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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's not the point. The point is whether the DM is even going to let those be possible because they're protecting their setting.

Why wouldn't the DM let the character's actions change the setting? That's the whole point of playing to me. You let the players loose to play their PCs in the world (which keeps ticking away), and see what they do. The world reacts to their actions, and changes, big and small, occur as a result. All of that, character and setting action, adds up to the emergent narrative of the game.

That's my philosophy in a nutshell.

 

[TwoSix]

Play any way you want. I just want people to stop saying that anyone who doesn't follow a specific style is engaging in adversarial DM and that is only "Out to win". Because the vast majority of us are not. We're out to have a fun game with our friends and framing it as DM vs player is really unfair.

Literally no one is saying that.

 

[hawkeyefan]

"Made sense" are their words, not mine.

But do you get the point?

Many things may “make sense” in the setting. So that isn’t a meaningful rationale on its own for a DM making a decision in play. There’s more to it.

So what more is there?

Do you want to engage with that or send more winky emojis?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Disagree. If you know that the adventure is going to go from Chapter 1 in the module to Chapter 7 in the end (unless you TPK or something), then that's setting tourism.

If you're not driving the bus, you're a tourist on the bus.

My players take the bus off-road all the time. I try to be ready when they do.

 

[Oofta]

Disagree. If you know that the adventure is going to go from Chapter 1 in the module to Chapter 7 in the end (unless you TPK or something), then that's setting tourism.

If you're not driving the bus, you're a tourist on the bus.

What the f*** are you talking about? Seriously. That statement has nothing to do with what I or anyone else has ever stated. I have a campaign world. It doesn't care about the PCs but I set up different options they can pursue and set up flashing lights for those cases where they are not tall enough to ride that ride. Then the players decide what direction they're taking. What they do can have massive impact on the setting, or none at all.

They are driving their own bus wherever they want to go, they just aren't building the roads.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why do Enworlders think saying that someone's opinion is an opinion is the ultimate gotcha?

I use it when I feel a poster is presenting their personal opinion as objective truth unfairly.

 

[Manbearcat]

Those things are still strongly implied, if not outright stated, in nearly every version if D&D and its relatives, which are the games we are discussing.

Obviously other games play under different assumptions, and some folks play D&D under different assumptions, and that's fine.

This looks like you agreeing with what I wrote above, Micah.

So...you agree that people smuggle in those component parts I mentioned above to "GM plays to win" and that is why they land on that particular formulation of Adversarial GMing.

When I GM (whatever game it is), I "play to win," and "I play to perpetually put PCs in tough spots that they (through their players) have to get out of (until the game is over)." And it doesn't matter, because the games don't contain the circumstances that allow me to win by fiat so that adversarial approach to GMing never coincides with players having a compromised sense of how the gamestate moves from this state to that state.

Now the cost, to someone like Micah Sweet, would be "yeah but I have to deal with a transparent, table-facing game and consistently work under the cognitive circumstances of having a game layer in mind while I'm playing my PC...that impinges upon my (Micah Sweet) particular needs for immersion."

And that is fine. We've circled back to the beginning of cognitive orientation to play paradigms and the reality that costs and tradeoffs and individual particulars always must be accounted for in leisure activities.

 

[TwoSix]

My players take the bus off-road all the time. I try to be ready when they do.

I have to be ready, because my games have no roads and no map.

 

[hawkeyefan]

What does "characters should be the focus" mean?

For me, it means that the setting is there for the characters.

And why should all those things default to being in the player's favor? Just because they could?

No. Since we’re playing a game, we should have the outcome be determined by play of some sort.

Well if there was a locked door there already. I think whether the DM planned it in advance or just whipped it up matters a lot.


Your last sentence is right and if the DM planned it that way then it is entirely fair. It really comes down to frequency that something like this happens. If every single time something is a fake then of course that is bad. But sometimes in reality something is fake and that makes total sense.

To me this could go either way in isolation. Neither affronts my sensibilities.


I think the locked door is fine if it was always there. The DM is not expected to handwave away locked doors anymore than handwave them into existence.

Either makes sense. If you are watching it in a movie, you don't think "No way this is not possible."

Yes… there are a number of possibilities that make sense.

So when a DM decides that what makes sense in this instance is the thing that blocks the players, that, to me, seems very problematic to play.

 

[Oofta]

Literally no one is saying that.

Really?

...
That add-on is only assumed when one smuggles in Trad authority distribution, Trad action resolution dynamics, and attendant Sim priorities to "GM plays to win" to the concept of Adversarial GMing.

GM plays to win is not saying the GM is out to win? I mean that would be pedantically correct and maybe I'm just missing the entire point so correct me if I am. But otherwise? It's been quite clear, if we aren't doing a narrative story type game, we're adversarial DMs.