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

Emerikol

Legend
At this point in my gaming career, I'm generally only interested in strictly predefined settings in two cases.
That is too bad. I'd consider it a prerequisite for me to even play in a game though I would play in an established public setting if the DM made it her own.

If you flesh out fantasy pantheon #204135 with some new classes, spells, and feats to really hook me into the setting, I'm way more enthused to explore it.
I find the need for "mechanics" to be added or changed to make something interesting is a sad commentary on our game. I'm probably playing a simplified version of D&D already so we aren't on the same page. I'm not playing 5e even. I don't care for the implied setting enough.

What I will give is a pantheon that doesn't look like any other. I will likely have the Gods work in ways you haven't seen before.

I will have the local sandbox very well detailed and while playing there the party will engage with and befriend/atagonize all kinds of NPCs. I had a group one time actually say they were going to go a different route to some place just to check on one of their first level mentors. So I like relationship building in the game. They will also become abundantly aware of the highs and lows of their community and what their struggles are.

The Kingdoms will be detailed out fairly well and by the time the group gets to a larger city it will be well detailed out. I've started campaigns in cities and in the countryside but traditionally I start on the edge of society. City campaigns can be fun though.

There will be a well defined interaction amongst the races. They will have their histories to back up those feelings. And those things will differ setting to setting.

I will introduce a whole plethora of new campaign specific magic items. Even the mundane items will have more flare than D&D gives them.

I will have an economy. I will know how people are getting fed. I will know the trade routes and I will provide ample evidence of commerce. I will understand the culture well enough to represent how they really live instead of just handwaving it. If my focus is middle ages then I will represent that period given magic exists. I do move the game period forward and backward though depending on what I'm in the mood for at that moment.

My players in addition to adventuring will become connected to the larger world as they grow in power. Some will want to be low key while others will play up their fame. In some instances they will engage in politics, commerce, etc.. Invariable they will establish a base and the nature of the base varies. Sometimes its a business in a big city. Other times its a castle on the frontier.

I want the world to be a place of wonder for the players. I want there to be a lot of mysteries going on and I want some of those mysteries to be something besides the acquisition of power. Sometimes it's love. Sometimes it's racial hatred.

It's a living world and that is my goal.
 

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hawkeyefan

Legend
Then where do you draw the line and what type of mechanic should there be? Because I pretty much invent every PC, every building, every door. I only roll a die if I'm uncertain of the outcome. I simply don't know what kind of mechanics you want or think should be used.

Shouldn’t there be uncertainty in a chase scene? Will they catch us? When? Willwe have time to get away? To pick the lock? To hide? Whatever!

It’s fine for the DM to decide many things. But not all things. If they’re deciding all things, then what game is being played?
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
I know it's an old, old movie but I thought the Maltese Falcon was well known enough to use as an example. In the case of the Maltese Falcon it was sought after by different individuals who thought it was incredibly valuable. It wasn't, it was always a fake. If I were using it as inspiration for a game, it's not that I decided that it was fake after the group managed to acquire it, it's that it was always fake.

Phony artifacts, forged pieces of art, the all powerful wizard just being someone behind the curtain, McGuffins that are actually worthless are all standard storytelling tropes.

Sure, but what makes for a good story may not make for a good game.
 

TwoSix

Master of the One True Way
I find the need for "mechanics" to be added or changed to make something interesting is a sad commentary on our game. I'm probably playing a simplified version of D&D already so we aren't on the same page. I'm not playing 5e even. I don't care for the implied setting enough.
I don't. The game is a game. I want the game portion to be as compelling as the fictional portion.

What I will give is a pantheon that doesn't look like any other. I will likely have the Gods work in ways you haven't seen before.

I will have the local sandbox very well detailed and while playing there the party will engage with and befriend/atagonize all kinds of NPCs. I had a group one time actually say they were going to go a different route to some place just to check on one of their first level mentors. So I like relationship building in the game. They will also become abundantly aware of the highs and lows of their community and what their struggles are.

The Kingdoms will be detailed out fairly well and by the time the group gets to a larger city it will be well detailed out. I've started campaigns in cities and in the countryside but traditionally I start on the edge of society. City campaigns can be fun though.

There will be a well defined interaction amongst the races. They will have their histories to back up those feelings. And those things will differ setting to setting.

I will introduce a whole plethora of new campaign specific magic items. Even the mundane items will have more flare than D&D gives them.

I will have an economy. I will know how people are getting fed. I will know the trade routes and I will provide ample evidence of commerce. I will understand the culture well enough to represent how they really live instead of just handwaving it. If my focus is middle ages then I will represent that period given magic exists. I do move the game period forward and backward though depending on what I'm in the mood for at that moment.

My players in addition to adventuring will become connected to the larger world as they grow in power. Some will want to be low key while others will play up their fame. In some instances they will engage in politics, commerce, etc.. Invariable they will establish a base and the nature of the base varies. Sometimes its a business in a big city. Other times its a castle on the frontier.

I want the world to be a place of wonder for the players. I want there to be a lot of mysteries going on and I want some of those mysteries to be something besides the acquisition of power. Sometimes it's love. Sometimes it's racial hatred.

It's a living world and that is my goal.
I'm jaded. Twenty years ago, I might have been intrigued. Now, that comes across as a Kickstarter blurb for a 400 page book full of proper names describing a Harn/Kalamar clone.
 

Oofta

Legend
Supporter
Shouldn’t there be uncertainty in a chase scene? Will they catch us? When? Willwe have time to get away? To pick the lock? To hide? Whatever!

It’s fine for the DM to decide many things. But not all things. If they’re deciding all things, then what game is being played?

Maybe, maybe not. Personally I wouldn't have a chase scene where the PCs didn't have a chance to pick the lock or bust down the door (aka barbarian lockpicking). But I don't know what the DM was thinking.

However, that's just one scenario and there are plenty of cases where, for whatever reason, I'm just ad-libbing it.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
I, personally, would apply "setting tourism" to most non-sandbox modules. If the expectation of play is that we're going to start in Chapter 1 and "X sessions later" get to the last boss fight in Chapter 6, that's setting tourism.

"Setting tourism" isn't some degenerate state; I imagine it's probably the most common playstyle across the entire spectrum of TTRPG tables.

I’d potentially apply the term even to many games that may be called sandboxes. An Adventure Path is like a guided tour, a sandbox is when you just go off on your own to see stuff.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
All well and good until we get to this ...



I've made what I think is a passingly realistic fantasy world. I've thought about the different actors (NPCs, organizations, monsters mighty and meek) and how they interact with each other. When we have a session 0 I discuss with the group various regions and overall goals we could start with and we go from there. So if they want to start in the cold north I'll explain what that region is like and what kind of scenarios are most likely there. That chain of islands? Full of cutthroat pirates, but also plenty of opportunity for privateers that defend against the pirates.

Yes, I've prepared the menu of options but the players pick from that menu. I'm not making up a world for a specific campaign. So I'm sorry if I'm dense but I still don't know what "a setting serves the characters" means in comparison to any other way of designing a world.

I’m not saying your dense. I’m not sure what else I can say to try and convey what I’m talking about. I’ll try one more thing.

Instead of making a setting first and then characters that fit into it, try making the characters first, and only then start making the setting.

That’s not exactly what I mean, but I’m hoping it will help bridge this gap.
 

TwoSix

Master of the One True Way
I’d potentially apply the term even to many games that may be called sandboxes. An Adventure Path is like a guided tour, a sandbox is when you just go off on your own to see stuff.
Depends on how open-ended the sandbox is, for me. One of my games right now is using "Dark of Hot Springs Island", which is really freeform. It's more of a "scene-framing assistant" than a module.
 

TwoSix

Master of the One True Way
Deities may be a bad example because they always factor in a big way in my world. Religions are major movers and shakers. if someone wanted to play an exile from a fallen Kingdom, then I might find something because it's a big world. But all of my established history is based on the Gods.
I picked an example with deities specifically because I know setting focused DMs often start with pantheons and cosmology.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
Yes, but this is again some weird attempt to redefine language so that "adversarial" doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means. I don't understand why people do this, especially people who then complain that people antagonistically misunderstand them! Stop trying to use words to mean different things than everyone else, that might help!

Why not just engage with the point if you understood it? The problem isn’tpeople using words in idiosyncratic ways… not if they take the time to explicitly explain their usage.

Let’s imagine he said “competitive” instead of “adversarial”if you like. Can you then engage with the clear point?
 

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