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.

 

[ezo]

Regarding the original thread topic, <snip>

Whoa! Wait a second... think about what you are saying!?

Trying to actually get a thread back on topic! Oh, the humanity!

 

[TwoSix]

I think this is why it's really not the default for D&D. I've experimented as well with my groups. Some of them love it, and others (even very experienced players) hated it with the intensity of 10000 suns. It's very group specific.

IMX, it's a pretty core division between players as to whether they're oriented towards "play to explore" or "play to create". I know very few players who are equally enthused and skilled at doing both.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Whether or not that's an acceptable or tenable position seems to be subjective. Some folks seem to be fine with it. And they're not all DMs.

 

[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.

Well as has been said before, there is some level of trust that players will honor the social contract of the game. I don't know what you want. Every DM decision is subject to player committee overruling him? If so that will be an absolute disaster and I'd be out of that game so fast the players heads would spin.

I'm there to make the game fun. If it is not fun, then the players go find a DM that is fun.

 

[abirdcall]

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.

This is something I see on these boards sometimes and I just don't understand it.

Most chapters in the published adventures are like this.

So are action movies.

It's just the way stories are, which okay, are manufactured but otherwise there isn't anything.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

You think every table should make a public offering?

 

[Emerikol]

IMX, it's a pretty core division between players as to whether they're oriented towards "play to explore" or "play to create". I know very few players who are equally enthused and skilled at doing both.

I agree. I'm a very well known quantity and I know I'm not everyone's cup of tea. I am the type of DM though that some players love. I'm happy to make those people really happy and let the others go to another DM that will meet their needs and everyone is happy.

 

[TwoSix]

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.

If I don't have players and DMs who I both trust, and trust me in return, I don't play.

 

[grimmgoose]

It'll be interesting to look back in a year to see if the removal of the Adventuring Day is due to the new CR system being actually effective, or due to WOTC just cutting it out and not replacing it with anything.

I find it hard to believe that the Adventuring Day is just "out" from the game mechanics. 5E, across the board, is a game about resource attrition, one that gets more pronounced as the players rise in level. 90% of my problems with 5E are solved by simply having more than one combat per Long Rest.

 

[Emerikol]

It'll be interesting to look back in a year to see if the removal of the Adventuring Day is due to the new CR system being actually effective, or due to WOTC just cutting it out and not replacing it with anything.

I find it hard to believe that the Adventuring Day is just "out" from the game mechanics. 5E, across the board, is a game about resource attrition, one that gets more pronounced as the players rise in level. 90% of my problems with 5E are solved by simply having more than one combat per Long Rest.

Wow. How can you not consider that the norm? Are you players honestly stopping for a long rest between every single encounter? I think it's time for the monsters to get a brain and attack and harry their enemy.