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]

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

Having a character be tempted down the dark path but then ultimately deciding the gain wasn't worth the cost is actually a pretty good character arc.

A player self-sabotaging a cool character moment because they were too passive to embrace the story is sadly an all-too-common occurrence.

 

[Oofta]

If hashing out a rules or framing issue takes more than 2-3 minutes, then I would say there are some deeper problems in the game.

Do you have every rule, every spell memorized? Know every class feature, decided in detail how to handle every intersection of the rules?

I don't and neither do I expect that of my players. In D&D there have always been and will always be corners of the rules that people have different takes on. We can't always know what they are until we hit them.

 

[TwoSix]

Do you have every rule, every spell memorized? Know every class feature, decided in detail how to handle every intersection of the rules?

I don't and neither do I expect that of my players. In D&D there have always been and will always be corners of the rules that people have different takes on. We can't always know what they are until we hit them.

Of course not. But reading a rule, hearing some quick discussion, and making the call shouldn't take more than 2-3 minutes, as I said.

And more importantly, the point I was making wasn't about knowing a rule. It was with a player actively disagreeing with my interpretation and ruling. Those are two very distinct things.

 

[TiQuinn]

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 don’t know what you mean by “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

How did he fail? Did he not want to play an “evil” character? What did you give him as a familiar? An imp or something?

 

[Oofta]

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

As a DM I don't pre-author any conclusions. I have general ideas of the setting. I know who the NPCs are and their motivations. I have some encounters I expect to happen along with a couple "extras" just in case. But even those planned encounters aren't set in stone, description and fluff can change to fit a scenario.

What I don't do is force decisions on the players. Since I don't know what they're going to do or how they'll react, how can I know what the conclusion is going to be?

Sometimes they question a captive that is simply a low level grunt doing what they're told so they don't know much.

If you never fail success becomes meaningless. If they succeed on their plan but fail to get what they expect I will have a reason for it other than just being a crotchety DM. There's a secret yet to be revealed, lack of success leads to other cookie crumbs, what initially looks like failure can be turned into a positive in time.

The vast majority of DMs are just trying to make the game fun. There's no one true way of doing that.

 

[TiQuinn]

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.

They accomplished their goal, they just didn't continue further with that series. Is that really the scenario being discussed or are we just naming exceptions?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Who said you can't ask questions? Sometimes you have to let a call stand in the moment, but after the session you can talk about it more come to an equitable solution (probably. Maybe not always).

@Emerikol literally just said that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

So, what happens when the DM does a thing that could be 1 or 2, but it's really obviously very consequential, and it has a clear, immediate, significant negative impact on the PC(s), and the thing it's doing specifically and directly contradicts clear, basic, publicly-shared rules of the game, like the text of a spell or a class feature?

Because that's example I gave. This out-of-the-blue "nope, the rules don't matter, past precedent doesn't matter, you just have to trust me as DM that a spell blowing up in your face for no discernible reason is 100% okay." Which, again, this is not something I made up. It's something another user on this forum asked me about.

 

[TwoSix]

Sometimes they question a captive that is simply a low level grunt doing what they're told so they don't know much.

If you never fail success becomes meaningless. If they succeed on their plan but fail to get what they expect I will have a reason for it other than just being a crotchety DM. There's a secret yet to be revealed, lack of success leads to other cookie crumbs, what initially looks like failure can be turned into a positive in time.

Good. I'm glad we're on the same page.

 

[Emerikol]

They accomplished their goal, they just didn't continue further with that series. Is that really the scenario being discussed or are we just naming exceptions?

Well my point is that some groups might decide the going is too rough and not continue to the end even though to that point they've been succeeding though perhaps with great difficulty. As DM, I don't force my players to play any adventure. I'm a sandbox guy. Quitting and doing something else is on the table.

And I agree, that my example was maybe not precisely that case.