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.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Sounds like you're arguing against leadership.

If those attitudes are considered leadership, then absolutely.

 

[pemerton]

In practice the DM cant really he kicked. Unless they're completely horrible. Groups usually blow apart first.

This is strange too. I mean, apart from the fact that you're one of those advocating that players should be expected to tolerate bad GMing - and so are contributing to the norm that GMs "can't really be kicked" - I mean, why not?

All that is needed is for everyone to walk away. It's not hard at all!

 

[Zardnaar]

Yet this thread is full of posts arguing that I and my fellow players were wrong (overly hasty, disproportionate, etc) in leaving a game. And full of posts defending, as entirely justified, an episode of GMing about which their primary bit of information is that the one participant in it they have heard from has said it was terrible.

So I'm not sure what you mean by "easily", given this apparently very strong norm that players have a duty to sit through even terrible GMing.

Your original post had players metagamimg using knowledge they shouldn't have vs a DM you barely knew.

By itself the reason you gave was kinda silly (DM not doing what you wanted with a Kobold).

If you're not having fun by all means leave. The impression you gave it was a silly reason to do so by itself.

 

[Zardnaar]

This is strange too. I mean, apart from the fact that you're one of those advocating that players should be expected to tolerate bad GMing - and so are contributing to the norm that GMs "can't really be kicked" - I mean, why not?

All that is needed is for everyone to walk away. It's not hard at all!

I didn't say you should tolerate a bad DM. The reason you gave was stupid for leaving.

I wouldn't leave myself for that reason unless something else was going on. Maybe the game sucked overall for example.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Considering the 'consequences' I keep seeing show up is being bullied and discriminated against in-game, they're right to react that way to a spiteful punishment for not doing what the DM wants.

The consequences is usually that they’ll be treated as an oddity which can lead to distrust with the peasants, getting stared at, equipment that doesn’t fit, not able to blend into a crowd, etc., etc. In my 40+ years of gaming, the odd man out is usually not interested in dealing with that.

There are lots of consequences besides bullying. Why leap to that?

If the world hasn’t seen, well, Warforged, for example, and one comes walking into town, it’s going to be met with curiosity (malign and benign) and some degree of wariness. After all, most D&D worlds are crawling with things that come outta the woodwork to eat the commoners’ faces.

 

[Vaalingrade]

This thread is why we need a better DMG.

The more players trying their hand at DMing, the less perceived market power held by DMs that wish to place their preferences and fun ahead of their group's. It would also help new DMs learn to DM without being influenced by such.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

I didn't say you should tolerate a bad DM. The reason you gave was stupid for leaving.

I wouldn't leave myself for that reason unless something else was going on. Maybe the game sucked overall for example.

I think anytime you are not enjoying yourself, you should leave the game. D&D, and most TTRPGs, are too much of a time commitment and life is too short to play in a game you dislike.

So I disagree with a lot of what Pemerton said about that incident. But they 100% are correct in leaving a game they didn't enjoy.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

No, not really. Of course the whole thing is wildly different, but the role is taking input of others and making corrections as deciding what ultimately goes.

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.)

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.

I see. So this where the disagreement stems form, and again, with you, SURPRISE, it is semantics! The things you say here I mostly agree with, except that in a typical D&D game, such "constraints" on the GM are self-imposed, thus I would interpret them not impeding the GMs "absolute power." Also, I think that in practice many GMs do mix these methods. Some things are pre-authored and the GM chooses to be bound by them, whilst other things are decided on the spot.

 

[Zardnaar]

This thread is why we need a better DMG.

The more players trying their hand at DMing, the less perceived market power held by DMs that wish to place their preferences and fun ahead of their group's. It would also help new DMs learn to DM without being influenced by such.

It's nit that but the DM dies get to set the tone of the game, what's allowed and who gets to play generally.

If they can't find or retain players they need to change something. Assuming players are available it's hard in a small town for example.

 

[pemerton]

I disagree with a lot of what Pemerton said about that incident.

What's your evidence base for thinking I'm wrong about what took place, that Friday night in Melbourne around early March 1990?