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]

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

At least the Glossary in the 2024 Players Handbook specifies: "You fall if your Fly Speed is reduced to 0 [unless] you can hover."

For most situations, that seems good enough. An especially poor method of flight might specify, if you move half your speed or less you fall.

 

[tetrasodium]

At least the Glossary in the 2024 Players Handbook specifies: "You fall if your Fly Speed is reduced to 0 [unless] you can hover."

For most situations, that seems good enough. An especially poor method of flight might specify, if you move half your speed or less you fall.

That's not much of an improvement since it only kicks in with situations like a trip & does nothing in situations where the most optimal "flight" is to stand & walk in the sky

Spoiler: like so

Yes they are standing in the sky & sometimes literally walking, that's not photoshopped image editing. It was a common thing across all 26☆ seasons of bleach

☆ Holy heck bleach got a lot more seasons than I thought it did

 

[pemerton]

The player really doesn't have that option. I've never seen that in any game I've played in let alone DM'd.

I am the interface to the world that the players use to run their characters. What they see, smell, hear, touch, etc... is relayed by me to them. They then relay what they want to do back to me. If I tell them their sword turned to butter and splashed against an enemies shield, they are going to be shocked but they aren't going to question what their characters saw.

Aren't they? I can tell you that, if I said that from out of nowhere when I was GMing, the players would 100% question it.

The players expect me to conform to the rules of the game, just as I expect them to do so. In D&D, those rules put hard limits around when a sword can turn to butter - basically only as the result of polymorph any object, which traditionally is a very high level spell, or something that pixies can do.

You are just wrong here. Your character may be imagining he is wearing a red cap but if the DM does not say you are wearing a red cap then none of the world is going to react to you like you are wearing a red cap.

You seem to miss the point that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

The GM can tell me all they like that my sword has turned to butter, but if I keep declaring actions as if my sword is a sword than that is that.

Nothing can progress if everyone isn't on the same page as to what is happening in the fiction, and the GM has no unilateral power to establish that consensus. That's part of what it means for it to be a consensus!

a campaign is the DMs.

Really? That's not my experience. The game "belongs" to the participants.

You are an archetype of a player that of course would not last long in most of our campaigns.

Well, I've been GMing RPGs pretty much continuously since 1982. And I've played on-and-off for a good chunk of that time period too. Back when I had the luxury of time to attend conventions (in the mid-90s) my friends and I would win certificates (for individuals and for teams) from time to time.

So I don't think I'm a particularly curious or unusual example of RPGer, except that - by dint of having been doing it for over 40 years - I probably have more experience than most contemporary RPGers.

 

[pemerton]

They can tell you that they've made it clear that green hats are not allowed. If you insist they ask you to leave the game.

And where does the GM get the authority to tell someone else to leave the game. I mean, I'm playing D&D at my friend's house - I'm the GM, he's a player. Do you really think I've got the authority to ask him to leave the game?

You're building in a whole suite of assumptions here that have nothing to with the structure of how the game is played, but are all about some assumed social dynamics, hosting dynamics, etc.

 

[Lanefan]

And I become instantly suspicious when someone says, "You are not allowed to question anything I say, and at best you may make suggestions, which I have absolute and total veto power over."

For me it's more "You're welcome to question anything I say, but be warned: you might not like the answers."

You are presuming good faith on the DM's part. This entitles me to presume good faith on the players' parts. If I am not allowed to assume good faith on the players' parts, you are not allowed to presume good faith on the DM's part.

The blanket presumption I make on the DM's part is that it's in her interest to (and that she wants to) keep her game going, and is thus likely to act accordingly.

I do not make the same blanket presumption of players mostly because it's often not as clearly in any specific player's interest that the game keeps going. Sometimes, though rarely, for whatever reason a player might in fact be trying to undermine the game such that it does not keep going (I've seen this, long ago, when a player "got religion" and tried to drag the game down with him when he left).

That is the only reasonable way we can conduct an actual conversation. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot demand that we look at DMs exclusively as being without any fault, and then turn around and say that we have to consider the full spectrum of possible player behavior.

Agreed, to a point. We can look at the spectrum of player behavior without regard to any variance in DMs, just as we can look at the spectrum of DM behavior without regard to any variance in players. Both are valid discussions IMO.

 

[pemerton]

Can we use more realistic examples? I think I see your point, but the hyperbole is making it hard to take it seriously.

What's unrealistic about a green cap?

 

[pemerton]

What counts as "wearing a red cap" in a TTRPG? Typically, participants picture it in their imagination. No matter what DM chooses to imagine, player can continue to picture that they are "wearing a red cap". Suppose there are three players and one DM, and the three players all share that picture, then the normal view is that the character is indeed "wearing a red cap".

Starting from here, we can get a long way. I mean, the GM can sit at their computer and write reams of backstory for the campaign setting. But none of that is part of the shared fiction. If the players have a different idea about the backstory, that they have discussed and shared among themselves, it seems that the latter is going to matter more to actual play than the stuff the GM came up with.

And this stuff isn't just hypothetical or theoretical. I've seen games come unstuck when the GM tried to impose their setting solitaire material onto a game, when it contradicted the understanding of things that the players had built up among themselves.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

You are presuming good faith on the DM's part. This entitles me to presume good faith on the players' parts. If I am not allowed to assume good faith on the players' parts, you are not allowed to presume good faith on the DM's part.

That is the only reasonable way we can conduct an actual conversation. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot demand that we look at DMs exclusively as being without any fault, and then turn around and say that we have to consider the full spectrum of possible player behavior.

Either we consider the full spectrum of all participants' behavior, DM and player alike, or we restrict ourselves to only those who are participating in good faith, DM and player alike.

This is not crazy. This is not some ridiculous, unfair demand. It is simply asking for a fair, unbiased discussion. I will not accept a discussion that is starting from such an actively biased point.

The thing is, yhis whole thread is full of people with opposite assumption - players are never at fault, dm always is. Why the double standard?

 

[Lanefan]

That doesn't matter. If I narrate the grass is green and you and all of the other players imagine as purple, that grass is still green in the fiction. Your imaginations can't override that. If your PCs start insisting the grass is purple, they will eventually(after it's assumed to be a joke) be labeled as insane by the NPCs who hear it.

Unless they use illusions or Colour cantrips or whatever to turn the grass purple either for real or just in the eyes of the gullible.

 

[Lanefan]

Actually, I have never seen Aarakocra in my games.

I have, but only as monsters.

The only winged PC I can recall was when a PC got reincarnated as a Sylph (pretty much an Elf with wings) and kept going; but the party level was high enough at the time that one more flier made very little difference.