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.

 

[Lanefan]

You are clearly far more tolerant of wasting your time than I am!

Perhaps I'm just that much more optimistic that given some time either the GM will improve or that I can find ways and means of making the game fun for me (and, hopefully, others) anyway, or both.

Yes, that seemed a minimal courtesy. He declined.

Fair enough.

 

[Lanefan]

It sounds to me like that GM has not done a very good job of getting the players to accept their narrations of stuff that is, traditionally in most RPGs, the purview of the GM.

Well, from my perspective the piece where the players and GM conflict over the (desired vs played) in-game weather rides mighty close to the piece where the players and GM conflict over the (desired vs played) intelligence of a captive Kobold.

What happens next is obviously going to depend on stuff that you have not specified in your example.

Ditto for your experience with the Kobold, which - given that the players all walked out over it - I have to assume is merely the tip of an iceberg. I'm curious as to what made up the rest of said iceberg.

And if it isn't the tip of an iceberg, all of you quitting the game over something this seemingly-trivial is really not a good look.

I thought you didn't believe in retcons!

If there's reason for a foe's intelligence to be worked out earlier, I'll do it; but most of the time the PCs' interaction with said foes consists of clobbering each other until someone falls down; and most creatures are capable of attacking and defending even if not otherwise sentient. Result: with cannon-fodder opponents that don't cast spells, 95+% of the time I either never have to work out any intelligence scores or can leave off doing so until the PCs interact with one in ways not involving weaponry and violence.

That said, I'll sometimes have a foe be unusually indecisive in combat if not told what to do, or - flip side - unusually quick at seeing what needs to be done and getting on with it or telling others to do so.

 

[pemerton]

all of you quitting the game over something this seemingly-trivial is really not a good look.

What norm do you think we violated? Why are we obliged to keep turning up to participate in a leisure activity that is of no interest to us?

And let's flip this around - the GM could have taken steps to improve things, but didn't. Why is that "not a good look"?

 

[Lanefan]

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 forgot the most important out-of-character statement in any game:

"Is there any more beer in the fridge?"

 

[Lanefan]

What norm do you think we violated? Why are we obliged to keep turning up to participate in a leisure activity that is of no interest to us?

Again, it seems there's more to this than just a played-as-dumb captive Kobold that made that game "of no interest" to not just you personally, but the whole lot of you.

What were the rest of the straws on this camel's back?

And let's flip this around - the GM could have taken steps to improve things, but didn't. Why is that "not a good look"?

Did the GM even know (he?) had things that needed improving?

With the Kobold example, you even noted that you all - perhaps begrudgingly - accepted it during the run of play at the time, and then at some later time after the session decided as a group to quit the game.

And while I get it that not every GM is suited to every player (and vice-versa), that in a game-club setting with somewhat random people this GM wasn't suited to any of you seems to push coincidence a bit far.

 

[clearstream]

Let's suppose the DM has an ongoing campaign like Gygax did where people come and go. The game is the DMs. It is Gygax's game. If a player leaves or all the players leave, Gygax will just bring in more players to that same game. It's the same campaign world. If the players go and buy the Greyhawk setting and one of them runs a game, that game is never the same game that Gygax was running. It's a new game based on the new DM.

That's a helpful example, and in line with what I've been thinking about Adventurers League. If I understand your purpose properly, you are not counting on Gygax's particular authority as an original designer of the game, and using him only as an example DM.

A question it raises is on what grounds do I say "the game" has persisted? First of all, one must say in what form does "the game" exist at all? I've claimed that it exists only while played. That view fits with my claims elsewhere that game-as-artifact is a tool for fabricating game-as-played. The artifacts I have in mind would include dice, rulebooks, maps of Greyhawk, DM notes and player character sheets. Although it might be an unfamiliar and rather objective way to put it, I would count the imagination of each participant among artifacts necessary to play a TTRPG.

What I have been referring to as "the game" all through, is the game as played. So the first question is to ask whether that is what you are referring to? It seems possible that what you're observing is that Gygax continues to own some artifacts that were used to fabricate "the game". You could then be saying that whatever game is fabricated in future with a new set of players will look enough like what was fabricated in the past with the now-departed cohort, that you're prepared to call it the same game.

If that is right, then I can make the same claim on behalf of the now-departed cohort given only that they create continuity with "the game" represented on their character sheets and in in their imaginations. One might say - "Let's meet on Tuesday night to continue our Greyhawk campaign." Gygax can say that they're not playing "the game" that they were playing in the past, because his imagination is no longer available to them. And they can mirror that claim right back, because their imaginations are no longer available to him.

A long while ago on these boards I claimed that the game played is distinct to each cohort of players, such that it is better to picture multiple versions of the game... one for each cohort. The versions can bear a very close family resemblance, but they are not utterly identical. That seems very obviously the case where groups disagree on the meaning of rules, for which examples abound on Enworld.

In conclusion, I would resist the claim to high ground you seem to be making by changing the sentence I bolded to read "All versions are new games based on their new participants." One response I can think of is to say "Very well, there are multiple versions of the game, but I count DM's version superior to that of the players". Which begs the question: why? The preferencing is a norm one can tacitly opt into, a fact about ones attitudes rather than an ontological fact about games.

 

[CreamCloud0]

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

i would instead frame it as the view that PCs are common folk of the world who don't have a literally encyclopedic knowledge of the world in which they inhabit, if you wanted to know how smart those kobolds were the option to make a knowledge check was right there rather than metagaming with the monster manual.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't know what work the word "right" is doing here.

It's rule zero of D&D. Other games work differently. They are not D&D.

But suppose that the GM and the player are unable to come to an agreement, then there will be no game

If a player refuses to change the backstory to one that is consistent with the setting, then they are refusing to play by the rules of the game, so they don’t get to play. The game goes ahead with players who agree to play by the rules.

The reason for this is simple: if the players have signed up for a low fantasy gritty realism game, and one player insists that their character is a space marine from the planet Mongo, then it spoils things for the other players.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

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!

There are plenty of good reasons for leaving a game, from “it’s boring” to “the DM is a racist”. But from what you have told us, the DM was playing according to the rules and acting in good faith.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

i would instead frame it as the view that PCs are common folk of the world who don't have a literally encyclopedic knowledge of the world in which they inhabit, if you wanted to know how smart those kobolds were the option to make a knowledge check was right there rather than metagaming with the monster manual.

Even if the PCs are scholars, kobolds might be unknown in the setting. That’s why the Monster Manual is a DM facing book. Players are not supposed to know the contents.