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]

Hence the need for democracy and the peaceful transference of power.

Actually democracy is only good when all other approaches would be worse. For example, democracy in running a business is bad. A business is not a government. Most of the time it is far better to not have a democracy. Design by committee is an insult for a reason in many professions.

In the context of D&D, there is an increasing sense of egalitarianism where players have equal weight in the narrative.

There is a trend where some segment of the D&D populace is becoming more egalitarian. I think the strongest growth though is outside D&D in games designed to be Story games.

The social power rules can describe intent. For example, that the purpose of rules is for players to "fun", and players should choose actions that bring "delight", is hardly a math equation. But it does serve to formally define what the game is for, and how to play it. It isnt for the DM to fantasize an world that players are unable to contribute to. Heh, "here is my museum, please, look around but dont touch anything".

This is true but the contribution comes through the player character actions and from the player in general.

That said. I feel it is a useful model to have the players play their characters (including supporting characters in bastions etcetera), while the DM plays the setting. Just as the characters adjust and adapt so too does the setting. I like curated settings (as long the players can interact with it meaningfully). I hope these dedicated settings can remain while the power balance shifts around a little bit.

I don't think this would work absolutely as it would be a very poor representation of being lord of a bastion. Your staff and retinue do serve you as the Lord and "in general" will carry out your orders but they all have their own dreams and desires which may run afoul of the players at times. Some will curry favor to get advantage over others. They are still played by the DM. Now if you just want to abstract the whole thing to a few die roles and call it domain management then sure the player can make the high level decisions as he is the Lord of the bastion. Some of the roll results though will indicate times the NPCs didn't do what they were supposed to do.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Actually democracy is only good when all other approaches would be worse. For example, democracy in running a business is bad. A business is not a government. Most of the time it is far better to not have a democracy. Design by committee is an insult for a reason in many professions.

Isn't it the case that, unless a corporation remains privately-held, it's run by a democracy of shareholders? They select representatives on the board. Employee-owned businesses exist, for example, and things like collective bargaining only work because you have a democratic effort of the employees.

Your point is not as strong as you'd like it to be, if you're trying to claim that democracy has no place in business.

Doubly so when you conflate literally all possible forms of collaboration with "design by committee," an error already made and denounced in this thread.

 

[Emerikol]

Isn't it the case that, unless a corporation remains privately-held, it's run by a democracy of shareholders? They select representatives on the board. Employee-owned businesses exist, for example, and things like collective bargaining only work because you have a democratic effort of the employees.

Yes they are joint owners but they quickly choose a CEO to run the corporation. How many stockholders really get involved in the running of a company? Not many. Those that own very large numbers of shares behave like quasi owners.

Your point is not as strong as you'd like it to be, if you're trying to claim that democracy has no place in business.

Doubly so when you conflate literally all possible forms of collabration with "design by committee," an error already made and denounced in this thread.

My point is that democracy in general isn't necessarily good or efficient. It's just too dangerous in the case of the government to let any single person have absolute power. That is not true though in business, gaming, or a host of other things.

But let's not sidetrack this threat with an argument about business.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

@Emerikol and @EzekielRaiden ,

Might want to be careful with this Democracy tangent. Paul Farquhar and Yaarel already got redtexted and booted for going on about it. I like you two's on point posts and would be disappointed if you both got booted as well.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes they are joint owners but they quickly choose a CEO to run the corporation. How many stockholders really get involved in the running of a company? Not many. Those that own very large numbers of shares behave like quasi owners.


My point is that democracy in general isn't necessarily good or efficient. It's just too dangerous in the case of the government to let any single person have absolute power. That is not true though in business, gaming, or a host of other things.

But let's not sidetrack this threat with an argument about business.

Fair enough. My previous reply to you still stands.

 

[Emerikol]

Fair enough. My previous reply to you still stands.

I get that. We just agreed to disagree and get back to game discussions. If you want to carry on in a direct message, I'm fine to debate it with you there.

 

[tetrasodium]

But trust is not--cannot ever be--a one-way street.

That's the problem I keep having with all this talk of "trust."

It's that the argument you've just given boils down to, "I'm the DM, therefore you should always trust everything I say, no matter what. Nothing I do is ever a reason to not trust."

That's simply not an acceptable or tenable position--and it is exactly that position which causes me such problems.

No because that extends both ways. I'll use an example from a frostmaiden game I got ito play in before running or even reading it. I was playing a wizard from thay with the fosl of a graduate proving adventure type motivation. Eventually we teleported the to thay for some much needed long overdue shopping where the group got stopped at a "papers please" sorta identification checkpoint where another player asked if my wizard from Thay had ID only to have me say to the gm "I don't know... Given my background, do I have ID?". The GM took the answer in an interesting direction I wouldn't have considered and we as a group were able to explore the setting in interesting ways because of that trust I extended. Other times I've encountered similar situations with no strong preference but an idea and tossed that trust over to the gm only to find that I was ok with the idea not fitting or appealing to the gm & their prep or plans.

Deciding that you can never trust the gm and expect total trust from them as a result is not something I'd expect to go over well through the course of a game lasting more than a session or two with one gm and multiple players unless it becomes ok to treat the other players as little more than sidekicks if player actions are expected to mean anything

 

[Emerikol]

But trust is not--cannot ever be--a one-way street.

That's the problem I keep having with all this talk of "trust."

It's that the argument you've just given boils down to, "I'm the DM, therefore you should always trust everything I say, no matter what. Nothing I do is ever a reason to not trust."

That's simply not an acceptable or tenable position--and it is exactly that position which causes me such problems.

It may be that you can't get there. For those that can, they are able to enjoy a rich roleplaying experience. You will have to find a place where you are comfortable and play in that manner.

When I consider the amount of work I put into a campaign, it's hard for anyone to think I'm doing it for anything other than to have fun. And for DMs with my play style, the fun of the game is exploration and discovery as much as anything. It's the notion the world is a real place which is verisimilitude. It's not a real place I know just like Middle Earth is not a real place but if done well we can escape to that place and really enjoy it.

Since a DM can do anything inside his campaign, why would he ruin it? His goal is to create a great experience and invite players into a world of discovery. I realize temperamentally some people aren't suited to DMing but for those that are it's great.

 

[Oofta]

But trust is not--cannot ever be--a one-way street.

That's the problem I keep having with all this talk of "trust."

It's that the argument you've just given boils down to, "I'm the DM, therefore you should always trust everything I say, no matter what. Nothing I do is ever a reason to not trust."

That's simply not an acceptable or tenable position--and it is exactly that position which causes me such problems.

When is trust a one way street? I trust my players not to cheat unless and until proven otherwise. I trust them to track their HP, be honest when they make a save, what they roll for damage. I trust them to abide by the ground rules we've established for the campaign such as don't be a loner a-hole or a handful of other things.

The vast majority of times, it all works out. Every once in a great while it doesn't. But here's the thing. There will always be a bad egg here and there. But the DM is outnumbered by players, for me, it usually ends up being 6 to 1. So if 1 in 600 players is that bad egg then I'm going to run into them on average every 100 groups I DM. The player? They'll have to have 600 DMs.

Obviously I don't know what the real number is, but the point remains. There are players who are abrasive, who cheat, who are glory hogs who make the game less fun for their other people at the table. If you're unlucky enough to get together with a group with a bad player odds are only 1 in 6 that the person at the table who is problematic is the DM.

 

[AK_Ambrian]

Regarding the original thread topic, the idea of forcing a certain number of encounters before each short or long rest is about game mechanics and resources. From the point-of-view of the world the characters are in, it is not realistic at all unless the characters are penetrating an enemy fortress or deep within hostile territory. It's just a cheap way for DMs to 'manufacture' tension/challenge. It doesn't really have anything to do with role playing.

With adventures like Master Of The Desert Nomads and its sequel Temple Of Death it makes sense to me because the characters are sometimes crossing land occupied by an entire enemy army and then the heavily guarded stronghold of the enemy overlord. Or in Keep On The Borderlands' Caves of Chaos there are a lot of monster lairs in close proximity to each other so I can imagine a high number of hostile encounters per day if the characters are not stealthy. But for an adventure like Isle Of Dread, I think more than a few encounters a day is unrealistic if you look at the map and see how spread out everything is.

It's better to determine the number of encounters per day by considering the geography of the dungeon/wilderness the characters are in.