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.

 

[TwoSix]

There are times when the players don't know everything going on. Sometimes they steal the Maltese Falcon thinking they're getting a fabulous treasure only to find out it's a fake. Sometimes the goblin doesn't know anything because he was just a grunt doing whatever his commanders told him.

So you're agreeing with me. The reason the players failed is because the DM pre-authored a failure state.

 

[Emerikol]

Let's make a new set of assumptions.
1. The DM sticks to his setting even when it seems the players are confused why. A good thing.
2. The DM manipulates his setting to force players in one direction or another as it suits him. A bad thing.

Can players always tell the difference between 1 and 2? No in the short run and probably yes in the long run. I can even tell when a DM is winging it. So there is some player intuition involved. I still think though if we only have one datapoint that players should trust the DM and see how the game goes. Eventually though if the DM keeps doing 2 then the players go.

 

[TwoSix]

Maybe they set an unreasonable goal? Maybe they had a goal that seemed reasonable until they discovered something they didn't know and can now use that knowledge to set a better goal? Maybe the dice were against it?

If the player(s) set an unreasonable or implausible goal, it's the DM's jobs to tell them. If you shoot at the moon, I don't tell you to roll. I narrate you shooting at the moon and your arrow flying off into the distance.

 

[Emerikol]

“If the PCs do everything right and don't achieve their goal, assuming that the dice were not actively the cause, why did they not achieve their goal?”

I had a group once who soundly defeated the giants in G1-G3 but refused to go into D1-D3 and thus did not complete that series. Maybe the goal can change. At the beginning their goal was to punish the giants for raiding.

But sure, I can contrive a scenario where the PCs would have won except the DM stopped them and in those cases yes it was the DM who stopped them.

 

[TwoSix]

I had a group once who soundly defeated the giants in G1-G3 but refused to go into D1-D3 and thus did not complete that series. Maybe the goal can change. At the beginning their goal was to punish the giants for raiding.

But sure, I can contrive a scenario where the PCs would have won except the DM stopped them and in those cases yes it was the DM who stopped them.

But that's not a fail. If the PCs don't want to go to another place, they don't. If they decide their previous goal is no longer worth pursuing, that's just normal roleplaying.

"Failure" is specifically about the player pursuing a specific intent at that moment and not achieving it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you're agreeing with me. The reason the players failed is because the DM pre-authored a failure state.

But that doesn't make it a novel. Sometimes the players don't know that a plan won't work. Doesn't mean there isn't a setting-consistenr reason why not. Given some effort, the players can almost always find out what that reason is.

Just use that tactic very sparingly as a DM, because it is understanbly frustrating IMO.

 

[Manbearcat]

No it doesn't... I think there's some sort of inductive fallacy going on here that I'm currently too tired to unpack.

If an inevitable result of y (the exclusion of an archetypal form of TTRPG play; GM Storyteller + Setting Tourism) doesn't follow from x (the preference or ability to integrate meta considerations when evaluating decision-trees and declaring actions for a PC), then I would say "x doesn't lead to y" follows.

I don't know how we're not clicking here?

I mean I find the whole term "setting tourism" offensive and derogatory, and I really do not recognise it as a common playstyle at all, so I think it just weird how you talk about it like it was a usual thing. I still do not understand why you even brought it up. Like what it has to do with anything?

@hawkeyefan already answered this (and I agree with his answer).

* It was brought up because the conversation seemed to be running together very different forms of exploration in TTRPG play. Its pretty important to distinguish between various forms of exploration priorities, exploration systemization, and the attendant experience of exploration that comes from priorities meeting systemization.

The (i) conflict-charged exploration in Moldvay Basic or Torchbearer in a challenge-centered game where multiple clocks and forms of resource/inventory management converge to generate constant duress on decision-trees is extremely different than (ii) exploration of the cities of Neverwinter or Baldur's Gates or Waterdeep in a Forgotten Realms 2e/3e/5e game that features a significant chunk of table time devoted to freeform play and conflict-neutral consumption of scenery-chewing, notorious NPC exposition, and declaring actions in order to trigger reveals and info dumps and plot nodes that engage with famous, novelized setting conceits.

I don't see how this is even slightly controversial? I've done all three for years and years and years. Those two forms of exploration are not even on a continuum. They're decisively different things in implementation and in experience for both GMs and players.

 

[TwoSix]

But that doesn't make it a novel. Sometimes the players don't know that a plan won't work. Doesn't mean there isn't a setting-consistenr reason why not. Given some effort, the players can almost always find out what that reason is.

Just use that tactic very sparingly as a DM, because it is understanbly frustrating IMO.

I never said it makes it a novel.

But the fundamental distinction still exists. Some people see stopping a player's activity because of something in the pre-defined setting definition as fundamentally a good thing, and others see it as the opposite.

 

[tetrasodium]

“If the PCs do everything right and don't achieve their goal, assuming that the dice were not actively the cause, why did they not achieve their goal?”

I once had a player set out to get a familiar on his cleric. Told him it would go somewhere dark if he wanted to go down that path and even though I did that after taking the unusual step of walking away from the table with him so he could answer without feeling pressured he asked no questions then later still failed because he wasn't cool with actually going to the dark and openly wearing it on his sleeve for others to see.

I forget the custom spell specifically but there were a couple away from table talks where he nodded along enthusiastically without questioning and a couple adventures going on dark directions like getting a sacrificial altar out of a dungeon after killing some bbeg in there previously and such. All I remember was that the spell was called "transmute soul to familiar" and it required a live humanoid who's soul is consumed by the ritual.

It was actually very frustrating because he tried to make it out like his refusal was because I was gm had somehow misled him by not giving him a standard find familiar or the eventual spell before repeatedly telling him it would go somewhere dark and sending him on multiple adventures going in dark necromantic directions without him ever bothering to ask even a single question. He failed because he made no effort to actively work with the GM and just participated as a spectator

 

[TwoSix]

The (i) conflict-charged exploration in Moldvay Basic or Torchbearer in a challenge-centered game where multiple clocks and forms of resource/inventory management converge to generate constant duress on decision-trees is extremely different than (ii) exploration of the cities of Neverwinter or Baldur's Gates or Waterdeep in a Forgotten Realms 2e/3e/5e game that features a significant chunk of table time devoted to freeform play and conflict-neutral consumption of scenery-chewing, notorious NPC exposition, and declaring actions in order to trigger reveals and info dumps and plot nodes that engage with famous, novelized setting conceits.

I would point out, also, that saying a certain style of play is not "challenge-centered" is in no way derogatory or some kind of attack.

I mean, case (ii) described above is a perfect encapsulation of what happens in Baldur's Gate 3, and that's on the short list of greatest cRPGs ever made!