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.

 

[pemerton]

It was the impression your post gave. GM you just met.

I didn't use the phrase "just met":

I was playing in a game run by someone I'd only recently met in the context of a university RPG club.

 

[Zardnaar]

I didn't use the phrase "just met":

Just saying that's the impression I got. Wasn't trying to put words in your mouth.

 

[pemerton]

All of those may or may not be game mechanics actually.

Is the Kobold easy to see? that's up to the DM and may involve a game mechanic.

Whether the player successfully picks up the rock is up to the DM and very well might involve a game mechanic (depending on if the DM decides one is appropriate).

The results of studying the door closely are, again, up to the DM, and if the DM chooses, of involve a game mechanic.

In D&D, In all of these situations, whether they requires a game mechanic and the likelihood of success, are all up to the DM.

Just to pick one of my examples: that my character is closely studying the door is not a game mechanic. It's a change in the fiction brought about by my declaring it to be so (assuming that my character is in the vicinity of a door, is not blindfolded or otherwise unable to see, etc).

The GM may or may not call for a game mechanic to be used (eg a Perception check in some versions of D&D) or use a mechanic themself (eg a roll to find secret/hidden things in older versions of D&D). But the action declaration itself is not a mechanic and doesn't depend on one in any version of D&D (again, assuming my PC is not restrained, paralysed, etc).

The DM says yes, without requiring a check - then yes the kobold is that cognitively incapable. This is the reality the DM has set. If players refuse to accept it, they are, literally, rejecting his game.

They are, literally, rejecting his proposed contribution to the fiction. Which is my point: the GM can't unilaterally create a shared fiction. The players have to accept it, and nothing can compel them to do so.

Of course there are parameters that guide expectations as to what will and won't be accepted, but in D&D these are traditionally very loose, in part because a good chunk of D&D advocates are very hostile to any attempt to state procedures of play in more definite terms than traditionally has been done.

But my point is a simple one: the GM did not succeed in making it true in the shared fiction that the Kobold was cognitively incapable of answering the PC's questions. Rather, his attempt to do that actually resulted in the shared fiction, and the game, coming to an end.

I think this statement is interesting. It leads me to believe that the purpose of the situation you laid out was solely to get others to condemn the DM.

Not remotely. To be honest I took it for granted that people would agree that it was terrible GMing - it strike me as self-evidently so even in the description of it, and moreso when the only person who participated in the episode, who is clearly a very experienced player and GM of RPGs, described it as such.

My reason for telling the story was to provide an example that refutes the claim that the GM has "absolute power" to establish shared fiction. Because it shows how that can fail - that is, how the players can reject a proposal from the GM with the result that it does not become part of the shared fiction. In the story I told, the shared fiction collapsed completely. If the GM had cared to save the game, then of course he could have withdrawn his proposed fiction and gone with something that fit within expectations of how Kobolds, warfare, interrogation etc work in AD&D.

But the bit that amazes me is that I have a thread full of posters saying the GM has absolute power, but the player is free to leave and then, when a player tells a story of leaving, nearly all of those posters say the player ought not to have left!

 

[pemerton]

Except you are ignoring that the fiction remains intact through the next group

I've got no idea what you're talking about here.

The next group did whatever they did. But what they did has nothing to do with the game I was describing.

The PC remains as an NPC and the fiction does in fact change.

I think it would be pretty weird for that GM to have kept all our PCs as NPCs. What would be the point of that?

I assume that he started a new game with a new group. That's certainly what it looked like at the time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Quite happy to comment on that. There is a lot of stuff said during the game that has nothing to do with playing the game. “how is the new baby?” “”I had covid last week” “this T Rex is the wrong colour”, and that’s before the terrible out of character jokes.

You have completely reversed what I said.

I did not say, "Everything said during the game is part of playing it."

I said, "nothing out-of-character is part of playing the game". That is: it is never the case that something is both OOC and part of play. That position is explicitly untenable, since character creation is both OOC and part of play, just as one founding example. Questions about the rules are also, necessarily, OOC but part of play, e.g. "How much HP do you have left?" "Tell me your Wis save bonuses, I'll roll them en masse" (one that actually came up in Hussar's game recently, albeit not in those words). "Roll for initiative" is explicitly OOC, but a direct instruction for play.

There are many, many, many things that are OOC and also part of play. That was why I said you probably don't want to commit to that. (Nothing to do with "comment upon" that.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But the bit that amazes me is that I have a thread full of posters saying the GM has absolute power, but the player is free to leave and then, when a player tells a story of leaving, nearly all of those posters say the player ought not to have left!

It is quite funny, isn't it?

You're supposed to vote with your feet, indeed many love to emphasize how that's the one tool always available to the player--and when you do, you've taken the nuclear option and thus you are actually at fault.

 

[pemerton]

I see terrible things being done by the players. Like using MM info to assume you know something meta about the kobold captive, for example.

So you seem to subscribe to the view that PCs are aliens who know nothing about the world that they (notionally) inhabit.

Whereas I think we were assuming that our PCs, as intelligent people some of whom spoke the language of Kobolds, and who had already been dealing with Kobolds who behaved more-or-less as one would expect if one was familiar with Kobolds from years of playing D&D, that if Kobolds were in fact wildly different from our expectations than (i) the GM might mention that as soon as we began planning to capture and interrogate one, and (ii) that the GM might have manifested that difference in the way the Kobolds had been presented up to that point.

But of course the GM didn't do (i) or (ii) because the GM didn't actually have a creative vision of Kobolds in "his" world. Rather, he didn't know how to adjudicate an interrogation, probably as a special case of a more general inability to run a non-railroad scenario.

 

[pemerton]

No, it an out of character comment, not part of playing the game. “Does my character believe it is normal for kobolds to be this stupid?” would be part of playing the game. In which case the. DM would ask for an Int (nature) check. Or “is this kobald faking?” Which would call for a Wis(Insight) check.

"Does my character believe <X>" is also an out-of-character comment (unless you're playing some sort of fourth-wall-breaking thing where the PCs know they are characters in a game). So I'm not sure what you criteria is for classifying comments as part of playing the game, or not.

But in the many hundreds, probably many thousands, of hours that I have spent RPGing, asking questions to get clear on the fiction someone is putting forward has always been part of the play of the game. It happens quite a bit, in my experience.

I've seen many examples on these boards of posters talking about how they, as GMs, ask players who declare actions the GM thinks silly or unwarranted "Are you sure?" Presumably that counts as part of playing the game, even though no NPC is saying that to the player.

So likewise, when players say to the GM "Are you sure?", they are playing the game. I mean, what else would they be doing? It's not a question being asked about anything else, or that has any meaning outside of the context of establishing the shared fiction in the context of playing a RPG,.

 

[pemerton]

If that backstory turned out to be incompatible with the setting, the DM would IMO have every right to veto it (respectfully of course, and perhaps offering a compromise).

I don't know what work the word "right" is doing here. The GM can express their dislike of it. They can propose an alternative. But suppose that the GM and the player are unable to come to an agreement, then there will be no game. And so there will not be a setting - just a GM's solitaire imaginings.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If that backstory turned out to be incompatible with the setting, the DM would IMO have every right to veto it (respectfully of course, and perhaps offering a compromise).

Indeed. You say something like "a very interesting backstory, but it would work better in the setting if you changed these things to this."

Generally, it a case of changing the names of places and people to ones that exist in the setting.