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]

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.

Do you, though?

I can think of well-known rock bands who turned over their entire lineup other than the one key person who was the band's core, and yet it was and remained the same band all the way through.

 

[TwoSix]

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.

That seems fair to me, because that's definitely a player fail. If you see a combat spell being cast, you should assume that it has some sort of duration; I would have allowed for an Easy Arcana check (or relevant system-specific check) to get a rough sense (minutes, hours, days) of how long it would last.

 

[Emerikol]

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

The campaign is what has been established by the DM as true in the setting. So if the DM has created ten countries in a particular area of the setting that is now campaign information. Some but not all of that may be provided early in the game and the rest might be discovered later. For example, imagine Gygax has detailed out a basic outline of the world of Greyhawk. He has a lot of detail around Greyhawk, such as city details etc..., and as you circle out he just has gazateer knowledge. Though in honesty even my gazateer knowledge is vastly more than is offered by the Greyhawk setting.

Every bit of that is the campaign. As the players move through the world gathering knowledge and impacting events, the setting changes or grows and that information is added to the setting thus changing the campaign. It is highly unlikely that any PC will ever know everything about the setting. A campaign set in Keoland is likely not going to care about what happens in the Great Kingdom. And I'm using Greyhawk to make the explanation easier. I almost always do my own setting. Nowadays always.

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.

The DM is the keeper of the official record of the campaign. For example, when the PCs defeat some evil that leaves a power vacuum and that means other forces will move in reaction to those events. All kinds of NPCs might be making decisions based on what the PCs did. The PCs don't know everything happening. They may see some aspects of it but they don't know that the collapse of a goblin stronghold is going to result in better farming output along the borderlands. I'm just making up examples don't take them too seriously other than as illustrations.

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

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.

The DM doesn't know the players motives or thoughts I agree but other than that the DM knows everything else whereas the players only have a slice. They may individually not even have the same slice.

 

[Oofta]

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 seperate, so I expect this has fairly broad applicability.

I can only use my personal experience. I limit species because I don't personally care for dozens of species inhabiting a single world. If my campaign was set in more of a crossroads setting I'd have no issue with it. Mos Eisley's Cantina makes sense because there are hundreds, if not thousands of inhabited planets in the setting. But I find settings like FR where there are dozens of species running around and new ones are added at the drop of a hat (or splat book) less believable. No, I don't find it convincing that whatever random species someone wants to play just happens to be from "a hidden valley far off". There's only so many hidden valleys!

If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably consider even fewer races. Or I'd just build as part of my lore that there are gateways to uncounted worlds and different species get dumped in the campaign world now and then. I can imagine settings where dozens of species make sense to me, it's just not my campaign setting. At least not without major upheaval.

But that's just me. I have a reason for it. I can even say that I like knowing how the different races interact and having basic ideas where their population centers are. But it really comes down to too many cooks spoil the broth ... erm ... too many species makes the world less believable to me.

 

[TwoSix]

Do you, though?

I can think of well-known rock bands who turned over their entire lineup other than the one key person who was the band's core, and yet it was and remained the same band all the way through.

Yea, that definitely isn't how I'd view it. It's a trademark of a band that has managed to keep a coherent sound because a lot of its identity was based on a single person, but I'd never say a band that replaced its guitarist or its drummer is the "same band".

 

[Lanefan]

This is a fun hypothetical. Let's assume the players from this fractured campaign assign one of themselves as the DM, and pick up the campaign from where they left off (except that the kobold actually does what they think it should.) The DM also continues the campaign with a new set of players.

Is one of those campaigns more the "continuous" campaign than the others? (Ultimately it doesn't "matter", of course, but as a thought exercise.)

If the players somehow had full access to the original GM's setting notes and backstory and ideas for the campaign and then remained true to such, one could argue the players' game is the more continuous.

Such access would, I think, be a very rare occurrence; and without it the original GM's campaign by default would be the more continuous.

A (regrettably) more common instance where something like this might happen is if the original GM dies and the players still want to continue the campaign, be it to honour the deceased or because they really enjoy that game or whatever.

 

[Lanefan]

Yea, that definitely isn't how I'd view it. It's a trademark of a band that has managed to keep a coherent sound because a lot of its identity was based on a single person, but I'd never say a band that replaced its guitarist or its drummer is the "same band".

So in your view there's been a dozen or more different Deeps Purple over the years, then?

To me there's only been one Deep Purple, just with an ever-evloving sound as its personnel come and go.

That's like saying the Vancouver Canucks aren't the Vancouver Canucks any more because they let some players go over the summer and signed some free agents to take their place. Gotta call bollocks on that one.

 

[TwoSix]

So in your view there's been a dozen or more different Deeps Purple over the years, then?

To me there's only been one Deep Purple, just with an ever-evloving sound as its personnel come and go.

That's like saying the Vancouver Canucks aren't the Vancouver Canucks any more because they let some players go over the summer and signed some free agents to take their place. Gotta call bollocks on that one.

A sports team and a band are different in that regard. A sports team is a holistic entity in concept, its identity is rooted in its trappings, history, and location much more than its individual membership. A band is smaller, and is ultimately a moniker that identifies the group, not vice versa.

You can go to a concert for Deep Purple in 2024 and say "I saw this band in concert in 1978," but you can't say "I saw this same band in 1978."

 

[Lanefan]

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

Good to know. I own those books but have never put them to any use and may not have ever fully read them.

 

[Oofta]

...
That's like saying the Vancouver Canucks aren't the Vancouver Canucks any more because they let some players go over the summer and signed some free agents to take their place. Gotta call bollocks on that one.

Well ... now that you mention it sports teams really aren't the same after a few years.