own parameters.

Something resembling a paraglider vehicle should explain its parameters.

There dont need to be "rules", but each method should make itself clear. Some methods cannot "hover", and that can be a big deal since Speed 0, or sometimes even Half Speed, means Falling.

That's something that 5e (4e?) stripped away it used to be part of the maneuverability ratings summarized in the table at the bottom of this page. Needing to add those after the fact when there is nothing winds up feeling arbitrary and unsatisfying.

 

[Yaarel]

That's something that 5e (4e?) stripped away it used to be part of the maneuverability ratings summarized in the table at the bottom of this page. Needing to add those after the fact when there is nothing winds up feeling arbitrary and unsatisfying.

On the 3e page you linked, the only items that felt important to me were "hover" and the "turn" radius. Otherwise I prefer the simplicity of "move in any direction" with the option of intentionally "falling".

Maybe for simplicity sake, a less maneuverable method of flight might say specify something like: half your move must continue forward when you change the direction of your flight.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Although a correct observation, it misses the actual point being made in the example.

But it does return to the point of why the discourse seems to treat actions of priblempayer as something to be dealt with on personal, individual level, but actions of problem DM as inherent problem of all DMs that has to be tixed on rules level.

 

[Maxperson]

Any DM that insists on controlling the color of a PC's clothes is a DM that needs to be yeeted.

I don't think a single person here has disagreed with that.

 

[tetrasodium]

On the 3e page you linked, the only items that felt important to me were "hover" and the "turn" radius. Otherwise I prefer the simplicity of "move in any direction" with the option of intentionally "falling".

Maybe for simplicity sake, a less maneuverable method of flight might say specify something like: half your move must continue forward when you change the direction of your flight.

The minimum move speed was important to make flight stay mobile & different from moving on the ground rather than just feeling like Anime style standing in the sky to save animation costs while differentiating different flight capabilities. It was better described on 3.5 dmg20 but the srd writeup is rough. It was extremely rare for creatures to have "good" or "perfect" maneuverability so some of the things on that srd chart are mostly just to differentiate those two better than normal flight options