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.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

I'm gonna beat some others to the response you'll likely get:

"Being the DM is voluntary. Why can't the DM change to accomodate the player. The DM is not special and has no greater role than any player."

Oh, sure. I get that.

But I’m the DM who’ll go, “Yeah, that’s not what I’m interested in running. Who’s running the next campaign? Dave’s gonna run Greyhawk?! Cool! I got a character that’ll fit right in! Woot!”

I’m interested in having fun and playing is just a fun as DMing!

 

[Oofta]

But if the go-to reflex is "my way or the highway", something is wrong. And it isnt the game. The game rules themselves are fairly nuanced, fair, and sensitive to everyone involved.

I tell people my basic restrictions when I open up a spot in my game. No evil, limited species, don't play a loner who hates absolutely everyone.

I had a player who joined my game and after a bit really wanted to play an evil PC. Not only would I have not enjoyed having an evil PC, neither would some, if not all, of the other players. We parted ways amicably and we all wished them luck.

So yes, in some ways it is my way or the highway. If you haven't joined the game yet, just keep on going down the highway until you find the exit you want. If you're a currently in my group then you knew what you were getting into when you joined.

I will work with people and see if there's something we can do. But sometimes the answer is "no".

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I’m interested in having fun and playing is just a fun as DMing!

Playing is a lot more fun than DMing. DMing can be a slog, the last thing the DM wants to do is play disciplinarian, but sometimes, as the de facto group leader, they have no choice.

The are occasionally alternatives. At some after school D&D clubs the teacher does not play, but can act as referee, settle disputes, and remove problem players if necessary.

That’s not a whole lot of fun for the teacher of course, so good luck finding someone willing to referee without playing!

 

[Scribe]

There seems serious systemic dysfunction if the impulse is continually "take a walk".

When religious groups become dysfunctional, ostracizing is how it happens.

group ≠ DM

The impulse is to establish a consensus, a shared understanding with the group.

If an individual deems their view more important, is so selfish that the group must bend to their whims?

Yeah, show that individual the door, they can come back when the game better fits their desires.

You seem to think you are saying something here with "group != dm" but you are not. Its understood that the group is not the dm, the dm is not the group, the dm is part of the group.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

But if the go-to reflex is "my way or the highway", something is wrong. And it isnt the game. The game rules themselves are fairly nuanced, fair, and sensitive to everyone involved.

Isn’t it more “our (the rest of the group’s) way or the highway?”

I think I’m going to bow out. Nothing against you, Yaarel. Hopefully, I’m not coming across too dickish. But I haven’t had nearly enough sleep to keep all the threads separate in my foggy brain.

Gonna quit before I get too far behind!

 

[Yaarel]

Isn’t it more “our (the rest of the group’s) way or the highway?”

I think I’m going to bow out. Nothing against you, Yaarel. Hopefully, I’m not coming across too dickish. But I haven’t had nearly enough sleep to keep all the threads separate in my foggy brain.

Gonna quit before I get too far behind!

Its all good.

 

[Yaarel]

The impulse is to establish a consensus, a shared understanding with the group.

If an individual deems their view more important, is so selfish that the group must bend to their whims?

Yeah, show that individual the door, they can come back when the game better fits their desires.

You seem to think you are saying something here with "group != dm" but you are not. Its understood that the group is not the dm, the dm is not the group, the dm is part of the group.

In a context like this, a "consensus" includes protection of minorities.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

There seems serious systemic dysfunction if the impulse is continually "take a walk".

When religious groups become dysfunctional, ostracizing is how it happens.

group ≠ DM

Mate. If I don't let you play a wookiee jedi in my Star Trek game doesn't mean you're ostracised. I have no obligation to play any game with anyone, it is completely voluntary. And if I feel that I don't want to run a Star Trek game with wookiees or jedis in it, then I won't.

Making comparisons to real world religious ostracisation is bizarre, and tries to imply moral failing on people for their choices of using their own hobby time. That is offensive.

The first rule of a successful RPG game is that everyone is playing roughly the same game. This is just making sure that this happens. If our tastes and preferences do not happen to meet, so be it. It is not a moral failure on anyone's part, and in such an occasion everyone should just amicably move on to find a group more suitable for their tastes.

 

[pemerton]

This is like saying that if a magazine has an editor who has final say of what articles get published, the writers of those articles have no impact to the content of the magazine.

GMing is not very much like editing a magazine.

I've edited academic journals. I've supervised research students where the supervision is comparable to editing. And I've supervised research students where the supervision has been line by line, sometimes word by word, guiding the student at nearly every point. These all involve quite different degrees of contribution to the final output.

The GM who determines outcomes of declared actions, moment-by-moment, as they see fit or deem appropriate without any constraint, is a shaper of the fiction in a way completely different from the person who says "yes" or "no" to publishing a fully-authored work.

It is group effort, but the GM is the one who has to make sure that everything goes together as a cohesive whole. They also often have access to way more information than the players, some of which the players could not even in principle know, as it is supposed to be a secret and knowing it all would spoil the fun. Thus it must be the GM who has the final say, as they're the one who has the best grasp of the big picture.

This does not entail that the GM has "absolute power". For instance, it only makes sense if the secrets are pre-authored and the GM is bound by that pre-authorship. (The best-known example of this is classic dungeon-crawling adjudicated by reference to map-and-key.)

If a player says "I open the door" and the GM says, "the door won't open, it seems to be locked," then that indeed thwarts what the player wanted to do. But there are plenty of good reasons why a door might be locked.

Sure. There are also plenty of good reasons why the earth the PCs are standing on might suddenly collapse. Or why one of the PCs might suddenly suffer a heart attack.

This doesn't tell us when it is appropriate, in a RPG, for the GM to declare that a door is locked. It doesn't distinguish between (say) playing via map-and-key, where the GM has pre-authored the state of the door, and now reveals that to the players, from (say) playing Burning Wheel, where the GM narrates the door being locked in response to a failed test that included as its intent that the PC open the door, from (say) playing Marvel Heroic RP, where the GM spends a Doom Pool die to add a Scene Distinction - The Door is Locked - to the scene, from (say) the GM just making up in response to the player's declared action that the door is locked.

Only the latter manifests an asserted "absolute power" over the content of the shared fiction, and an asserted "absolute power" to set aside or ignore rules and expectations around how the game is played. And it is exactly that sort of GMing that turns the players from participants in a game to "witnesses" of the GM's narration of a solitaire fiction.

 

[Yaarel]

Mate. If I don't let you play a wookiee jedi in my Star Trek game doesn't mean you're ostracised. I have no obligation to play any game with anyone, it is completely voluntary. And if I feel that I don't want to run a Star Trek game with wookiees or jedis in it, then I won't.

Making comparisons to real world religious ostracisation is bizarre, and tries to imply moral failing on people for their choices of using their own hobby time. That is offensive.

First rule of a successful RPG game is that everyone is playing roughly the same game. This is just making sure that this happens. If our tastes and preferences do not happen to meet, so be it. It is not a moral failure on anyone's part, and in such an occasion everyone should just amicably move on to find a group more suitable for their tastes.

I play with friends. There is nothing neutral about how one treats friends or friends of friends.