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]

As I understand establishing fiction, I mean changing the setting outside the in world actions of the PC. I gave examples in another response.

And I posted this upthread:

Fiction: imaginary stuff.

Shared fiction: stuff that is imagined together, by a group. In the context of this discussion, that is a group of people playing a RPG.

The GM can imagine whatever they like in their own head, or when they go home and write up their notes, but that is not playing a RPG. Playing a RPG means creating a shared fiction together.

The shared fiction is what makes a RPG different from a board game, because the only limitation on the moves a player can make is that, when they declare that their PC does something, it must be something that is possible given the circumstances of the PC in the fiction. (The label for this constraint on action declaration is fictional position. In a board game I as a player have a position, but it can be described purely in terms of the logic/geometry of the game. In a RPG I (and my PC) have a fictional position.)

The terminology is not that opaque. Earlier in this thread you used the terms "actor stance" and "pawn stance" assuming that I would be familiar with them. Those terms have entered into use from the same body of discussion (20+ years ago now) as the terms "the fiction" and "the shared fiction".

 

[Emerikol]

And I posted this upthread:

The terminology is not that opaque. Earlier in this thread you used the terms "actor stance" and "pawn stance" assuming that I would be familiar with them. Those terms have entered into use from the same body of discussion (20+ years ago now) as the terms "the fiction" and "the shared fiction".

Right and in my everlasting seemingly attempts to nail you down, I'm saying
1. Actor stance means you state your action and the DM reacts. It might be to just say your action succeeded. It might be to say your action cannot succeed or you need to make some kind of check. It might also be to just say something is not possible.
2. Actor stance does not mean you establish any fiction besides the DM's reaction to the action you said you took.

 

[pemerton]

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

But if rule zero really means that the GM has unlimited power to decide what happens when a player declares an action for their PC, then a player can't do what you say they can do.

For the players to have that ability, there must be some constraints on the GM. I can point to classic D&D (OD&D, Gygax's AD&D, B/X) and tell you where those constrains are found: in the binding nature of the GM's pre-authored map-and-key; in the action resolution rules; and in some more diffuse principles and expectations (some inherent to the game; some that need to be developed over time, which mean that a given campaign should have a "sequence" of increasing complexity, and increasing contextual sensitivity, of tricks and puzzles).

I can do the same for 4e D&D as well, though given you have little interest in that edition I won't bore you.

It's not clear where any relevant constraints are found in 2nd ed AD&D or 3E as written (at least, it's not clear to me); but if they are to be played as non-railroads then some constraints must be adopted by the group.

 

[TwoSix]

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.

I think if the DM carries that fiction forward with an entire set of new players (and presumably PCs, unless the DM can convince a whole new set of players to play the old ones*), then you run into some Ship-of-Theseus definitional problems pretty quickly.

*And if the DM is somehow charming enough to convince an entire group of players to play a whole other group's old PCs, he probably deserves to be a "benevolent tyrant."

 

[ezo]

What would the point of this be? It's exactly the same outcome, except dragged out over N additional hours of playtime. Talk about time-wasting boondoggling!

Would it be? I don't know...

Again, whether or not this was a viable option depends on how the DM was running the game. Was it just that kobold who was dumb, or whatever? Was it all of them? Unless he implied in his response it was all of them, then it remained an option.

I mean it's obvious that the GM didn't respond satisfactorily, given that his players departed en masse. I vaguely recall him trying to protest about the meaning of Average (Low) intelligence, but have no memory of the details.

Well, as I've shown if he cited the kobold range of intelligence as his reason, he was correct. It was your faulty assumption the interrogation should be as if with someone of normal intelligence--that was not a guarantee and you could have accepted it, if other things were going well otherwise.

However, I realize you are fighting on several front, so to say, and since you fail to address other points I've made I'll step back for a bit. I will conclude (for now) regardless of the reasons why or your expectations, if you didn't enjoy the DM and his game style, you were correct to walk away. The DM might have even been glad to see such players leave. I know I've been relieved with some players stop coming.

 

[pemerton]

If you say "I interrogate the Kobold for information" and the DM says "You get nothing" then that is it. The DM controls the NPCs. You don't. You are trying to control something that is not your character. You said what you did and the DM said what the kobold did. You are trying to change the underlying fiction established by the DM when he created the adventure or campaign setting.

AD&D has action resolution rules. It's rules for interrogation are at the weaker end of things, but the reaction and morale rules would be a starting point. PCs have a CHA stat, which is not meant to be mere toothless flavour.

If I turned up to an AD&D game, and we got into a fight, and the GM just said "The Orc stabs you - you're dead", without invoking the action resolution rules, I can tell you I'd be out of that game too.

 

[ezo]

Whatever it is that players heart is set on, normally, there can be an accommodation.

LOL it is like an attack roll...

You can make a critcially good accomodation (20!!!)
You can make an accomodation. (N to 19)
You can fail to make one. (2 to N-1)
You can never make one. (1)

 

[pemerton]

The DM might have even been glad to see such players leave.

He seemed rather deflated when he was told that he no longer had a group of players. I have no idea how much he enjoyed the game that he subsequently started up - for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons we didn't really have much to do with one another subsequently, except as I mentioned on that one occasion when he was the GM of a tournament session that my friends and I played in.

 

[Oofta]

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.

The players have authority of what their PCs think, say and the actions they take*. The impact the players actions have on the world is determined by the DM. The DM having final authority over the world and results of player declarations does not make it a railroad, only the the DM ignoring all of the PC's actions makes it a railroad. You're misrepresenting the commonly accepted definition Rule 0.

...
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.
...

As DM I am not constrained in how I decide an NPC acts. I will have them act in whatever way I deem appropriate and whether I roll a die to determine that result (because their response is uncertain) is completely up to me. Same with the noble who is untrustworthy. Unless I state in my session 0 that in my campaign all nobles are honorary and trustworthy, as they say of financial investments "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." When I play in a game I wouldn't want it any other way.

I will note that if I'm going to do that kind of plot twist I'll drop a hint here and there. It recently happened in one of my campaigns that I dropped multiple hints that someone was not what they seemed but the group never followed up on it. The group admitted that they should have known something was up.

This is the kind of thing that makes me say you're telling us that playing the game wrong if we don't play it like you do. A DM that makes decisions or runs their game in a manner you disagree "terrible GMing". That's calling me, and most DMs I know, terrible DMs.

*There are exceptions for things like rules disagreements and the scenario needing clarification.

EDIT: if I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting something let me know.

 

[ezo]

He seemed rather deflated when he was told that he no longer had a group of players.

Well, he probably felt you (plural) were being unreasonable, too.

Blame is rarely, if ever, truly one-sided IME. Whether someone can accept that blame and how they handle it, is a different thing, of course.