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.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Or maybe the noble was a bad apple? Not everyone follows cultural norms.

Sure, but would they do it openly, this should lead the other nobles thinking badly of them. But yeah, the original example was not the clearest, but I tried to read it in the way I imagined @pemerton intended it.

 

[Maxperson]

The game book is not a Tolkienesque Tome of Power, with magic imbued in it by its creator in the dark forges of game design. The rules cannot give you power.

Power comes only from mutual agreement of the people playing. The social contract is the only real source of power in games.

The GM's "absolute power" comes only with a mandate from the table - when that absolute power stops serving the needs of the table, that power should go away, no matter what the rulebook says.

So if the DM abuses his authority as DM, what can the table do about it? I can't see anything at all as far as the game goes. They can't tell him no it doesn't happen. They can't decide something else happens instead. They can't open the books and show the DM that he can't do that, as the rules allow the DM to change the rules and make rulings that defy the rules.

The only recourse they have if they don't want to go along with it is to leave the game and go do something else. Play another game, find a new DM, or one of them can DM a new game of D&D.

Even if they do so, though, the DM can find other players and continue the game that they just left, with whatever the DM just ruled being how it happened in the game. So even leaving the game doesn't stop his ruling from happening.

So, I feel what I said stands. GM's who understand this very basic truth about our games will generally speak about responsibility, not "power".

And I stand by the fact that I can not run my games the way I'm talking about above, yet still see that the rules back up the DM if he abuses his authority. And that even the social contract can't override such an abuse.

A DM can have that "power" and still run the game "responsibly."

 

[Maxperson]

I think the tin-pot dictator DMs are just as uncommon as entitled karen players. But those keep getting brought up....

Yep. When I speak of bad DMs as being rare, I often also speak of bad Players being just as rare. These issues don't come up very often.

 

[Yaarel]

I fully admit that when it comes to my settings, I am very protective of them. Not everyone feels that way, and that's fine, but this is how it is for me and that's that. Then again, it seems I am good enough at pitching my premises that this has not been a problem in practice. People seem to be happy to pick stuff within the confines of my premises.

From the art that you do, it seems a beautiful setting.

For my mythologically accurate Nordic section, I am protective too. But the solution in this case obvious. It is only a regional setting, where the rest of the planet has diverse regional settings. It is no problem for someone from elsewhere to be in the Nordesque lands, or viceversa.

 

[Yaarel]

Before and after a game I am willing to negotiate about parts of the game all day long, I'm extremely permissive especially if something looks like it will be fun.

But during a game? You get a sentence or two (maybe) and then we move on. A typical game is 3 to 4 hours minus personal chatter, food/bathroom breaks etc. I'm not going to bog it down with rules or other meta discussion. Especially if it only it only involves one person in the group.

Me too.

Something needs to be really important to justifying bogging down a game.

 

[tetrasodium]

The point is the desire of the DM and the desire of the player are EQUALLY important.

Yet some keep insisting on some kind of self-inflated DM dictatorship.

how do you quantify "EQUALLY" & why do you quantify it like that? I might do it something like this... A word like "Equally" implies some numbers & math can come into discussing this particular point. Lets make it easy and say that everyone at the table can voice their desires by a vote and that there are a total of 100 votes so everything adds up to some fraction of 100%.

• 1 GM(Willow) & 1 player(Bob)? That seems easy where each has 50 votes since either can walk and the whole thing collapses.
  • The GM however needs to prepare the adventures, build& track any settlements/npcs/etc while the player just needs to show up and play the session the GM built/bought & prepared to run.
• 1 GM & 2(Add Cindy) players. Here Willow is still doing all of the work but now Cindy's presence means that the game will still go on if Bob walks and Cindy has invested a similar amount of effort in making her character so it fits Alice's campaign.
  • Because Bob & Cindy both have a vested interest in the continuity of Willow's game world & campaign while Willow has a much higher investment in time & effort those votes shift to something like Willow with ~50 votes at the table where Bob & Cindy each have another ~25ish
• 1 GM & three or four players? (Add Dave & Edith) Here's where any one player missing a session or deciding to walk if they don't get their way starts crossing into territory where the game is probably not impacted whatsoever. If Willow the GM misses a session or decides to walk or quits GM'ing in disgust then all of the other players are negatively impacted & need to find (yet) another GM instead of playing.
  • By now each of the players have well under 20 votes & that number dwindles with each additional player.
  • Things are getting interesting though because 50/3=16.66_ & you can't have a fractional vote so Willow has 52 votes while 3 players each have 16
• 1GM & five or more players(add Frank & so on) If one player out of three missing a session or choosing to walk had minimal effect on the game it certainly does so by now because we cross into territory where Willow probably does not even need to rebalance encounters much (if any)
  • Once again we get some fractional results dividing that "EQUAL" share of whole votes allocated to players because there are 5 players with 9.6 votes & the 0.6*5=3fractional votes roll over to Willow's "EQUAL" share of 55 votes to less than 10 for each player because all of those players have actually increased her workload & time investment while each individual player still maintains an interest in the benefits that come with her continuing to run the campaign their PCs have been playing in
• Depending on factors like if a particular person is hosting the game, playing a particular class, or providing a ride to other players you might have edge cases where some players have more votes than others, but Willow can almost always take the game to be hosted somewhere else (ie a flgs, park, room at school, etc) so those are rarely going to be a scenario where that player gains a majority or even a significant plurality of votes needed to gain the authority granted to the game's GM and override Willow.

About the only time that changes significantly is when you have a closed social group who know that none of them can or are willing to be the GM for that group but value sticking together over anything else no matter how many GM's they need to churn through looking for the increasingly implausible perfect fit unicorn of a GM as the size of that group grows.

 

[Maxperson]

The incident was beyond a "screw up". It wasnt about a misunderstanding of the Intelligence ability stat, even tho this was the hook that incited the incident.

We don't know that.

We know that the kobolds were run differently from the MM. We know that @pemerton and his buddies played multiple games and this was either so major on it's own or was the straw that broke the camel's back and they left the game.

What we don't know is whether the DM had the change in kobolds planned from the start and/or overlooked that having a language of their own means that they are smart enough to be interrogated with it, or whether he was trying to keep information secret and forcing his way at the expense of the players. The former would be in the category of DM screw up and the latter beyond DM screw up.

@pemerton has said that he doesn't remember much more than the incident because it happened a long time ago, so it's not for sure that it was the DM forcing things. My gut feeling based on what I know of @pemerton, how kobolds were played, the fact that the PCs knew the language, etc., is that the DM was forcing his way, but I don't KNOW that.

 

[Maxperson]

I see. I don't think the issue here was that it turns out some nobles aren't honourable. It is that the players have assumed for a good while that honour (or at least pretence of honour) is something the noble class in this setting care about, that is part of the decorum, part of how they portray themselves, and openly acting otherwise would be a faux pas at least. But then it turn out this was actually not the case at all. Now miscommunication misunderstandings happen, and sometimes it might be on the players for not paying attention, but if such fundamental thing about the culture the players presumably have interacted with for several sessions gets miscommunicated, it's probably on the GM.

I also don't see how even if it was established that nobles do value honor, that a noble or some nobles who go against type is automatically horrible DMing like @pemerton implied. Ape shall not kill ape, until one does. There are lots of examples throughout media of a person or small group going against a well established way of doing things. Even ones ingrained in culture.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

“Duras!”

 

[Maxperson]

“Duras!”

Great example!