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.

 

[tetrasodium]

i don't believe that adding warforged to your setting requires all of those other specific story threads to be dragged along with them, why is this the only creation story they can ever have and why are they chained to it on a five-inch leash, it's like claiming if you add uruk-hai into a setting and saying that just cause you added them that also means you have to add saruman, sauron, mordor, the rings of power, the wizard-angels and a couple of hundred years of other miscalaneous bits of lore.

Absolutely correct that it doesn't require the gm to add that, but it absolutely invites the player who knows eberron but not whatever setting is being used to draw on the lore threads attached to warforged. That is the problem with making exceptions for an out of setting PC, it's rarely just the once unless it's a one shot or something.

In the time since I made that post you quoted there has been a poster talking about how easy it would be for the GM to refluff warforged as animated armor golems and so on but the hypothetical player didn't come asking to play a golem or a suit of animated armor... They came asking to play a warforged & those carry their own lore just like FR drow Tolkien style dwarves and so on.

 

[TiQuinn]

If huge numbers of restaurants were bad, I'd stop going. You don't find out until after you pay that the food is terrible and I'm not fond of throwing a lot of money into the trash.

Whatever you choose to do, I doubt that you say bad restaurant don’t exist.

 

[Zardnaar]

Sure, but in the case of this unique character, the mind of a Humanoid inhabit the armor as a means to remain alive (hence Full Metal Alchemist). Or whatever. It is easy to make golems make sense.

Indeed, the first "golem" is Adam, the first human, made out of moist clay dust − a statue come to life!

There's still a difference between does this exist vs do I get to play one.

 

[CreamCloud0]

For what it's worth, I don't allow people to play goblins either.

that's fair, i'm all for a curated setting, but i just feel some groups of people are convinced it's far harder to integrate warforged specifically into a setting than it actually is due to tying them so strongly to a specific origin lore for a specific setting.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm doing ancient Greece. Anachronisms exist but you have to find them.

Warforged might exist in a setting but they're not walking down the street.

Quite. If something is supposed to be strange and mysterious it can’t be a PC, because all the PCs are familiar to each other.

 

[Yaarel]

There's still a difference between does this exist vs do I get to play one.

Sure. But at a certain point, if the concept is actually everywhere, the DM needs a good reason to say, no. Heh, being a dysfunctional control freak who is determined to micromanage player decisions, is a less satisfactory rationale.

 

[Yaarel]

Quite. If something is supposed to be strange and mysterious it can’t be a PC, because all the PCs are familiar to each other.

I think the opposite.

In my settings, the players are anomalies. Especially with regard to high levels and "fate".

High levels are rare, "classes" are rare.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It does the player no favours if they create a character that is out of step with what everyone else. One game I was in a player braught a very serious, angsty character to the game. A couple of sessions in they realised everyone else was playing comedy characters, and their character was proving unfun, so they switched to playing comedy character themselves.

 

[Zardnaar]

Sure. But at a certain point, if the concept is actually everywhere, the DM needs a good reason to say, no. Heh, being a dysfunctional control freak who is determined to micromanage player decisions, is a less satisfactory rationale.

Warforged is easiest example of not appropriate. Haven't seen one yet which is kind of a shame. Eberrons been an option since 2019 in the roster.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think the opposite.

In my settings, the players are anomalies. Especially with regard to high levels and "fate".

High levels are rare, "classes" are rare.

So? PCs may be rare in the world, but they are ever so familiar to each other.