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

pemerton

Legend
I'm always operating under the assumption the DM is acting in good faith.
I don't know what you mean by "good faith". And I've told you the GM was terrible, but you don't believe me. I don't know what you are basing your assumption that I am wrong on. You seem to think I'm incapable of spotting a railroad, and that your guesses 35 years after the event are more reliable than my eyewitness report.

As a player you just assume you know the whole story when at least in my game you would not.
No. As a player, I can tell when the GM is railroading and using the fiction to block action declarations and plans that the GM doesn't like, because they cause departure from the GM's pre-conceived storyline.

This is nothing to do with "knowing the whole story". It's about knowing the GM's decision-making process. Which I did - I was there, and observed it.

That one example though doesn't make your point.
Yes it does. My point is that the GM cannot unilaterally make something true in the shared fiction. And I've provided an example that illustrates why - because if the players don't accept what the GM is proposing/presenting, and walk away, the GM fails in their attempt, and the shared fiction comes to an end.
 

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pemerton

Legend
You haven't shown us it wasn't handled in a principled fashion
I've asserted it, and explained at quite some length. I don't know why you don't believe me.

There are frequently times when a DM makes decisions based on information the players do not have.
On this occasion, I've told you why the GM made the decision they did - namely, to block the players' plan, because it didn't fit with the GM's railroad.

I don't know why you think I'm wrong about this.
 

pemerton

Legend
I don't know if they were or not. I know you are sure they weren't. Why are you so sure?
Because I was there. I observed the GM making up the stuff about this Kobold, getting increasingly uncomfortable in his characterisation as the players pushed harder and harder in disbelief at the degree of flagrant railroading.

I mean, maybe you think that I and the other four players are incapable of working out what is going on. I don't know.

Other posters in this thread have talked about bad players and bad GMs and those assertions have gone unchallenged. I don't know why my statement that I one time played with a bad GM, who was a terrible railroader, is regarded as false.
 


pemerton

Legend
But what BG3 definitely is not, is passive setting tourism or storytime. Even though as a computer game the options presented are obviously more limited than in a game run by human, the choices the players can make impact the course of the events and the fates of the characters in a big way. And that's why it is a great computer RPG; it actually comes to very close to what is normal and expected in the tabletop RPGs, the choices of the players mattering and moulding the story.
Maybe I'm out of touch with modern computer games. But isn't a game like BG3 a sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure? I wouldn't compare a choose-your-own adventure to a RPG.

When I play a RPG, I am not expecting to "mould the story" simply in the sense of prompting the GM to say stuff having regard to what I said. I am expecting to actually shape elements of what happens next, via a procedure that incorporates all the relevant elements of the fiction (and other appropriate considerations too).

EDIT:
Gotta hard disagree there. BG3 is absolutely setting tourism. You're playing a predetermined plotline where you can make some choices that give you different scenes at the ending. It's a classic adventure path.

Ultimately, I'm playing to unlock the scenes that are in the game. The fact that this playthrough I fought Orin first and allied with Gortash and romanced Lae'zel instead of Gale doesn't change that.
This makes sense to me!
 



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