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.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Replace can't do with shouldn't do and I agree with all of that. The DM has the ability to say, "No, because I don't want it to happen right now," but that would be a horrible abuse of his authority and more than likely a violation of the social contract as well.

 

[Mort]

The important point is that the DM's authority to adjudicate the fiction is constrained by plausibility, just as much as the player's declared actions are.

I accept the DM can say "No, because." But the DM can't just say "No."

One of my biggest red flags is a DM that constantly says no to reasonable things players are trying to do.

It makes me start to think the DM has a preconceived outcome (without telling the players he has one) or that he has a very specific set of things that "work" in mind and will reject/veto all the rest.

 

[Scribe]

The idea they can just 'oops nevermind' what would appear to be a major balance consideration just proves what I figured out when I looked into the math a few years ago.

The 'balance' as it was, is so loose in 5e, that it frankly doesnt matter or factor at all.

 

[tetrasodium]

Replace can't do with shouldn't do and I agree with all of that. The DM has the ability to say, "No, because I don't want it to happen right now," but that would be a horrible abuse of his authority and more than likely a violation of the social contract as well.

I think at the other end of the spectrum you have players who use whatever follows "no because" to discover things the PCs can't or shouldn't be able to know yet by stonewalling & continuing to push. I've been the GM & seen GM's eventually just starting to quite reasonably respond to those kinds of players without the "because x".

 

[Mort]

The idea they can just 'oops nevermind' what would appear to be a major balance consideration just proves what I figured out when I looked into the math a few years ago.

The 'balance' as it was, is so loose in 5e, that it frankly doesnt matter or factor at all.

Well, hopefully it's less "oops, nevermind" and more "After 10 years, here's what we figured out works better..."

But sure, anyone who thinks it's anything resembling an exact science as opposed to, at best, an educated guessing game is being overly optimistic.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

One of my biggest red flags is a DM that constantly says no to reasonable things players are trying to do.

It makes me start to think the DM has a preconceived outcome (without telling the players he has one) or that he has a very specific set of things that "work" in mind and will reject/veto all the rest.

Yes absolutely. And I think that was the actual issue @pemerton had with the GM in the kobold situation. So if this was a pattern, I find the decision to walk perfectly understandable.

 

[Oofta]

But it isn't "because I say so." You're doing it because you a particular aesthetic vision for your campaign setting that you're trying to curate. That's a very different rationale and should be presented as such.

I'm just saying that there can be a fine line that's not always simple. I may not allow elves because I was once traumatized when I used super glued to attach Spock ears for Halloween and now I don't allow any species with pointy ears.

In general I give DMs a decent amount of leeway even if I don't understand why they made a decision or if I disagree with it. Being able to justify a decision doesn't necessarily mean I'll agree with it, although I will agree it can help.

 

[TwoSix]

Replace can't do with shouldn't do and I agree with all of that. The DM has the ability to say, "No, because I don't want it to happen right now," but that would be a horrible abuse of his authority and more than likely a violation of the social contract as well.

To my mind, in a voluntary social activity "can't" and "shouldn't" carry equivalent weight.

 

[ezo]

And I think that was the actual issue @pemerton had with the GM in the kobold situation. So if this was a pattern, I find the decision to walk perfectly understandable.

We can't really know, but we can hope so.

It is unreasonable for a DM to rule an NPC kobold the PCs capture has an Intelligence 5, can't answer their questions because it doesn't really know anything or understand them or whatever? IMO, not at all.

But we now understand this was not the 1st session, and might not have been the first such instance when something the DM narrated annoyed the players, although we haven't been given furrther specifics and the incident was 35 years ago...

Regardless, you can never blame a player for feeling they need to walk away from a table. We aren't them. We might not agree with their reason, but that isn't really for us to judge ultimately. I hope everyone agrees on that at least.

However, again hearing only one side of the situation, we can't say anything really about the DM in question.

I think the only fair thing to say in this case is the DM's style did not agree with @pemerton or their concepts of a good D&D game.

 

[TwoSix]

I'm just saying that there can be a fine line that's not always simple. I may not allow elves because I was once traumatized when I used super glued to attach Spock ears for Halloween and now I don't allow any species with pointy ears.

In general I give DMs a decent amount of leeway even if I don't understand why they made a decision or if I disagree with it. Being able to justify a decision doesn't necessarily mean I'll agree with it, although I will agree it can help.

To my mind, there's a distinction between "I hate elves lol" and "I hate elves lol no seriously you can't play that elf character in my game."

I fully support a DM building a specific vision for their setting, even if it strikes me as oddball, if there's real thought and creative intent behind it. I'll happily embrace the DM's restrictions in those cases.

"No gnomes they suck", on the other hand, raises some red flags for me about how the DM's intent will match with my expectations.