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.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

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.

I appreciate you clarifying your position last night.

As I understand it. The DM is the window through which you interact with the world. Any interaction done through that window is arbitrated by the DM - as they are the one with the knowledge about the world on the other side.

Under that assumption, the player autonomy from the DM ends at the body of the PC. After that, there is an expectation of benevolence from the DM but the DM has full creative control of the setting around the players. For example, if a player says "I raise my arm," I cannot think of a situation, outside of physical restraints, where a DM should say no. But if a player says "the world is flat" I think the DM has full power to say "no."

This extends to direct interactions. If the player raises their arm to touch something, I think most players would expect the DM to provide the sensory information, and not for the player to provide it. So the DM has the ability to interpret and adjudicate interactions with the world as well.

In your example of a kobold, we have incomplete information. The kobold being of certain intelligence looks like DM discretion, just as the tactile description of a item is. And it looks like this because it's outside the purview of any player. It is neither a PC nor directly connected to a PC. And seems to be well within the creative control the DM has over the world.

The incomplete information comes from not knowing any discussions on the world done before the situation at hand. If the group had decided a different "reality" in a session 0 type discussion, and the DM was simply ignoring that discussion, that would be different than if nothing had been said on the topic, and the DM was just interpreting the world in good faith.

The issue here is that DMing is not a science, you can have the same action by the DM be right or wrong based on the situation they are made in. The situation you described falls into that.

This is why, in my post last night, I found it interesting that you wanted a determination of fault based on incomplete information. DMing has far too much nuance in it to do that fairly.

The DM's decision is, theoretically, defensible. And players vetoing worldbuilding decisions is not the normal expectation. So absent more information, I don't know that any meaningful judgement can be made here.

 

[TwoSix]

The original is the continuous one.

The new campaign where the players assign a new DM won't have the old DMs notes and plans, so it can't really continue on with the same fiction. Nor will the new players know what the old DM has NPCs doing behind the scenes in response to their already played out interactions. And lastly, players miss things that can still impact the game in the future, but they won't have knowledge of those in their game.

They will be creating a new, but similar game and playing that one. It can't be a continuation of the old game's fiction, though, because there are too many variables that they don't have.

Fair. I disagree, but that's because I don't view any external guidance (such as notes) as being relevant to the state of the fiction at the current time. It guided the DM to the current game state, but it isn't actually present in the fiction.

Group A that uses the DM notes will arrive at a different fiction than Group B that doesn't have the notes, but they're still just two branches from the same tree. (IMO, of course.)

 

[Emerikol]

Yes, and you you would be amazed how much cheating goes on in chess. Any tournament, even at school chess club level, has umpires, and it's a difficult job.

Maybe at the kids level but I think very little at the adult level. I've played in tournaments and we had a tournament director but he didn't hover over us unless it was a special situation. The person winning was running out of time on the clock.

 

[Yaarel]

It depends what you mean by “tyrant”. In their role of referee they have to have the final word over the rules. In their role as world builder they have the final word over the fiction, so that all the participants have, as much as possible, the same mental movie playing. They play all the NPCs (not always in my game, but my game is an outlier), and determine events in the game word. They decide what monsters are in the dungeon, they modify or invent them to better support the fiction

But they don’t do these things in tyrannical manner, they do them so as to create the best experience for the players. To borrow a phrase from Pratchett, they are a semi-benevolent dictator.

The way I look at.

The DM is responsible for the setting, and the player is responsible for the hero. In those areas that overlap, both the DM and the player need to agree.

 

[DarkCrisis]

But what the DM CAN'T do is say "No, because I don't want that to happen right now."

Wanna bet?

Ive come across many players who do the ol' "Thats what my character would do" campaign disruption BS and I as DM was like "No, you don't." because it ruins everyone else's fun. No player or DM is an island. It's a group activiate and as much as I hate having to do it sometimes there is good reason for the DM to say "No."

 

[Emerikol]

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.

Well consistency is important. The problem is the DM knows a lot that the players don't know and can't know. What if the orc had a truestrike and you didn't know it? Now I agree on one thing: an arbitrary DM will not be a good DM. But the DM is not bound inexorably to adhere to all the rules in every circumstance. He can bend them for good reason.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think "final say" gets overemphasized. The DM is ultimately the arbitrator when there's a lack of clarity about the fictional positioning. But the DM must allow players to take the actions and specify the results allotted to them by the rules, unless they give a reason that those actions or results are rendered implausible by the fiction.

If a player wants to cast fireball on a group of kobolds, the DM can forbid it because the kobolds are 500' away and that is well outside of the range of fireball.

They can stop the damage from happening because an enemy spellcaster cast counterspell.

They can forbid the damage from occurring because the targets are underwater, and fireball can't penetrate water.

They can forbid the fireball from being cast because of a secret antimagic field. They can withhold the actual reason at that time, but there is an implicit promise that there IS a reason and that reason is able to be determined (even if it never actually is determined in play).

But what the DM CAN'T do is say "No, because I don't want that to happen right now."

Now, some DMs might object to some of those examples because of other play concerns, but the overall principle is core to the play loop of pretty much all GM-led games.

Yes, of course. But there is not any external list of "reasonable things" and like you say different people might disagree on what is reasonable. For example to me your fireball to water ruling seems pretty reasonable, but I don't believe that's how the rules actually work, so might be "unreasonable" ruling to some. So ultimately this is just self regulation, which is probably at least somewhat influenced what the GM expects the players to find acceptable.

 

[abirdcall]

It's not as big a deal when dealing with a common monster. When a PC uses knowledge that really is very rare and his PC would absolutely not know that is bad. And I agree in a situation where you know PCs have monster knowledge, you should mix things up but I don't have to warn them. If you use fire on troll and the fire heals the XYZ troll that is lesson learned. If you do this enough your players stop using metagame knowledge. (and yes perhaps a Troll isn't rare enough for the example but that is the idea).

I think there are some monsters where PCs are encouraged to meta game as it is part of the fun.

For example, flesh golems are healed be lightning. If a player makes the connection to Frankenstein's Monster being animated by lightning that's good fun.

 

[TwoSix]

Wanna bet?

Ive come across many players who do the ol' "Thats what my character would do" campaign disruption BS and I as DM was like "No, you don't." because it ruins everyone else's fun. No player or DM is an island. It's a group activiate and as much as I hate having to do it sometimes there is good reason for the DM to say "No."

Sure, but that's ultimately a metagame action to step out of the fiction and address the player in real life. Policing a group abut playstyle issues is often done BY the DM, but it's explicitly different from the DM's role as arbitrator WITHIN the fiction.

 

[Oofta]

Wanna bet?

Ive come across many players who do the ol' "Thats what my character would do" campaign disruption BS and I as DM was like "No, you don't." because it ruins everyone else's fun. No player or DM is an island. It's a group activiate and as much as I hate having to do it sometimes there is good reason for the DM to say "No."

That's a very rare exception to the general rule in my experience fortunately. Another example would be one PC attacking another player's PC. I know some tables allow it, in my game the player initiating the attack has to get permission from the targeted PC before any effect is rolled. On the other hand, I have a no evil PC rule. That doesn't mean the PC can't commit evil acts, just that if they do they become an NPC. If I think the player is not clear on what an evil act constitutes (I consider torture evil for example) then I will ask them if they really want to proceed.

But as they say, every rule has an exception including this one.