Dungeons & Dragons Has Done Away With the Adventuring Day

WotC has scrapped its recommendation of 6-8 encounters per day.

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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.
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer


tetrasodium

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Epic
So um... How have they changed to offset the removal? Wotc has long waffled between expressly admitting that things were designed with the expectation and that the game was not designed to expect it. We have the new PHB (complete with some near identical monsters) where there's no drastic overhaul on that end of the things assumed & mapped to the 6-8, simply removing the words without restructuring the monster design leaves the big question of how the encounter building itself was restructured on a mechanical level.
 
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payn

I don't believe in the no-win scenario
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.
I am really hoping this leads to running the game better for a lot of folks. Though, im worried that simply not saying adventure day is just trying to avoid a controversial term and folks will still need/want more guidance on how the game is designed to work from the DMG. I am curious to see the pacing section though I must say.
 



DEFCON 1

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You mean DMs will actually have to put in the work to figure out how best to make their games enjoyable for their players, rather than lazily relying on a series of guidelines to do all the work for them, but then getting mad that they don't work for their very specific wonky table and oddball group of characters they are running the game for?

Good.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend, he/him
I am really hoping this leads to running the game better for a lot of folks. Though, im worried that simply not saying adventure day is just trying to avoid a controversial term and folks will still need/want more guidance on how the game is designed to work from the DMG. I am curious to see the pacing section though I must say.
Guaranteed thst it is a change of terminology rather than design: the Classes and Monsters work the same, with the same balance ideals. The"Adventure Day" rule of thumb seems to have been replaced with a budget and pacing suggustiona...which probsvly work out to the same thing.

But rephrasing representation can really help. A lot of people struggled with the old guidance.
 



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