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]

That is ultimately the divide. The fiction of the world is not shared. The activities of the PCs is how the PCs interact with the world but the fiction of the world is the DMs. As a player I absolutely want that. I'd be grinding my teeth with you willy nilly introducing fiction that was not the role of the player. I will admit I am not as good at finding good DMs as I am at finding players. I do DM more. So I have found myself in a few campaigns where I was glad when the session was over and I could leave the game.

I don't think you understand what I mean by the shared fiction.

It is the whole of the game. To play a RPG with people just is, at its core, to imagine stuff together.

When I say (as my PC) "I walk north", that is making something true in the shared fiction, about what my PC does. If the player has no authority to make anything true in the shared fiction, then - as @EzekielRaiden posted upthread - they are not actually a participant in the game at all; they are just a witness.

In those days, different approaches officially didn't exist.

I don't know what this means. Lewis Pulsipher wrote about different approaches in White Dwarf in the late 70s. I was aware of them in 1990. I didn't have a particularly good vocabulary for describing them, but it wasn't a mystery that they existed.

 

[pemerton]

So it's semantics. Got it.

You think it's purely semantic to assert that it is breaking the rules for a player to query a GM's proposed contribution to the shared fiction?

 

[Emerikol]

I don't think you understand what I mean by the shared fiction.

It is the whole of the game. To play a RPG with people just is, at its core, to imagine stuff together.

When I say (as my PC) "I walk north", that is making something true in the shared fiction, about what my PC does. If the player has no authority to make anything true in the shared fiction, then - as @EzekielRaiden posted upthread - they are not actually a participant in the game at all; they are just a witness.

You keep changing back and forth. If you walk into a tavern and say "I talk to the big green orc at the bar" and in the campaign there is no orc that is creating fiction. If the orc becomes real on the spot then that would be creating the fiction. I have no dispute with acting within your character (actor stance) and interacting with the world. I suppose the resulting events are ongoing fiction but I'm talking about the former not the later. And while not at all common, the DM has the right to say, "When you try to walk north you hit an invisible barrier and stop". So it doesn't become shared fiction until you announce what you are doing and the DM says "Okay, what do you do next".

edit: And saying a kobold succumbs to questioning is creating fiction. Trying to interrogate and waiting on the DM to say what happens is not as I'm using it.

I don't know what this means. Lewis Pulsipher wrote about different approaches in White Dwarf in the late 70s. I was aware of them in 1990. I didn't have a particularly good vocabulary for describing them, but it wasn't a mystery that they existed.

There are zillions of ways a game can be different. I'm not talking about the differences between a Monte Haul campaign and a standard campaign. I'm specifically say the story game shared fiction mentality (see above what I mean) was not a thing in the 70's. At least not in the D&D world.

 

[Oofta]

Yes. I've repeatedly stated that it was made clear to the GM that we - the players - did not accept his proposed characterisation of Kobolds.

This is where I ask, again, why am I under any obligation to humour a GM who is wasting my time?

That GM claimed to be experienced. Yet was terrible. I have been GMed by a friend of mine - using Burning Wheel - who has GMed only a dozen sessions or so but leaves that GM absolutely for dead. It's some of the best GMing I've experienced: a vibrant sense of the fiction; a powerful sense of consequence; and engaging situations. Why would I spend time being bored and frustrated by a terrible GM, when I could spend time running a game that I and others enjoy, or being GMed by someone who does an amazing job?

I mean, just to start: what sort of terrible GM allows the players to spend time at the table coming up with a plan to capture and interrogate a NPC, and then to begin to operationalise that plan, if the whole time they are planning to narrate the NPC as incapable of answering questions? If they want to run their railroad, at least have the courtesy to be upfront about it and spare everybody that hour or whatever of wasted play time.

From what you've stated, it makes it sound like you had a hissy fit because the DM didn't allow a plan to work. That because you seem to believe you had a good plan it should have worked and the DM had no control over the result.

Who is railroading whom in this scenario?

I'm not saying the GM in this scenario handled things correctly. But sometimes, like in life, “The best-laid plans of mice and men oft' go awry …and leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!”

 

[tetrasodium]

I've been posting in threads with @pemerton for 15 years, I've never seen a post where they have said that someone is playing "wrong".

One can express distaste for certain playstyles without saying that it's wrong.

It's absolutely 100% possible for a player to be playing "wrong" in a particular game, Here are many examples of how

Spoiler: examples within

The idea that nobody can ever say a particular style of play is wrong only serves to insulate those behaviors & that insulation has really been taken to extremes for the last ten-ish years.

 

[pemerton]

Rule 0 has nothing to do with railroading. It's insulting to keep framing it that way.

If the game is not to be a railroad, then the players must have the authority to establish elements of the shared fiction. If players have the authority to establish elements of the shared fiction, then the GM's authority over the shared fiction is not unlimited or absolute.

Hence, whatever rule zero is, if it's compatible with non-railroading it cannot be an unlimited power to establish whatever fiction the GM wants to. The GM must be under constraints of some sort. The most basic source of such constraints is the action resolution rules.

 

[Maxperson]

One can express distaste for certain playstyles without saying that it's wrong.

I personally have never eaten a single playstyle that tasted good.

 

[pemerton]

That was a lot of text to dodge a simple question. The DM says the rule works like X, the player says Y. X and Y are not compatible, there is no compromise. What happens?

You've been told: they discuss it and come to agreement. I provided some examples of that happening.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know what this has to do with anything.

"We capture and interrogate the Kobold" is not "making up the setting". "I use my spell to transmute the rocks into mud" is not "making up the setting". That has nothing to do with whether the GM has "absolute power" to say whatever they like in response to those action declarations, or is constrained (in various ways - eg by rules, principles, expectations etc) in how they respond.

It's trivial to conjure up examples that pertain to setting details and yet would - I think quite routinely - provoke player responses that query what the GM is putting forward.

First, there's stuff that might be contrary to good taste or to moral norms: say, stuff around sexual violence, vicious racism, graphic torture, etc.

Second, there's stuff that might be contrary to something that the players have been taking for granted - eg suppose the players have, in the development and play of their PCs, been assuming that nobles in the world take honour seriously, and have demonstrated this in the play of their PCs (by way of their banter, the sorts of actions they declare, the way they admonish dishonourable NPCs, etc). If the GM then decides to have leading noble NPCs tell the PCs that honour doesn't matter, that they are deluded to take it seriously, etc - basically pulling the rug out from under the players' assumptions about how the social and moral world of their characters works - then I would absolutely expect the players to query that. It's terrible GMing.

Third, there's stuff that's unfair or unreasonable. For instance, the players defeat some villains, but spare their lives, and release them on their own parole. And the GM - without even (for instance) calling for an appropriate social check or (in AD&D) without even making a loyalty or similar sort of check - then decides that the freed villains go back to the PCs' home village and pillage it. So the GM unilaterally, through their authoring of "off screen" events, turns the PCs' victory into a bitter failure. I think this is terrible GMing too, and as a player in this situation would make my view known.

As the 5e rulebook says, "if everyone had a good time and created a memorable story, they all win." It's a player's absolute prerogative to point out that the GM's proposed fiction is not creating a good time and is unlikely to be memorable except as a RPG horror story.

It doesn't sound like you made much effort to pointing out the issue you had. How did the DM respond to what you did say?

 

[Maxperson]

For example, the Elf doesnt need to be an "elf". It can reflavor to something matching the tropes of the setting.

When the player puts forth the reasons for wanting an Elf, the DM can normally accommodate that.

Either it's an elf or it's not. Refluffing the elf stat block into something else isn't playing an elf. It's playing a Goonygoogoo with stats similar to an elf. If a player wants to play an elf in such a setting, it will be disruptive.