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.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I've already given examples - at a certain level of abstraction, but can elaborate a bit if anyone cares for the detail of decades-old games.

If the players are working with an idea of the shared fiction - about who their PCs are, or what their background is, or what it is that gives meaning to what the PCs are doing - that differs from the GM's, then that does not make for an effective game. In fact, in my experience, it can make games collapse, if the GM tries to insist on their vision over that of the players.

The GM has no unilateral power to just dictate what the players should think about all those things, and in my view would be foolish to try and insist on any such power - especially because, the more intimately involved it becomes vis-a-vis the PCs, the more likely it is that the player cares more about it than the GM.

Here's one example: I was playing in a game run by someone I'd only recently met in the context of a university RPG club. He was running an adventure that may have been of his own design, or may have been a module - if I ever knew which, I no longer remember. What I do remember is that we - the PCs - were in a town, that was under some sort of assault from Kobolds. So we - the players - decided, as our PCs, to capture a Kobold and interrogate it. Which we did.

Our view of what one might learn from interrogating a Kobold was informed by our knowledge of the Monster Manual, which states that Kobolds have Average (low) intelligence. In other words, interrogating a Kobold is not that different from interrogating a normal person.

The GM had the Kobold respond to every question we asked it in any utterly hopeless and incomprehending fashion - we got the same sorts of responses from it as one might get from a 2 or 3 year old child. It could not tell us anything about how it had got into the city, how many other Kobolds there were, where they were coming from, what their disposition of forces was, etc.

We politely let the GM tell us all this. And then we (the players) all agreed that we would pull out of the game and start a new game ourselves.

The GM did not have the unilateral power to establish how intelligent a Kobold is, or what they are able to communicate under interrogation. He tried to do that, in disregard of the rulebook (the MM) that we were all familiar with, and that the GM knew we (the players) had in mind in deciding on our capture-and-interrogation plan. But he failed: we (the players) didn't accept his suggestion about what the shared fiction was, and we walked away from the game.

Maybe that GM is out there somewhere still, insisting that that Kobold really lacked the cognitive abilities to answer the questions that we put to it. But his solitary imagination does not constitute an episode of RPG play.

Right. So you exercised the power everyone has agreed the players have: to leave the game if it is not for your liking.
Though one would hope that the actual reason was not that the GM had the temerity to change the kobolds to be different than MM would suggest, but the GM seemingly using that power to thwart the perfectly sensible plan of the PCs.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The GM had the Kobold respond to every question we asked it in any utterly hopeless and incomprehending fashion - we got the same sorts of responses from it as one might get from a 2 or 3 year old child. It could not tell us anything about how it had got into the city, how many other Kobolds there were, where they were coming from, what their disposition of forces was, etc.

We politely let the GM tell us all this. And then we (the players) all agreed that we would pull out of the game and start a new game ourselves.

That seems like a fairly major overreaction. How do you know that was not a particularly dumb kobold that was captured? Or a particularly smart one who was pretending to be dumb to avoid giving out information under interrogation?

Of course, the most likely explanation was that the inexperienced DM had not thought through the answers to your questions. The kobold didn’t know because the DM didn’t know.

The GM did not have the unilateral power to establish how intelligent a Kobold is, or what they are able to communicate under interrogation

Yes, yes they do.

 

[pemerton]

I think D&D is being impacted by broader societal issues here.

In order to be a player in a game of D&D you need to TRUST that your DM is going to try and make the game enjoyable for you.

However, some people’s faith in human nature has been eroded to such an extent that they do not believe it is POSSIBLE for someone to be in a position of authority and use it to screw everyone over.

It's nothing to do with faith in human nature. It's about what playing the game involves.

I mean, I've GMed thousands of hours of RPGing. I don't have a lack of trust in myself. But the game is a social thing, not solitaire. I'm not turning up to the session just to show off my stuff to the players.

 

[Emerikol]

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.

My gamers expect consistency and fairness but they are not going to question something happening in game.

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.

you can keep babbling but things happening in the game like your hit points going down and the monsters not going down are not your decision.

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!

In my games, the DM establishes ALL the fiction. It may be in reaction to a player action but it is established by the DM. Pemerton you've argued this line so much but you don't represent a typical D&D player from any era. I'm happy you can play and have fun. I don't want to ruin your fun. But if you showed up in my games, the result would be you'd be booted out so fast your head would spin and the other players would be helping me.

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

You really seem to have missed an entire playstyle that is large even today but in the past was dominate.

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.

You are. You are so radical your way that I will honestly say I've never met a gamer like you face to face. You are rare here where the most radical and unusual viewpoints often congregate.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Who?

Who has said this?

Name, or rather quote, two people in this thread who have explicitly said that, that players are absolutely never at fault and DMs are always at fault.

I'll wait. If the thread is "full of them," you should be able to find two examples easily.

The double standard is in treating the DM as an incorruptible angel. That's why I'm calling it out.

Dude, you yourself wrote something like this:

You explicitly did not say that. You said, verbatim, full post quote, relevant section bolded:

There is ZERO room for discussion during session OR AFTER. The one and only thing the player can do is "suggest." A suggestion is the weakest possible contribution a person can make; anything less than a suggestion becomes mere vague hinting. This is not a tolerable situation--ever.

You made a strawman of other person's argument and built a strawman that requires the assumption DM WILL be a tyrant and players WILL be iunnocent to actually be effective scaremonger you are using it for.

I don't feel like looking up whole thread for second argument, so have this guy:

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.

This is, once again, only a problem if you operate from belief every DM WILL abuse the power given. If it is a mere possibility, then, just like a bad player, it should be solved on individual group's level, right? If you need rules designed to disempower DM, it fundamentally shows you assume either all DM's or vast majority of them are inherently tyrannical and every or overwhelming majority of problems are DM's fault, while treating problem players as an individual problem to handle on case-by-case basis.

 

[Emerikol]

False dichotomy: you claim the only possibilities are an "absolute power" DM or a "wishy washy" DM. There are other possibilities, such as a collaborative DM (e.g. "let's put our heads together and figure this out"), a division-of-labor DM ("you track initiative, and you track party finances, and you keep notes for me because I always forget" etc.), or a DM that solicits player inputs and then weaves something from those, which I sadly don't have a nice pithy name for.

For my style, DM absolute power is mandatory. I said for other styles it may not be. Go back and check what I wrote.

Maybe! Maybe not. What if that player is the one actually hosting the game? Or if that player is friends with the FLGS owner, so if you boot them you can't run the game in that space anymore? Or that player is best friends with one of the other players and the significant other of a second player, so that you're not booting out one player, you're booting out three and suddenly the game ends from lack of participants?

It's never as simple as you think--and we're talking about worst-case scenarios, right? We're pointedly not considering best-cases here.

Okay well most of the time it is not that but let me be absolutely clear. This is a non-negotiable. And any FLGS owner who booted me is choosing to boot a lot of profit. But I don't tend to run games in stores or at cons. I run them at homes and if someone at the home has to be booted then we meet the next week at another house. And if by some strike of lightning I get three people who are unsuitable for my style of play, (I've really failed the vetting because I get the players to assent to this far in advance), then I drop the campaign. Playing a game that would be a miserable experience for me is not on the table.

No rulebook can ever take away my right to speak up when I see bovine feces. So where does that leave us?

Yeah....that was pretty obvious, I'm afraid.

It means you are booted from my campaign and you play with some other DM and I play with some other player. Not everyone has to play a game together. I wouldn't even necessarily dislike you for it. I just know your style of play is not one I like and we agree to disagree.

 

[Emerikol]

You explicitly did not say that. You said, verbatim, full post quote, relevant section bolded:

There is ZERO room for discussion during session OR AFTER. The one and only thing the player can do is "suggest." A suggestion is the weakest possible contribution a person can make; anything less than a suggestion becomes mere vague hinting. This is not a tolerable situation--ever.

I don't understand. That quote totally vindicates what I said. You can only suggest if the DM has final veto power. It can be brought up and discussed but the final decision is the DMs. It's exactly what I said.

 

[AnotherGuy]

But his solitary imagination does not constitute an episode of RPG play.

I'd imagine you would respect that people play the game differently to group A, group B or group C.
What you're describing may be an episode of someone else's RPG play but not necessarily your preferred style.

I feel we may also have to account for the experience of the DM, because if it was as bad as you say (and this format can make things appear far worse than they actually were), I'd be inclined to think that DM did not have much experience and likely did not have the answers to your questions and thus communicated that using the fiction, which is bad play by a DM but not uncommon for someone inexperienced.

My time online has broadened my knowledge on DMing by conversing with others. I would not have gained that if I'd kept playing with my mates without exposure to other ideas and styles of play.

 

[Oofta]

By rule the DM has all of the power people keep saying they don't have. The only limit on DM power is the tolerance of the most tolerant available players. And the lack of DMs lowers that bar significantly.

The answer to bad DMing is for players to leave games. The answer to bad players is to kick them from your games. But here we are on tyrannical DMs again.

I've had bad DMs, it happens. I've had DMs that run a game I'm not interested in. The mythical tyrannical DM? It could happen, in theory. Over decades of play I've never seen one or heard of one in real life.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Yes, I am making assumptions. I assume that if there is no DM there is no game. That if someone doesn't like the game I run they can leave, which over decades of DMing has happened a couple of times. That as a DM if I ask someone to leave and they do not, I can leave.

I did have to ask someone to leave the table in a public game because they were being verbally abusive. At one point I did not invite someone to the next game*. If I were at someone's house and chose not to DM for them any more I would find a different venue and invite everyone else. If it were bad enough (e.g. the verbally abusive player) I would pack up my things and leave.

What, exactly is a player going to do if I don't want to DM for them? Chain me down to my chair? I am following the assumptions as defined by the game I've been playing for close to half a century now that the DM makes the final call and it's worked just fine. Obviously you try to work things out before it gets to the point where someone is no longer part of the game. Most of the times when things don't work out it's just a difference of preference and what you want out of the game.

So I'll ask one more time, although I did not ask you directly. What happens if the DM says "No" and the player disagrees? Take the current discussion about whether a thief can use fast hands to cast a spell off a scroll as a bonus action if the spell normally takes an action. As DM I say "No", a player says "Yes". There's no compromise here either it works or it doesn't. There is no compromise, no in-between, as DM I've thought about it and it's not going to happen. What happens next? Because someone has to decide. The DM can make the final call, the player can make the final call, you can put it to a vote.

*They were cheating, playing CN as insane and literally said they were a werewolf.