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.

 

[Lanefan]

What rule of AD&D are you referring to here? (There is no concept of a "knowledge check", at least as we were familiar with the rulebooks in 1990).

2e had roll-under-stat for such things, did it not?

Thus, what we now call a "knowledge check" would have been roll under Intelligence.

How is it metagaming? The MM records information about creatures, which we as players were familiar with, and which we then treated as the knowledge that our PCs had. That's not metagaming.

Did the GM go along with this or object to it, or was it even discussed?

Were I the GM and this came up, my first and last response would be along the lines of "Forget everything you've read in there because it may or may not apply here." Then I'd change a few commonly-encountered monsters and probably leave the rest largely untouched.

 

[ezo]

2e had roll-under-stat for such things, did it not?

FWIW 1E had it as per the Wilderness and Dungeoneer's Survival Guides, if not before.

 

[Oofta]

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.

I just don't care about how the sausage, or the world, is made. Is it coherent, logical and, most of all, fun to play? That's all that matters. They can have all the justification for decisions in the world and it may not be the game for me. In other cases they could have no reason at all and it can be a fun game.

 

[Lanefan]

Not sure what he was getting at & don't want to guess with a ten foot pole but I think it has been a while since the words "rule zero" have been printed on pages of the actual rulebooks. Pretty sure it got an occasional mention in old dragon magazine stuff every so often but it has been a while since I remember reading the words "rule zero" or "rule 0" on the pages of a d&d book beside whatever text it did contain carrying similar concepts.

Overall it's kind of a shame because not having it by name makes it harder to find when the obscure footnote is needed

Though the concept has been around since Day 1, the only place I can recall seeing "Rule 0" referenced by name in a rulebook is 4e.

 

[Maxperson]

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

I agree with that. The difference is that with one it's possible and with the other it's not. It's possible, but would be a horrible misuse of authority to do.

 

[Lanefan]

Those are not at odds. Use the power for good as I said above. And as a player I would not be engaged by your style of GMing. I'd be looking at my watch wondering how I can politely get out of there and not come back.

In fairness, going by the play reports and coverage he gives us, were I in a @pemerton game I'd quite likely find the premise and story and characterizations engaging enough to want to stick around.

The breakdown point would likely come whenever he asked me-as-player to contribute a setting element, to which I'd reply "That's your job, not mine".

 

[clearstream]

There is the ongoing set of players contributing to the campaign setting by their actions. The DM is also contributing to the campaign setting and he can do that at any time even with or without players. The obvious intent of course is for players to experience it at some point but it doesn't have to be inside a session. For example, I would work out a plot in my world where the King of one of my kingdoms is overthrown by treachery and a new King is on the throne. When a new group shows up to play that is established fact in the world they are playing. I'd argue the campaign begins when the DM starts creating the history in prep for his first session.

Here I feel you are introducing a new entity - "the campaign". I'm speaking about the played game.

Yes assuming it's the same campaign perhaps advanced a little in time. The effects of the old PCs could be discovered by the new PCs. Not every DM does that sort of thing. I don't do it all the time. I love world building so I will do a brand new campaign. To me the campaign is the setting with a continuing history. So can DMs have more than one campaign, yes. Does the number of groups equate to the number of campaigns? No. It could still be one campaign or it could be as high as the number of groups where each had a unique setting.

Yes. I would agree with Gygax. Even if they play in same "purchasable setting" like the World of Greyhawk, there is so much fiction that the DM has contributed on camera but more importantly off camera. There may be an assassin whose been tracking the party for months which they knew nothing about but the DM did. But in contrast, the DM knows of all the PC contributions to the fiction in his campaign. If the DM didn't run it or authorize it, it didn't happen.

Recollect that we've stipulated a fork in what is imagined by DM, and what is imagined by players. There is then no authoritative single game being played. Thus, reciprocally, if the players didn't authorize the DM contribution to their game, it didn't happen.

For me, a campaign represents a snaphot of the rules most of the time though I admit when editions changed some campaigns survive the change. But most of the time, if I decided for flavor reasons to establish some houserules those would hold for that campaign but perhaps not every campaign.

This continues to reference "the campaign". How are you defining that?

It's not a matter of superiority other than superiority of knowledge. The DM knows the campaign setting in ways the PCs can never know it. Even if they spend 20 levels their they will have barely scratched everything the DM would know. The DM is the possessor of the knowledge. If a group rejects a DM, and I agree some are worth rejecting, then they reject the campaign. The DMs actions and their campaign are often fused together.

Evidently, the players know their game in ways the DM doesn't, seeing as the DM imagines the hat to be green and they know it to be red. I hope this simple observation helps show that it is a matter of preferencing.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

I've both DMed and played in sessions where hours were spent planning something, only to have it all immediately fall apart when put into action because of something the DM knew all along that the players - for whatever reason - did not.

An example from a 3e game I played in: during a combat a wall of force had appeared across a chamber (I forget why). We won the battle but couldn't proceed further because the invisible wall was in the way. So, we retreated, sacked out for the ngiht, and spent half a session or more figuring out how were were going to get past that bloody wall the next day.

Next day we load spells etc. specific for getting us past the wall, go back to the chamber, use all those spells, and get beyond the wall. Only then do we realize the wall isn't there any more - none of us thought of it having a set duration (but the DM knew it did!) and had in fact gone away about half an hour after we left the chamber.

The DM's biggest challenge was keeping a straight face while we did all our planning.

It's not the DM's place to tell the players their plans are all for naught until-unless those plans get put into action and something goes adrift.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I just don't care about how the sausage, or the world, is made. Is it coherent, logical and, most of all, fun to play? That's all that matters. They can have all the justification for decisions in the world and it may not be the game for me. In other cases they could have no reason at all and it can be a fun game.

In my experience, well built worlds do far more to enhance the game than not. I'd much rather play in a custom world that is well done, than in a premade setting.

Here is where we might disagree. I think DM motivation can matter here. Because your underlying motivation is actually really hard to hide. It's like a solid black tattoo that you are trying to cover up.

As an example, if my world building motivation is a political commentary on the perceived shortfalls of capitalism, it would be hard to both make the world adhere to my motivation, and hide that motivation from observers. In a divided society, where tempers often run high, this has implications.

This is because I can't imagine I would compromise on making it fulfilling to me by lessening the importance of my motivation. And even if I desired to, this would be a difficult task to do mentally. As such, I am likely to do a poor job at the obfuscation.

So I think how the sausage is made, or more accurately why the sausage was made, is important to player experience. It can be a sort of tinted lens through which a player views the world. And in situations where a player has negative preconceived emotions relating to the motivations, it can cause issues.

Obviously, the more focused your audience, the less of an issue there is. But I know many wish to keep fantasy and real life separate, so I suspect this has fairly broad applicability.

EDIT: Fixed a typo

 

[Lanefan]

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.

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.

More simply defined as "fanfic vs official canon".