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.

 

[pemerton]

I've actually experimented several times in different ways in giving the players more control over shaping the fiction, and they balk at every turn. It's just not their thing apparently, which is a bit disappointing. I've since given up on it.

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.

I think you are talking about something different from most of the RPGs that I play.

When I talk about players shaping, I'm talking about them (i) declaring actions for their PCs, and (ii) those declarations being resolved by application of the action resolution rules, rather than the GM making decisions (including imaginative manipulation of secret/hidden backstory) so as to produce an outcome that the GM wants.

In D&D, combat is resolved by action resolution rules, rather than "GM decides", all the time. In classic D&D, player interactions with doors are resolved via action resolution rules, rather than GM decides, all the time. In almost all versions of D&D, if a player says "My PC goes <over there?" then that is just taken to happen, without the GM having authority to say things like "You try and make your legs move, but they don't - you've just suffered some sort of spontaneous paralysis".

It is possible to generalise this sort of approach to action resolution beyond combat, doors and walking. For instance, it can encompass social interactions, including interrogations.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

When and how is the situation established? What is at stake?

For instance, suppose that the GM is running a modern game, set in a city. There is no map-and-key. The PCs are fleeing for their lives from ruthless killers pursuing them. The GM described an alley with a door on one side wall. The players describet their PCs fleeing into the alley, and trying the door. The GM replies that the door is locked, and that while the PCs are trying to open it, their pursuers catch up.

You don't think that that is questionable GMing? The GM is pretending to the players that they have a choice, and a chance of their PCs escaping the killers; but in fact just makes stuff up so as to frame the PCs into combat.

How is that not railroading?

A door in a city being locked (assuming tech-level where locks are common) is far from unlikely. It is a possibility the players, when they make the decision to run to the alley, is perfectly aware of. It also means the characters now have opportunity to use whatever means they might posses to quickly overcome that lock. The only questionable thing here to me is, if the GM doesn't give the player opportunity to react to the information of door being locked before being caught.

 

[pemerton]

I know it's pretty much never what I want as a player. It harms my immersion to control anything in the setting outside my PC's actions.

Does it hurt your immersion for your PC to (say) control a thing they are holding? Or to influence a person they are talking to?

Assuming that it doesn't, then the next question is: how do we work out what happens when you try and perform a task with a tool, or influence a person?

One way is for the GM to make it up. Another way is to have some sort of action resolution procedure.

D&D takes the second approach for some tool use - eg using swords to kill people; using lockpicks to unlock doors.

Taking that approach for the influence of people was originally a part of the game too - hence rules around reactions, loyalty and morale.

For instance, just as an attempt to kill someone is normally resolved by rolling dice, so an attempt to befriend someone, or to prompt them to answer a question, can be resolved the same way.

 

[pemerton]

A door in a city being locked (assuming tech-level where locks are common) is far from unlikely. It is a possibility the players, when they make the decision to run to the alley, is perfectly aware of. It also means the characters now have opportunity to use whatever means they might posses to quickly overcome that lock. The only questionable thing here to me is, if the GM doesn't give the player opportunity to react to the information of door being locked before being caught.

So you agree that the example I gave - which includes The GM replies that the door is locked, and that while the PCs are trying to open it, their pursuers catch up - is an example of poor GMing, and of railroading?

 

[pemerton]

As a player I wouldn't want to shape the fiction either. I want to explore the fiction. Learn about the world. Engage with it. If I'm creating it as a player then it doesn't seem real to me. If the DM is winging it, then it doesn't seem real either.

Presumably when you play the game, and declare actions for your PC, you expect the fiction to change so as to incorporate those actions and their consequences.

And presumably you have ideas about what sorts of consequences you want the fiction to include: eg if you say "I open the door", then presumably you intend that the fiction include an event of your PC putting their hand to the door, pushing it open, etc - and then your PC seeing what is on the other side of it.

These are all shaping the fiction.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Does it hurt your immersion for your PC to (say) control a thing they are holding? Or to influence a person they are talking to?

Assuming that it doesn't, then the next question is: how do we work out what happens when you try and perform a task with a tool, or influence a person?

One way is for the GM to make it up. Another way is to have some sort of action resolution procedure.

D&D takes the second approach for some tool use - eg using swords to kill people; using lockpicks to unlock doors.

Taking that approach for the influence of people was originally a part of the game too - hence rules around reactions, loyalty and morale.

For instance, just as an attempt to kill someone is normally resolved by rolling dice, so an attempt to befriend someone, or to prompt them to answer a question, can be resolved the same way.

Yes, this is true. What conclusion are you trying to draw for me from this?

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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

The resource suites and recovery periods that are part of the core of the game's PC build have not been handed down on stone tablets. They are a game design. Presumably they reflect an intention about how the use of those resources, and their recovery, will produce engaging game play.

Presumably, likewise, there is an intention that the fiction of the game will be put together so as to ensure that the game play that results from it will be engaging. For instance, D&D game play often presents players with choices to make from the perspective of their PCs; but these questions are rarely about (say) the technical drafting of legal instruments, even though that is a thing that could "realistically" arise in many D&D settings.

So if a group is playing a game of D&D, and the nova-capable classes are dominating over the at-will-type classes, I don't see how it is any answer to a concern expressed by the players of the at-will-types for the GM to reply, well, the geography here dictates that there be only one or two interesting events per day. The GM had a choice about what the geography would be, what events would occur, etc.

 

[pemerton]

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.

So, imagine a group of people sitting around a table, "playing to explore". What they want to explore is stuff like: where are the Kobolds coming from? How are they entering the city? What are their numbers?

And so they come up with the idea of capturing and interrogating one of the infiltrating Kobolds.

And the GM blocks their exploration by presenting the Kobold in such a way as to stop any of that information being obtained.

Those people might become rather annoyed!

Moral of the story: @Oofta, @Micah Sweet and other posters, who are trying to argue that either your are "playing to create" or else the GM is free to make up whatever fiction they want, are not correct. "Playing to explore" is just as dependent on the GM playing with integrity, honouring the established fiction, following action resolution procedures.

Unless "playing to explore" is just a euphemism for "listening to the GM's story-time".

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So you agree that the example I gave - which includes The GM replies that the door is locked, and that while the PCs are trying to open it, their pursuers catch up - is an example of poor GMing, and of railroading?

There are of course exception for everything, but it generally is good practice to let the players react to new information, and that didn't quite happen in your example.

 

[pemerton]

Every DM decision is subject to player committee overruling him?

<snip>

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

The first and last sentences here say the same thing! The players are a committee who can veto the GM any time they like, precisely as you describe.