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.

 

[Emerikol]

Oh, no, I love using them as written and came up with something similar for 5E! I really miss the frequency info from AD&D.

IMO the game world is the game world, regardless of the PCs level. As a general rule of thumb, tier 1 creatures are common, tier 2 are uncommon, tier 3 are rare, and tier 4 are very rare.

So, yeah, extremely unlikely, but the PCs can encounter an ancient dragon at 1st level.

Oh I agree with wandering monster tables. I just don't agree with their exact representation of them. Maybe if I ran a Greyhawk campaign I'd adhere more closely. I love the Wilderness Survival Guide from 1e so I'm not against a consistent world. I just know whats in the region better than a pure wandering table can represent. I also have a very tight hold on dragons as they are different from D&D's traditional take.

By no means, is it impossible in the wild to meet something you can't beat because of a wandering monster roll.

 

[abirdcall]

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.

There are certainly atypical setups which I think is a strength of the game.

In Out of the Abyss the drow are not meant to be all fought. It is actually a good lesson for new D&D players. You aren't supposed to just be able to fight and win against everything. This is valuable experience to have at low levels too because it makes levelling up more satisfying when they do start winning against those foes.

There is an inn scene in HotDQ where a guy disguised as a noble bullies the level 3 party. There are possible ways for the party to deal with it. The default is to just sleep in the barn. We had a player just join us who turned out to be a problem who just wanted to kill the noble for bullying them. I advised that they are just level 3 and forecasted his power but the player felt he was entitled to win as they were the heroes of the story and got very upset when he lost. That isn't the adventure's problem.

In the current campaign that I'm running there is a CR 18 creature in the first dungeon. If the players attack the creature they are in for a bad time. That doesn't mean the adventure is poorly designed. Attacking the creature is on the players.

 

[ezo]

Oh I agree with wandering monster tables. I just don't agree with their exact representation of them. Maybe if I ran a Greyhawk campaign I'd adhere more closely. I love the Wilderness Survival Guide from 1e so I'm not against a consistent world. I just know whats in the region better than a pure wandering table can represent. I also have a very tight hold on dragons as they are different from D&D's traditional take.

By no means, is it impossible in the wild to meet something you can't beat because of a wandering monster roll.

So, it seems more you are saying just that you have your own "dedicated by region" tables for wandering monsters?

if that is all it is, sure, that's great! I have had some in the past, but nowadays if a creature doesn't seem appropriate to a specific region even though it would be for the climate/terrain, I just ignore that result.

 

[Emerikol]

So, it seems more you are saying just that you have your own "dedicated by region" tables for wandering monsters?

if that is all it is, sure, that's great! I have had some in the past, but nowadays if a creature doesn't seem appropriate to a specific region even though it would be for the climate/terrain, I just ignore that result.

It's perhaps more like roll on my table first with known antagonists in the region but have a result that says roll on the general table. But like you, if I think the result just doesn't fit then I would roll again.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This is also why I don't use the wandering monster tables as written but even deep in a wilderness area where theoretically a dragon could be, at maybe a mid level characters, my group would hide and avoid the dragon.

eh, i think it's perfectly fine to have that chance to encounter the dragon or whatever similar beastie in the encounter table, the problem is the assumption that it therefore needs to be fought as a result when it gets rolled.

 

[Oofta]

eh, i think it's perfectly fine to have that chance to encounter the dragon or whatever similar beastie in the encounter table, the problem is the assumption that it therefore needs to be fought as a result when it gets rolled.

We had a DM once that every time we rode horses as traveled from one location to the next he would "randomly" roll up a red dragon. We would quickly jump off the horses and let the dragon eat them.

Eventually we just accepted that every single time we traveled between cities we had to pay a dragon tax of 1 horse per PC.

 

[Umbran]

Playing the omniscent card again? Not a good look IMO.

Mod Note:
You say that as if your own (kinda snide) words here are any better.

Listen up, folks: If you cannot have this discussion respectfully, you will get removed from the discussion. If you can't cool it down, it will be cooled down for you.

 

[Yaarel]

I don't have warforged in my game as a race, but over the years I have had 3 in my game.

One was built by a long dead race and discovered on a dig. One was an accidental creation by a wizard trying to cut corners when making a golem, and the last was built by a Zakharan artificer as 1 of 100 and used against his enemies until he discovered that they were sentient. Then he released the few that still remained functional.

The idea of a sentient "golem" is very much in line with fantasy settings. I just can't see them as existing in large enough numbers to be considered a race.

This is gorgeous worldbuilding!

 

[Yaarel]

Given the vehemence in this thread and others I've seen here, the problem isn't the name. The problem is that a few people have had the bad luck to run into multiple bad DMs and have been burned by jerks.

Those jerks would have acted that way no matter what system they were running and what the rules said.

The problem is a people problem, not a rule or name problem.

In government structures, a democracy is different from a dictatorship. They work differently. One has elections, and checks and balances.

Likewise in D&D, the old school assigns and organizes social power in a way that the new school is still in the process of correcting for.

It is a structural problem, and rules design challenge.


Bad faith is something extraneous, and applies anywhere there are humans, including among DMs and players. Hopefully, most D&D gamers find bad faith to be minimal and rare.


The critique of the socalled "absolute power" DM, is akin to designing a microcosmic government, a healthy one. Compare how the founding of the US involved careful design for how to assign power, in order to transition away from dictatorship and toward an enduring democracy. It was a kind of game design challenge.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

No, the 2024 phb actually backs up what he said about PCs who don't fit the setting & they even showcased a critically relevant page during their own PHB hype.


What you describe is backwards in the expectation being drawn out for the GM to accomplish for a player what a player needs to be accomplishing for themselves. The 2014 PHB erroneously gave the impression that a player could roll up to a table with literally anything & expect the GM to somehow make it work but the new PHB even has two separate sidebars about this very sort of divide in character creation in addition to better wording to the character creation section itself.

The sidebars that you highlighted? The ones that say "Talk it out"?
Just like my post did?

Sometimes the best solution for everyone is for the player who does not know the cultures & peoples of the world to simply pick one that does exist because the player does not know them & how they differ from their first "can I play..." stab in the dark. I've seen the old way you advocate for play out multiple times in my eberron games and it never works when a player wants to play an FR race that is dramatically different in eberron (ie drow & some others) a statement like "no drow don't live on Khorvaire where the game takes place" or whatever is a perfectly reasonable hurdle for a player to find their own way around during character creation without the GM spending the entire campaign carrying the workload for changing that.
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That difference between a player themselves finding adapting what they plan to bring to a table so that it fits the type of game world being run and a GM being expected to find a way or place to make the initial square peg fit is dramatic & long lasting because the square peg will always be square & continue to draw on/insert things that simply will never fit. When the GM is expected to "help the player find it within the GM's game" that responsibility will continue to rest on the GM for the length of the campaign even as the square peg continues adding an ever growing pile of square ties.

You can't (generally) play a FR Drow in Eberron. But you could play an Eberron Drow: there is two-way travel between Stormreach and Khorvaire. Perhaps the player would want to play an Umbragen? Or as you talk it through with the player, they may realise that one of the other cultures would fit the concept that they want to play better: Perhaps a Tairnadal elf?
It is rather rare IME that a player has such a specific and inflexible concept in mind that there is no compromise possible.

There's no guesswork involved; what's available to play is spelled out right there in the "blue book". As in, here's this game's list of available species: pick one.

Also, given that I'm the one designing the setting I'm also the one who gets to choose what goes in it. Personally, I've always thought Dragonborn (and before that, Half-Dragons) to be fine as monsters but stupid as playable PCs; ditto for various other species that should have stayed as non-PC-playable monsters. Therefore, no Dragonborn PCs, end of story.

Want to play a Dragonborn that badly? Find a different DM.

Provided the added details are something I'm willing to have in a setting I DM, then sure.

That's the point of talking with the player. Humanoid dragons (and Lizardfolk, Kobolds etc) may not be sentient races available for play in the setting, but there are other things about Dragonborn that the player might have wanted to express in their character, and those might have places in your setting.

Without talking to the player, you're never going to know that, and be able to help guide them to a character that does work.
"Banned. Try again" closes discussion rather than encourages it.