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.

 

[tetrasodium]

As someone who has seen more than one player skimming through the module on their phone during AL games (my tables and tables of other GM's) and even had a player once tell me that they thought it was unfair that I wouldn't tell them the module "so they could prepare" for a nonAL personally created game who has had to deal with far too much browbeating from players referencing FR lore in the 5e books during my eberron games when the two differ in ways not immediately convenient to them it warms my cold black heart to.see dozens of pages where 5e's Jason problem is on full display over the right of players to overrule and politik behind their GM's back if monsters in play don't match the MM statblock closely enough.

 

[Yaarel]

What this is is a belief system, not a truth. And if you happen to believe it, you will be struggle to play D&D, since trusting the DM is core to the game. It the same as someone without an imagination will struggle to play D&D. Trust, like Imagination, is a core skill to playing D&D.

Trust is always a player choice.

Trust is never a DM entitlement.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Trust is always a player choice.

Trust is never a DM entitlement.

Sure, but the player needs to choose to trust the DM in order to engage with the game. If they don’t, then, as already pointed out, D&D does not work.

 

[Yaarel]

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

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.

As far as I can tell (DnDBeyond), the phrase "rule zero" doesnt exist in 5e in the official core rules? Or, can someone find it for me?

 

[Yaarel]

Sure, but the player needs to choose to trust the DM in order to engage with the game. If they don’t, then, as already pointed out, D&D does not work.

It isnt necessary to "trust" the DM to play D&D. For example, a game style that emphasizes mechanics, and makes it a combat game with explicit mechanical rules and procedures (like chess), requires little or no trust. And this style attends to the wargame origins of D&D.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It isnt necessary to "trust" the DM to play D&D. For example, a game style that emphasizes mechanics, and makes it a combat game with explicit mechanical rules and procedures (like chess), requires little or no trust. And this style attends to the wargame origins of D&D.

Even chess has an umpire who the players need to trust.

 

[Yaarel]

Even chess has an umpire who the players need to trust.

Heh, I have never played chess with an "umpire". What exactly does one do? Make sure a player doesnt cheat while the other isnt looking?

 

[tetrasodium]

It isnt necessary to "trust" the DM to play D&D. For example, a game style that emphasizes mechanics, and makes it a combat game with explicit mechanical rules and procedures (like chess), requires little or no trust. And this style attends to the wargame origins of D&D.

That's a pretty extreme style of war gaming inspired play that you are marking out... No even if you travel the range of play styles to that far end of the scale it is still necessary to trust the gm. In some ways it is even more necessary to trust the gm than a more social/exploration/narrative leaning style simply because it adds the need to trust that the gm will be fairly calling balls and strikes while fairly playing the monsters as prepared rather than changing things up as convenient to all
The other stuff players normally need to trust their gm about.

 

[Yaarel]

That's a pretty extreme style of war gaming inspired play that you are marking out... No even if you travel the range of play styles to that far end of the scale it is still necessary to trust the gm. In some ways it is even more necessary to trust the gm than a more social/exploration/narrative leaning style simply because it adds the need to trust that the gm will be fairly calling balls and strikes while fairly playing the monsters as prepared rather than changing things up as convenient to all
The other stuff players normally need to trust their gm about.

The point is, the assumption that D&D requires a "DM tyrant" is false.

 

[mamba]

That bit - both have to agree (or, better, everyone has to agree) - is where the symmetry resides.

I understand that it is what you meant by symmetry, but there are so many things in how the shared fiction is established where the role of DM and player differs considerably that I would not use the term