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.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's my issue with much of this. The proposed solutions have zero chance of solving the hypothetical problem. But no one wants to talk about social skills, so instead we continue to try to solve social problems with words on paper.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The rules have a zero percent chance of completely eliminating the problem.

They have a very meaningful chance of helping the problem--of making it less likely to happen, and making it easier to mitigate in mild cases, and easier to identify in general, and easier to clearly articulate consequences for doing.

Maybe I should go back to my hole. I'm getting excited.

If you prefer not to respond to this post, that's perfectly fine. I will not take that as a concession--simply a "I need to leave this conversation for my mental wellbeing."

 

[Zardnaar]

There are people like @Emerikol that refer to the DM as benevolent dictator (correct me if I misremembered!) but it's also clear that they're talking about enforcing the rules of the game, the narration of character action, the world outside of the narration of the character's actions.

They are not dictating player behavior, choices or actions. There are rare exceptions of course, like in my game if a player has their PC attack another PC, it's up to the target PC to decide if anything potentially happens.

That's kinda the DMs job. Velvet glove would be another way.

I've got a new player just over a month. She's super smart duck to water in terms of wcatching on. Her 1st 5E character is a battlemaster fighter and she's kinda figuring out that+polearm master. Found out Thursday she did genetics and something else at Uni.

She's noticing my velvet glove. In her words I nudge the newbies. Eg I specifically say they have full autonomy to pick what they like but ask for help.

So I'll say something like tell us what you want to play and we can help translate that to 5E rules. I use elf archer as my example aka Legolas. None picked an elf archer but you get the idea. Generally KISS (phb only).

I'm not going to throw 800 pages of rules at them and they don't know or care about most things in game. They also get the option to rebuild their PC if they make a mistake.

Get the fun part right first everything else will fall into place after that. They can add in tashas, Mordenkainens, xanathars later at their own pace.

 

[pemerton]

The players have authority of what their PCs think, say and the actions they take*. The impact the players actions have on the world is determined by the DM. The DM having final authority over the world and results of player declarations does not make it a railroad, only the the DM ignoring all of the PC's actions makes it a railroad.

The ability of a DM to make a final call in the fiction or resolve a dispute, even if the player disagrees, does not mean the player has no ability to take actions through their PCs.

Being able to take actions through one's PC doesn't stop the game being a railroad. It's about how the consequences/results of those actions are established.

I mean, I've given an example: we as players were able to capture and speak to the Kobold. The game was still a railroad, due to the way the GM established consequences of our attempted interrogation.

the GM can have unlimited power even if they responded to every action a player attempts with 'okay you do that' or 'sure, roll me an X to see how well it goes',

the player is still establishing fiction with their character actions.

If every time the players achieve something, or have some impact, it's simply because the GM "let" them, then to me that is simply a game in which the GM authors the fiction, treating the players' declared actions for their PCs as prompts. The players are not having an impact of their own.

As DM I am not constrained in how I decide an NPC acts. I will have them act in whatever way I deem appropriate and whether I roll a die to determine that result (because their response is uncertain) is completely up to me.

This is an example of what I mean: if every attempt by the PCs to affect the behaviour of a NPC is simply a prompt to the GM to make a decision, then it seems to me to be an utterly GM-driven game. And quite different from the sort of game that I learned about from Moldvay Basic, Classic Traveller and AD&D - these games all have reaction mechanics, which can be influenced by aspects of the PC (eg CHA in D&D, or social skills in Traveller) and by decisions the player makes, such as in this example of play from Moldvay Basic (page B28, following on from B60 despite the lack of sequentiality):

Hobgoblins turn up (due to a wandering monster role by the GM) and Silverleaf's player says that

Silverleaf steps forward with both hands empty in a token of friendship, and says "Greetings, noble dwellers of deep caverns, can we help you?"​

The example goes on:

The DM decides that Silverleaf's open hands and words in the hobgoblins' language are worth +1 when checking for reaction. Unfortunately the DM rolls a 4 (on 2d6) which, even adjusted to 5, is not a good reaction.​

Silverleaf's player's choice to greet the Hobgoblins in a polite and non-threatening manner affects the reaction roll, and as the example unfolds the GM is bound by the results of that roll.

As I posted upthread, I regard a GM-driven game as having an inherent fragility, because the players don't have the capacity to shape the game in a way that they think is interesting. Everything therefore turns on the ability of the GM to present interesting stuff that the players are happy to accept.

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.

<snip examples>

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.

What you describe here is a GM who is under a constraint: they are bound by the rules, and bound by fidelity to the fiction. So play might be GM-led, but it is not completely GM-driven in the sense I've described, because the players can also shape the shared fiction. By declaring actions, they can activate relevant rules; and by declaring actions, they can engage constraining fiction.

What you've described can very easily drift to player-led play: all that has to happen is for the GM to take cues (formal or informal) from the players as to what sorts of scenes to frame, and what sorts of consequences to foreground. I experienced that sort of drift in my own RPGing, to various degrees and in various different ways, throughout the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In my experience and observation, learning a language involves learning concepts and practices that go with it. (Of course, when it comes to learning Spanish in the US I would expect those to be Latin American in some or other fashion, rather than Spanish in the geographical sense.)

I can't imagine that Dwarves and Gnomes learn the language of Kobolds simply by being drilled in it but knowing nothing of Kobolds as such. Doesn't seem very verisimilitudinous to me.

He just gave a real life example of not getting much culture with your language. Can't get much more verisimilitudinous than that.

 

[Oofta]

I gave you several straight answers: Nothing happens.

I said that repeatedly.

What more do you want?

I'm done trying to have a conversation with you on this. There's no point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Dungeon World explicitly says play is a conversation and you work through what is going on that way. In general, you are in the fiction. It neither has nor needs mechanics because you're just describing things and asking questions. However, sometimes, the fiction requires clarification: an attempted action where both failure and success are interesting outcomes, or where there's a clear doing of something that is relevant to the evolving story. When, and only when, something like that happens, it "triggers" a move. Every move has a trigger phrase, and (for any well-made move) it's pretty clear what does or doesn't trigger something.

This invokes two DW rules: You have to do it to do it, and If you do it, you do it. "You have to do it to do it" means that if you want to use a move, you don't declare it and then roll or the like: you have to do the trigger, in the fiction. We would then execute the move, and then return to the fiction again. Hence, it is explicitly against DW's rules to say "I roll Diplomacy." You instead would need to do something like, "I say to the guard, 'Surely, ser, you have a sense of decency, of fair play! How can my accuser go on to this meeting with the judge, while I am stuck out here? No law could possibly call itself just if it listens only to the accuser and not the accused!" (In DW, this would be either a Parley, with the NPC's desired thing being their reputation of honor and decency, or a Defy Danger, with the PC taking the risk that this is a corrupt guard or jackbooted thug or the like.) That's the trigger from one direction, and the other makes it bidirectional; that is, "if you do it, you do it" means that whenever the trigger happens, the move must happen. The player can't just "closely examine a situation or person" and then hope to squeeze benefits out some other way: you DO trigger Discern Realities (because that is its trigger phrase), and we execute the move's text. Hence, the first is an "only if" condition (you do the move only if the fiction matches it) and the second is an "if" condition (you always do the move if the fiction matches it).

As part of this, there are rules that are straight up binding on me as a GM, e.g., I am not allowed to give anything but an honest answer to Spout Lore or Discern Realities questions, and I cannot tell a player that Ritual magic effects are flatly impossible ("Ritual effects are always possible, but...") Likewise rules that are binding on players: if they get a partial success on Spout Lore, it's on them to make the merely interesting answer useful; the only questions I am obligated to answer for Discern Realities are listed, or added by special moves elsewhere; they must accept the 1-4 requirements I posit for their Ritual magic, or else not perform it in the first place.

Together, we "Play to find out what happens." Both the players and I make proposals, and we talk it out. Sometimes, their opinion carries more weight than mine, not because theirs dominates mine but because we agree that their opinion was the better one. Sometimes, probably often I'd say, my opinion carries more weight than theirs, but that's because I persuade them, not because I lay down the law and threaten ejection if faced with defiance. Just like the conversation that play is described as.

I am not an absolute authority on the world we play in. If I were, it wouldn't be possible for me to play to find out what happens. Instead, I am merely one contributing factor, though certainly the largest individual one. This world would not exist in a recognizable form without the things the players have personally introduced into it.

Sounds like a fun game of not-D&D.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Yep. Agreed.

 

[pemerton]

Saying "you have to do it to do it" is pretty meaningless.

"If you do it, you do it" and "To do it, do it" are the key principles for action resolution in Dungeon World and Apocalypse World. It contrasts with "say 'yes' or roll the dice", which is the key principle in Baker's earlier game Dogs in the Vineyard (and is a principle taken up by Burning Wheel and 4e D&D).

"Say 'yes' or roll the dice" means that the consequence of declared actions is success, unless something that matters to the player and their PC (as established by the player and implicit or explicit in the current fictional situation) is at stake. In this latter case, the dice are used to find out what happens - if the player succeeds, their PC succeeds at the action and gains/preserves what was at stake; if the player fails, the GM narrates a consequence that undermines what was at stake, or deprives the PC (and thus the player) of it.

"If you do it, you do it" means that if the fictional trigger for a mechanically-specified move occurs, then the dice must be rolled and the mechanic applied. The mechanic itself will specify who has to say what depending on how the roll turns out. As a resolution system, it lessens the immediate emphasis on what the PC wants and what is at stake, and increases the immediate emphasis on what is happening here-and-now in the fiction. The earliest RPG I know of to use this sort of approach (though of course it didn't use Vincent Baker's label for it) is Classic Traveller.

An "if you do it, you do it" game places more technical demands on the designer, because they have to make sure that the way fictional triggers are characterised, and the way the mechanic invites and requires participants to say stuff, will produce the sort of play experience that the game is intended to evoke. Vincent Baker has a discussion of this in relation to Apocalypse World here: Powered by the Apocalypse, Part 3 – lumpley games

 

[Lanefan]

A good DM knows they have to not merely earn their players' trust once, but continuously.

I think most players' (IMO quite reasonable) approach is that the DM is presumed trustworthy until proven otherwise.

But there's a few here, it seems, who take the opposite approach: any DM is untrustworthy until proven otherwise.

And that's just kinda sad.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The rules have a zero percent chance of completely eliminating the problem.

They have a very meaningful chance of helping the problem--of making it less likely to happen, and making it easier to mitigate in mild cases, and easier to identify in general, and easier to clearly articulate consequences for doing.

The issue with any discussion on this topic is what we attribute the root cause to be.

I have been very outspoken on the epidemic of poor social skills in the TTRPG community as a whole. I believe that without proper social skills you will always have a hobby plagued by anti-social behavior - which is what tyrannical DMing, and many player issues, are.

This is why I believe the correct answer is properly teaching DMs the social skills to manage a table and to play nicely in a group. Rules will always just be interpreted through the lens of a person's social priorities and will be ineffective if those priorities are misaligned with the developer's wishes. And if the player or DM lacks the above social skills that misalignment is likely assured.

This is why I kind of wanted to go back to my hole, my opinion on the topic is not what people want to hear, and I don't feel like any progress can be made. I truly believe that without significant guidance on social skills, any other attempt will be futile. In my opinion, the only reason other games don't have such issues is because of the much smaller user base causing less exposure to those lacking the social skills to play nicely.

In my opinion, we need significant community resources on social skills, not more rules.

If you prefer not to respond to this post, that's perfectly fine. I will not take that as a concession--simply a "I need to leave this conversation for my mental wellbeing."

I appreciate this. But I had a few minutes with a two year old telling me how much he loved his daddy. I am loving life.