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]

Yes, the story is collaborative. But the players are making the choices, and the DM is responding to the choices.

I understand how it's supposed to work. How it's supposed to work doesn't change the fact that the DM has the power to break that by abusing his power.

 

[Lanefan]

And how many contemporary RPGers, or even RPGers in the 1980s, do you think were playing in that sort of fashion?

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, campaigns continuing while turning over players (be it quickly or slowly) were IME the norm.

Now that we've all settled into that "our friends now are our friends for life" phase of getting older, turnover isn't as common IME and is almost always due to either a) switching players from within a stable larger community or b) the grow-yer-own players program where an existing player's (or DM's) kid joins a game.

 

[Yaarel]

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, campaigns continuing while turning over players (be it quickly or slowly) were IME the norm.

Now that we've all settled into that "our friends now are our friends for life" phase of getting older, turnover isn't as common IME and is almost always due to either a) switching players from within a stable larger community or b) the grow-yer-own players program where an existing player's (or DM's) kid joins a game.

Everyone I have ever played D&D with, either is a good friend or became a good friend.

All this talk of kick people out or leave the table, sounds bizarre to me. It is alien to my D&D experience.

 

[Lanefan]

As far as rules, there has to be some process for how the final decision is made.

This isn't true in many other areas of life. RPGs are no different.

What @Oofta says above is true in every area of life.

The process is different in different situations e.g. deciding who will be prime minister takes a vote while deciding on a point of law takes a judge and-or jury while deciding on where to go for dinner takes a chat with whoever else might be going. But there's always a process.

The discussion here, of course, is around what specific process applies (or applies best) in D&D.

 

[Maxperson]

Which is the very reason the MM stats are merely suggestions. DMs have every right to tinker with them, heck the more modern versions of D&D have suggestions on how to do so.

AD&D was some of the most tinkered with D&D that I've played to date. Especially 1e. That said, if the DM altered kobolds to that degree, it probably should have been said or been able to be found out prior to that encounter. Doing it the way @pemerton describes makes it sound like the DM was just trying to keep certain information from getting out. There's no way to be certain which one it was, though. At least not from what we've been told so far.

 

[ezo]

Everyone I have ever played D&D with, either is a good friend or became a good friend.

All this talk of kick people out or leave the table, sounds bizarre to me. It is alien to my D&D experience.

When I was growing up, most of the players were friends of mine, while the rest we were "friendly" of course. No real "strangers" as we all knew each other from school, etc.

Much later in life, players (where I am) are few and far between IME, but because of other factors, I only see them mostly when we game. So, we're "gaming buddies" but not what I would call friends. We don't hang out otherwise, go out to celebrate occasions, etc. Again, when I was younger and in college even, I did such other activities with my friends and D&D was just something we did as well.

 

[Lanefan]

You're just making that up.

I don't recall how many sessions in we were when the events I described occurred. It was at least the second, and could have been the third or fourth.

Even four sessions isn't that much of a trial run.

I'd like to think I'd give it at least 10 sessions (or one completed adventure, if that takes longer) before pulling the pin.

I can tell you what they did wrong - they tried to GM a terrible, terrible game. I'm puzzled by this notion that players are duty-bound to humour GMs who run bad games.

Dare I ask what other sins this DM committed beyond playing an idiot Kobold as your party's captive?

Are you serious? I'm guessing everyone sitting at that table owned a copy of the AD&D Monster Manual, given that it came out in 1977, this game was in 1990, and (with the possible exception of one of us whom I never got to know as well) we had all been playing and GMing for years.

It's 2024 now, and I currently have 4 players. Of those, one's been DMing forever and knows the MM fairly well (but doesn't have it memorized by any means!), another is a sometimes DM who may or may not know the MM very well and may or may not even own one, and the other two - both of whom have been playing on and off for 30+ years - wouldn't dream of reading the MM or DMG as they are not DMs.

Well, the GM I'm talking about lacked that power. I mean, they tried, but they failed!

And again, we have some assertion of a duty on players to sit through terrible GM story-time.

You are correct that my first mistake was playing in this GM's game. Although that's not quite true, because the other players whom I met were worth meeting, and were good players in the game I started, and one of them is still a friend over 30 years later.

I did. That campaign that I started ran for about 9 years. At one point it had around 8 or 9 players, and was one of the more popular and well-regarded games in that particular university club. Some of the people who played in that game remain among my closest friends; and my current group is a direct descendant of that group, although none of them is an original player.

Part of what made my game popular is that it was known to have deep and rich fiction, and to not be a railroad.

Curious - did you invite the fired GM in as a player to show him how (in your view) it's done?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Dude, you yourself wrote something like this:

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 did not, AT ALL, presume that players are automatically without fault. I did not, AT ALL, presume that DMs are automatically at fault.

I was--as I have always been--saying that we must treat both sides the same way. Since there have been so many who immediately leap to "what do we do about problem players?", I have had to play the devil's advocate for the other side.

So! Are you willing to admit, then, that what you said is false? Because you said the thread was "full" of this stuff. It shouldn't be that hard to find a quote if it's "full" of such things!

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

This is, once again, only a problem if you operate from belief every DM WILL abuse the power given.

Nnnnnnnnnnope.

It is a valid concern that any given DM might.

For exactly the same reason that it is a valid concern that any given player might go bad. Isn't that what all this is allegedly for?

If it is a mere possibility, then, just like a bad player, it should be solved on individual group's level, right?

Then why do DMs need explicit rules telling them they have absolute power?

If you need rules designed to disempower DM

Nope. I need rules that actually DO empower them. Which means useful tools, wise advice, and rules that make their job easier, not harder. 5.0 is replete with the antithesis of that. Tools that barely work and are better ignored; "advice" that at best boils down to "you can do X, or not do X, you decide!" and in at least one case is actively anti-helpful; rules that barely work and have to be rewritten on the fly.

 

[Yaarel]

Much later in life, players (where I am) are few and far between IME, but because of other factors, I only see them mostly when we game. So, we're "gaming buddies" but not what I would call friends. We don't hang out otherwise, go out to celebrate occasions, etc. Again, when I was younger and in college even, I did such other activities with my friends and D&D was just something we did as well.

I am guessing, if they have the free time available, your gaming buddies would see a movie together, show up to a birthday party, and so on. For some of them, the D&D game really is all the time they have away from responsibilities.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

You still explicitly relied on a false dichotomy. You asserted that the only two possibilities are absolute power, OR wishy-washy. That is false. There are other options. An argument which is built on "there can ONLY be two options, A or B, and since B obviously sucks, we must do A" breaks down if there are in fact other options besides A and B.

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.

You have, again, completely missed the point.

Your statement was that the DM is uniquely special--that they and only they are the one on whom the game depends. This is false. While a mere player and nothing more is, yes, not guaranteed to be utterly essential, it is entirely possible for other players or even entirely separate third parties to be essential to the game. The DM is not uniquely special for being a necessary component--so any argument which depends upon the DM being uniquely necessary is not actually effective at whatever conclusion it's trying to support.