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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then they should actually show that it must be that simple all the time, rather than pretending that it is, or coming up with easily defeated examples.

It's not a specific example. If you really think that a situation where two people want mutually exclusive things (whether x or y or x or not-x) and cannot agree on a compromise is so vanishingly small that it doesn't bear thinking about, you should expect to continue to experience pushback.

 

[Oofta]

How the sausage is made is, in contrast, a very high priority for enjoyment of the hobby for me.

I care about making the sausage. I never ask for details about how a DM preps or why they do what they do.

 

[ezo]

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

They were actually both very full of good information if you wanted to add the extra depth to your game.

 

[Oofta]

I have not dodged it. I have shown, repeatedly, that it's not that simple. That's my point! You want to box me into a false situation.

"Have you stopped embezzling funds?" is a loaded question. I refuse to answer your loaded questions because they are loaded questions.

Except I'm not asking if you are still embezzling funds. I'm asking if embezzling funds is okay. It's not a hard question to answer, you just don't want to.

For that matter, you don't even have to answer from a D&D perspective. I'm curious how other games handle it.

 

[Oofta]

Then you are wrong. It is a scientific fact that different sets of rules and procedures do in fact encourage or discourage prosocial behavior. TTRPGs are no exception.


See above. People are, objectively and scientifically, emboldened to do worse things when they see things like people getting away with worse things and experiencing no consequences for it.


People are not inherently good or evil, but they are subject to temptation and to exemplars. Badly constructed rules actually do make more bad exemplars, which leads to more people choosing to follow in their footsteps. Nobody is born a bad DM. It's ridiculous to claim otherwise: and, more importantly, it's a moral claim far, far stronger (and more offensive) than any I have made here.


No one is a jerk no matter what. That's literally saying some people are just born jerks. It doesn't work that way.


Whether you disagree or not, the facts are what they are.

Claiming your opinion is fact does not make it so.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I did not, AT ALL, presume that players are automatically without fault. I did not, AT ALL, presume that DMs are automatically at fault.

Then you need to learn to better communicate your ideas.

So! Are you willing to admit, then, that what you said is false? Because you said the thread was "full" of this stuff. It shouldn't be that hard to find a quote if it's "full" of such things!

From my perspective, I literally grabbed first nearest post and you started bending over backwards to say why they don't count. I don't feel like playing the game where you are set off from the beginning to dismiss every example.

It is a valid concern that any given DM might.

For exactly the same reason that it is a valid concern that any given player might go bad. Isn't that what all this is allegedly for?

From what I have seen in this thread, the concern is that both Dm or player may go bad but the SOLUTION to that is to take away power from the DM and give it to the player, but if player goes bad...well, that's either an individual table problem or fault of the DM that can be solved by taking more power away from the DM. There is also never any talk ot player responsibility or the player taking some responsibilities from the DM if they want to take the power. Just "more power to the player, remove the DM".

Then why do DMs need explicit rules telling them they have absolute power?

reading comprehension crisis is this bad, huh?

Nope. I need rules that actually DO empower them.

After our interactions, I doubt it.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

They were hyperbolizing--but they were not joking. That is, the presentation was meant to be funny (it isn't, of course, but that's what they meant it to be). The heart of the message, however, was fully sincere: the "Viking Hat" DM is the absolute dominant master of the table.

That's why I said what I said. Maybe don't lay claim to the "Viking Hat DM" label so proudly. It doesn't have great roots.

No, it's very clear to me that this person is presenting a clear example what not to do in a humurous, sarcastic way. You just choose to see them as sincere because you lacked an argument and making a strawman was easier than actually searching for a geniue example. Some real "I think Coolville sucks" presentation of another person.

 

[Maxperson]

Then you are wrong. It is a scientific fact that different sets of rules and procedures do in fact encourage or discourage prosocial behavior. TTRPGs are no exception.

Sure. Rules like, "Be sure to override anything your players say and make them do what you want." will encourage that sort of behavior. Simply having authority will not. D&D doesn't have rule to encourage horrible DM behavior.

 

[Oofta]

Sure. Rules like, "Be sure to override anything your players say and make them do what you want." will encourage that sort of behavior. Simply having authority will not. D&D doesn't have rule to encourage horrible DM behavior.

I will grant that some of Gygax's advice was pretty terrible if you followed what he said. Things like (paraphrasing) "If the players are overly cautious, punish them! Use earworms to kill them and mimics to eat them." But even then, we just ignored it because we weren't a-holes, or at least didn't want to run that kind of game.

But that's an extreme, and it doesn't apply to any modern version of D&D.

 

[pemerton]

Aliens invade your town. Does that make you an expert on their biology and culture?

If I can speak their language, I know something about their culture, yes.