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.

 

[Distracted DM]

With that statement, how can 5e be properly played as written?

5e is VERY clear:

For the players, the rules are rules.

For the DM, the rules are suggestions.

Ad such, the power imbalance is near absolute.

5e assumes the DM will be running in good faith, but doesn't give the players any in game tools to in any way assure that.

Ha well, you ARE playing it properly. You just have to accept that your DM will be "corrupt," if you're trusting to that "absolute power" thing

 

[Vaalingrade]

No one is saying all games need a DM with final authority and responsibility.

there's plenty of people right here saying it's inherent to TTRPGs. Including the post I replied to right there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

there's plenty of people right here saying it's inherent to TTRPGs. Including the post I replied to right there.

Well, it is pretty common. Just about every TTRPG I've ever played was like that. But I'm perfectly happy with a traditional set up as a player or otherwise.

Even so, it's not universal.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

With that statement, how can 5e be properly played as written?

You may find that I agree with you, but not in a way that you would find agreeable.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

there's plenty of people right here saying it's inherent to TTRPGs. Including the post I replied to right there.

I think it is best that we take posts as a whole, and not extract single sentences, out of context, to further a narrative.

Obviously, you can have TTRPGs without a DM as they exist. But its also clear I am only talking about TTRPGs with a DM, as the entire post was about DMs.

Just so others have the full context, I have quoted my original post below. With that, I will withdraw from this conversation.

No. The rule is actually completely pointless and moot. DMs have that power inherently, due to their position within the hobby. DMs are the limiting factor to games, not players. And that has enormous consequences for any attempt at reigning in DM power through printed words.

Humor me for a moment, what if WotC had replaced that rule I was referring to with the following rule; "Elephants in fantasy worlds must wear pink hats."

Very little actually changes. Maybe some players, dismayed with past run ins with bad DMing, will rejoice. But they will soon be disappointed as DMs will just go about handwaving and changing rules to their heart's content - as they do now. Some being so bold so as to have their elephants wear only green hats, and only with a black buckle. And still those very DMs will have dozens of players flocking to their tables, because players would rather play with rule-breaking elephants in the game, than not play at all. And players who scream, "but the rule" will end up the one's without a game.

This is because the rule isn't where the power is. So until WotC comes up with a way to have the freedom and creativity of a TTRPG without the limit of needing human DMs, they are powerless to limit those very DMs. Only players can do that, and only if they are willing to leave games.

EDIT: Before someone argues "well why have rules at all then?" That's a straw man, and you know it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For those of you who think I'm somehow inventing antagonistic attitudes from DMs who claim this sort of power, I think it would be enlightening to look up the original source of the phrase "Viking Hat" with regard to DMs.

Word of warning: it's violent, it's crude, it's (blatantly) sexual/fetishistic in imagery.

Here's the post, from 2002 on RPG.net.

 

[Maxperson]

For those of you who think I'm somehow inventing antagonistic attitudes from DMs who claim this sort of power, I think it would be enlightening to look up the original source of the phrase "Viking Hat" with regard to DMs.

Word of warning: it's violent, it's crude, it's (blatantly) sexual/fetishistic in imagery.

Here's the post, from 2002 on RPG.net.

Nobody is saying that there isn't the rare DM who is a bad one like I'm sure that link from 22 years ago shows. We're just saying that those sorts of DMs are rare. The overwhelming majority of DMs run their games in good faith and with a desire for everyone involved to have fun.

 

[tetrasodium]

Appreciate the summary! Ditching optional rules would be laaame. I'm surprised we don't have a Table of Contents screenshot yet.

Tales of the Valiant GMG and A5E's T&T are probably the best resources a GM could get... ToV for newer folks.
ToV's GMG has some great optional rules, emphasizing "make it your game."

Agreed. The absence of text and things like that more is very much starting to look more and more like confirmation of problems that nobody even expected as possibilities as time passes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nobody is saying that there isn't the rare DM who is a bad one like I'm sure that link from 22 years ago shows. We're just saying that those sorts of DMs are rare. The overwhelming majority of DMs run their games in good faith and with a desire for everyone involved to have fun.

My point was that people call their own style "Viking Hat" DMing.

The phrase wasn't one I think people today would generally want to associate themselves with, despite having been used by a proponent of that..."style."

 

[pemerton]

Yes he can. He can simply say it's red and it will be. I've never met a DM who would do that, but the the DM is very capable of changing the color and you can imagine it green all you want, but it won't be green in the fiction.

What does it mean to say it will be? The cap is purely imaginary. If I (a player) imagine it to be green, and the GM imagines it to be red, there is no colour that it really is. There is simply a failure to create a shared fiction.