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.

 

[OB1]

Well... they already were... or could be anyway. You can have an easy encounter for a single combat day, after all.

Part of the issue I have with many games is the thought that all or most encounters my be hard or deadly and challenge the party.

I mean, come on, can you imagine how hectic and stressful the game would be ramped up to 8+ all the time!?!

Yeah, no thanks. As it is I already have encounters which nearly give the players heart attacks when I do them; no one I play with would want that all the time.

Right, which is why there are guidelines for Low and Moderate encounters as well. The point is, if you want to run a single encounter day and have it be a challenge, there now appears to be a guideline to get you there. I know a lot of groups who like to default to a single encounter per day.

Low and Moderate encounters are used when you need to have several in a single adventuring day or if you want one encounter but don't want to push the PCs to hard.

In 5e, I've always varied my adventuring days a lot, partially due to story concerns, partially to keep the players on their toes.

 

[abirdcall]

This is just a misunderstanding of proper pacing. Your encounters should vary wildly in difficulty and composition.

Have a mage that just learned fireball? Horde of goblin time.

Have a fighter with a sweet undead killing sword? Give them undead to slaughter.

I feel like some people want all of this laid out for them, or want for simple rules. But this is all table dependent. And learning how to do this to make the game more fun is a big part of growing as a DM.

Table dependent too.

Your suggestions would not be fun for me.

I don't want the world to change because of what I happen to have or the party composition.

Knowing there will be a certain creature to match the thing I just got takes the specialness of it away from me. It then doesn't matter what type of creature it is good at killing because they will be there to kill.

 

[ezo]

The point is, if you want to run a single encounter day and have it be a challenge, there now appears to be a guideline to get you there. I know a lot of groups who like to default to a single encounter per day.

Deadly usually fit that bill for me IME, but if it ends up helping others more then better.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Table dependent too.

100% agree. It's all personal to the people you play with.

My examples were not meant as objectively good, sorry if I portrayed them as such.

 

[Xeviat]

Gonna have to do a lot of reading, but I'm going to find it unusual if there aren't at least recommendations for allowing for an average of 2 short rests a day at the very least.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Deadly usually fit that bill for me IME, but if it ends up helping others more then better.

At mid levels at least basic deadly is pushover in my experience. You need to go double or so.

In my last session the party of four level 11 characters did beat encounter that was composed of single CR 7 monster, that I had boosted by giving it a single legendary action and resistance, better attack bonus and spell DC, and some better spells and ability to upcast them, (so they could target whole party with hold person) as well as regeneration (a troll hag necromancer,) accompanied by two slightly boosted CR 5 creatures (pretty basic trolls) and stock CR 5 creature (normal wraith). In addition one of the legendary actions of the hag was the ability to summon a new CR 5 creature, (wraith again) and it did so three times during the battle, so the party defeated four wraiths in total. So ignoring the boost for the leader monster (which probably would have brought it to CR 8 or 9) this would be a bit over triple current deadly, though staggering of the summoned creatures made it easier.

Whilst one character did go down, the party was at not really in any serious peril and they had plenty of resources left after that. But at least they were a bit worried, and had to burn some spells and play smart. I'm sure that after short rest they could have taken another encounter of similar difficulty though.

So yeah, deadly is nothing, and I'm glad the encounter budget gets boosted.

What I am worried about though is that the difficulty adjustment for multiple monsters seems to be gone. In my experience even with the old encounter guidelines it is the solo monsters that underperform the most, so this skews things even more against them.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Gonna have to do a lot of reading, but I'm going to find it unusual if there aren't at least recommendations for allowing for an average of 2 short rests a day at the very least.

I don't think there was such in the guidelines quoted in the AMA thread.

 

[ezo]

At mid levels at least basic deadly is pushover in my experience. You need to go double or so.

Then our experiences differ wildly.

The point was a "deadly" encounter in 5E 2014 can work as the single encounter for the day and offer a bit of challenge and fun. It won't likely do any lasting harm, but if the PCs are unlucky in their rolls it could have a moment or two of some concern.

In my experience even with the old encounter guidelines it is the solo monsters that underperform the most, so this skews things even more against them.

VERY TRUE!

That, if anything is what really should have been addressed in the new DMG!

The guidelines in 2014 treat a solo as x1 exp and x0.5 exp for large (6+) groups. It should be x0.5 for smaller groups and 0.33 or 0.25 for large groups IME.

 

[Xeviat]

I don't think there was such in the guidelines quoted in the AMA thread.

I'm not seeing anything so far either.

 

[Xeviat]

Then our experiences differ wildly.

The point was a "deadly" encounter in 5E 2014 can work as the single encounter for the day and offer a bit of challenge and fun. It won't likely do any lasting harm, but if the PCs are unlucky in their rolls it could have a moment or two of some concern.

I did a campaign from 3rd to 12th and found that 3 deadly encounters a day, with short rests between, with my own level adjustments for how many magic items the players had, felt challenging and no one died.

Deadly wasn't deadly, it was just hard.