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.

 

[Manbearcat]

The townspeople informed the party that they had a fragile truce with the wood elves of the forest so could they please avoid doing anything that might worsen the relationship. The players say they understand.

Party heads into the forest.

I'm curious.

* Was this situation (townsfolk at odds with wood elves > powderkeg + fragile truce > party traversing through wood elves home):

1) You as GM foregrounding provocative conflict that is relevant to one or more PCs' theme/premise?

2) A Sword of Damocles sort of protection racket move signaling to the players "don't pull shenanigans...engage with the adventure I've written and just info dumped...or else I'm pulling out the dryad/wood elves?"

3) Just a lore dump for benign setting color which you weren't anticipating engagement with?

---

Next question:

* How long was the game going on between consequential, engaging conflicts (no matter what type of conflict; social, journey, pursuing/fleeing, traversing obstacles, dungeon-delving, spiritual, combat) when this "I Firebolt the bird" instigator move took place? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour? More?

 

[pemerton]

You were using out of character knowledge. Espicially back then which was somewhere between metagamimg and cheating.

You assert this. But have no basis for that assertion. You don't know what our PCs did and didn't know. Heck, I can't remember whether we had a Dwarf, a Gnome, or both, or some other way of talking to Kobolds. Though I'm reasonably confident on the Gnome because one of the players loved to play Gnome illusionists.

As far as "back then" is concerned, I already quoted the foreword to the MM which doesn't say anything about "GMs only". And Moldvay Basic says that all players should read the whole book through (except for the sample dungeon).

Maybe the Kobold was stupid or playing dumb.

The Kobold has no independent existence.

I mean, you narrate your PC walking across the town square. The GM narrates that your PC collapses from a heart attack. Maybe your PC just had a weak heart! Or the GM narrates you being breathed on by an 88 hp red dragon. Maybe one was just flying by?

This notion that all fiction is equal, and that we can't judge the quality of GMing based on whether they produce fiction that is engaging, arbitrary, railroading, etc, is utterly bizarre to me.

you basically trashed the DM for being a tyrant.

Not a word I ever used or implied. In fact my whole point was to show that the GM lacks absolute power over the fiction.

I did say the GM was terrible. But apparently that's out-of-bounds around here!

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I'm also not sure why people say that the published Campaigns don't follow the guidelines: they have published a ton of Dungeons with 5-8 Medium Encoutners, they do it fairly constantly in fact.

We're probably just not thinking of the dungeons. There's a lot of adventures with very vague Encounter suggestions and the occasional seriously overclocked initial encounters. Think of Horde of the Dragon Queen's original Level One Encounter with 100 mercenaries and a Blue Dragon, or even the goblin caves outside of Phandalin. Or busting out of a Drow Prison in Out of the Abyss.

Now, I ran all of these with great fun, but it's not uncommon to hear of TPKs due to lack of guidance. They rewrote Horde's beginning for Tyranny of Dragons, because it was commonly botched.

Now, to be fair, HotDK was by Kobold Press and they were working from a playtest monster Document that had very weak monsters, so it's not quite fair, but the point is - when I say that I don't think that they follow the Adventuring Day - I'm speaking from the gut. I didn't math it out. And I admit, maybe they followed it more than it seemed. But I feel like that just goes to show - those guidelines don't work very well for many people.

 

[Zardnaar]

You assert this. But have no basis for that assertion. You don't know what our PCs did and didn't know. Heck, I can't remember whether we had a Dwarf, a Gnome, or both, or some other way of talking to Kobolds. Though I'm reasonably confident on the Gnome because one of the players loved to play Gnome illusionists.

As far as "back then" is concerned, I already quoted the foreword to the MM which doesn't say anything about "GMs only". And Moldvay Basic says that all players should read the whole book through (except for the sample dungeon).

The Kobold has no independent existence.

I mean, you narrate your PC walking across the town square. The GM narrates that your PC collapses from a heart attack. Maybe your PC just had a weak heart! Or the GM narrates you being breathed on by an 88 hp red dragon. Maybe one was just flying by?

This notion that all fiction is equal, and that we can't judge the quality of GMing based on whether they produce fiction that is engaging, arbitrary, railroading, etc, is utterly bizarre to me.

Not a word I ever used or implied. In fact my whole point was to show that the GM lacks absolute power over the fiction.

I did say the GM was terrible. But apparently that's out-of-bounds around here!

DM may gave been terrible but the reason you provided wasn't enough for that.

NPC behavior is under the Aegis of the DM. That Kobold was within expected or reasonable behavior. DM may have sucked just not for the reason you gave. That's the pushback.

 

[Zardnaar]

We're probably just not thinking of the dungeons. There's a lot of adventures with very vague Encounter suggestions and the occasional seriously overclocked initial encounters. Think of Horde of the Dragon Queen's original Level One Encounter with 100 mercenaries and a Blue Dragon, or even the goblin caves outside of Phandalin. Or busting out of a Drow Prison in Out of the Abyss.

Now, I ran all of these with great fun, but it's not uncommon to hear of TPKs due to lack of guidance. They rewrote Horde's beginning for Tyranny of Dragons, because it was commonly botched.

Now, to be fair, HotDK was by Kobold Press and they were working from a playtest monster Document that had very weak monsters, so it's not quite fair, but the point is - when I say that I don't think that they follow the Adventuring Day - I'm speaking from the gut. I didn't math it out. And I admit, maybe they followed it more than it seemed. But I feel like that just goes to show - those guidelines don't work very well for many people.

We had a lot of tpks in HotDQ. Probably 3.

Because we didn't know how many encounters. Game says 6-8 but in that adventure it's 1-2 imho.

One group got to the road then gave up.

D tier piece of crap adventure.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not certain how else they could be "introduced" other than leading to failure during play...

It's tricky in AD&D, which does not have a very robust action resolution system for anything outside of combat and dealing with doors.

It would be easy to give an example from 4e D&D, which is the opposite in the above respect.

But sticking to AD&D - suppose that, down the track, the players fail at something - eg they fail to prevent an escape (by a Kobold, or a known spy, or whatever). Then that could be a trigger for the GM changing things in the backstory to "undo" the quality of the intelligence the players have gathered.

Or suppose the players interrogate a NPC, and it passes a morale/reaction roll, then maybe the GM has it feed the players/PCs false information.

But just arbitrarily feeding the players false information, even though they have successfully captured and interrogated a NPC, in my view is a railroader's technique. The point of it is to keep the players floundering, without the information necessary to make meaningful action declarations. It keeps the GM in control of the unfolding of events.

How is that any different than the DM introducing the kobold not having the information you seek, or being difficult, or whatever?

Not having information doesn't create the same "fog" around player action declarations for their PCs as being given false information (but presenting it as true).

I've already shown playing the captive kobold as a low INT creature, stupid, cowardly, uninformed, scared and speaking nonsense, is an entirely plausible way for the DM to run that NPC.

And as I posted not far upthread, having a PC collapse from a heart attack or stroke, or having a red dragon fly overhead an burn them to a crisp, is also quite plausible. The test of good GMing is not can we imagine something that makes sense of the fiction the GM presents - that's a threshold that even the worst GM imaginable, and the biggest railroader of all time, can step over.

Because for many of us nothing you've said would be anything that would compel us to act as you did?

Yet five people acted as we did. So either, as per @Lanefan's suggestion upthread, we were weird conspirators setting out to waste our own time and the GM's; or we had the most rarefied tastes of RPGers ever; or the game was actually terrible!

 

[pemerton]

NPC behavior is under the Aegis of the DM.

So you wouldn't think that it is terrible GMing for the GM, in the first session of the game, to tell the players that the red dragon flies up to their PCs, says "You look tasty", and breathes fire and kills them all? I mean, that's a plausible thing for a dragon to do after all!

 

[Zardnaar]

So you wouldn't think that it is terrible GMing for the GM, in the first session of the game, to tell the players that the red dragon flies up to their PCs, says "You look tasty", and breathes fire and kills them all? I mean, that's a plausible thing for a dragon to do after all!

Bit different from the example you provided.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I play with friends

So do I. My friends trust my judgement, so if I say “there are no warforged PCs in this campaign” they won’t try to make a warforged PC.

Groups meeting for the first time are not yet friends though, so there needs to be some quick sorting into “people likely to become friends” and “people who will never get on”.

 

[pemerton]

Bit different from the example you provided.

How so?

I mean, you're the one who posted that

NPC behavior is under the Aegis of the DM. That Kobold was within expected or reasonable behavior.

What I've described is expected or reasonable for a red dragon. Who, being a NPC, is under the aegis of the GM.

Now if there's some other criterion you have in mind for reasonable GMing, I'm happy to hear it.