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.

 

[Oofta]

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.

Not those literal words, no. But they make it fairly clear, or at least seems to, that any campaign where the DM has complete authority over rules or narrating responses to character actions that is not to their liking is a railroad. A rose by any other name and all that.

 

[Emerikol]

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.

I think your terminology misuse is why people are confused. As I understand establishing fiction, I mean changing the setting outside the in world actions of the PC. I gave examples in another response. PCs obviously get to say what their characters do and in the vast majority of instances what they try to do they do. But in any given situation the DM could rule the attempt a failure for some setting reason. Having power is not exercising it 100% of the time.

 

[Maxperson]

But I can sit in my room just like the GM, and make up new stories about what my PC did after interrogating the kobold. I can even ask my other friends to join in. We could even make a game out of it!

Yep. You could in fact play a different game with different fiction in your room. You just can't play the game you left and the fiction you left, in your room with other friends.

That would be carrying the fiction forward, just as much as your suggestion that the GM is doing so.

It would be carrying a different fiction forward, unlike what the DM is doing. He is carrying the original fiction forward, not a new one.

 

[pemerton]

You're "getting in trouble" because you continuously tell us we're playing the game wrong because you run it a different way.

I've not told anyone they're running the game wrong.

My post upthread was this:

Rule zero makes no sense.

We're talking about a voluntary leisure activity. The participants can establish, among themselves, whatever rules they like. A commercial publisher like WotC offers to sell them a set of rules that present themselves as offering a fun time if followed. The purchasers of those rules can use them - or not - as they wish!

Not only is there no need to confer express permission on them to use them - or not - as they wish, but such a conferral is redundant, because it has no effect unless the published rules are adopted by a group - but then, as I said, there is no need to adopt those rules one doesn't want to use.

To the extent that rule zero tries to make the decision about rules adoption etc a unilateral matter for the GM it also makes no sense, as by definition no single member of a group can set the rules that govern a voluntary group activity. There needs to be consensus.

This is not a statement about whether anyone is doing anything right or wrong. It's a statement about the relationship between game texts, the rules they contain, and the actual social activity of a group of people playing a RPG together.

You appear to have established, with your group, a rule that says that they will go along with whatever you tell them is part of the fiction. Great! But the authority you enjoy comes from your group, not from a book. The book didn't need to say anything for you to gain that authority. And even if it said something different, you could be conferred that authority by your group.

 

[Maxperson]

Exactly. I can sit here right now and imagine new scenes with the interrogated kobold; even if I find those imaginings interesting, it's meaningless in terms of being a "game" or "shared fiction".

So could I, but what none of us can do is carry the original fiction run by that DM forward. We would all be creating a new and different fiction. Only that DM could move that original fiction forward, and he may have with a different group.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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?

I didn't say that. It's semantics to argue the concept of rule zero doesn't exist in a text because the term rules zero doesn't exist in a text.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Players can establish elements of the fiction through the actions of their PCs.

 

[pemerton]

Yes DM's can be bad. We are talking about the authority within the game that the DM has. The DM makes the setting and decides those things. If he is a bad DM, then the players find another. This constant "committee" that is overruling the DM is just not going to fly. No good DM and some bad DMs is going to tolerate such a committee in the playstyle I think D&D represents. Your DMing by committee may work for you but it won't for most people trying to play D&D who like D&D.

I don't know why you think it is better for the players to depart without explanation, than to express a view to the GM about why they don't want to accept the GM's proposed fiction. To me, the opposite seems the case: generally it makes sense for the players to express their views, so the GM can course correct. This seems less likely to lead to exploded games and people wasting one another's time.

 

[Emerikol]

I've not told anyone they're running the game wrong.

My post upthread was this:

This is not a statement about whether anyone is doing anything right or wrong. It's a statement about the relationship between game texts, the rules they contain, and the actual social activity of a group of people playing a RPG together.

You don't always come across as you wish to come across at minimum then.

You appear to have established, with your group, a rule that says that they will go along with whatever you tell them is part of the fiction. Great! But the authority you enjoy comes from your group, not from a book. The book didn't need to say anything for you to gain that authority. And even if it said something different, you could be conferred that authority by your group.

I would argue that the players assent to the rules in order to join the game. So sure it's been pre-agreed upon before the game starts. This is where a good campaign intro is very handle. Be clear and upfront. That helps people with different views find the right game for them. With the number of people out there desiring a game in almost all the known styles, the DM will get a group that wants what he offers if he does it well.

 

[tetrasodium]

IME if a player wants to play a banned/disallowed race and is not cool with "what about a dwarf with +2 int/-2 con instead of that elf" the table can 100% expect to see said dwarf start developing an entire civilization of forest dwelling cave dwarf sneering elvesdwarves who perfectly mirror the not allowed elven civilization. Even with those players who are cool with it there is stiull a fairly high likelihood of similar