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.

 

[tetrasodium]

Eh, if you want to be the only PC flying when the baddies have bows? you do you!

I've had a table where every single PC has flight at level one. Not having any of the rules that puts soft limits on flight without overtime gm fiat or adversarial monster choices sets and encourages players to return that unpleasant adversarial tone and that's a big problem.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Then they start flying even further away and are to far away.

Nope, they attract players who think it’s smart to fly ahead of the party and scout around, and get piled on by monsters when the rest of the party is too far away to help.

/experience

 

[Mort]

I've had a table where every single PC has flight at level one. Not having any of the rules that puts soft limits on flight without overtime gm fiat or adversarial monster choices sets and encourages players to return that unpleasant adversarial tone and that's a big problem.

That would be interesting.

If everyone has flight, then there's parity between the PCs, so no issues there.

And since everyone has flight, the challenges would certainly have to be approached differently.

I could see a potential problem with low level published adventures, but otherwise I would hope to run with it - would be fun!

That said, I am more in the -if the DM doesn't want to deal with an issue like flight at low level- then he can certainly make that known and reject flyers at low level. If nothing else, I can certainly see a new DM (or even an experienced DM) not want to deal with the extra hassle.

 

[Mort]

Nope, they attract players who think it’s smart to fly ahead of the party and scout around, and get piled on by monsters when the rest of the party is too far away to help.

/experience

If the scout gets captured/killed and doesn't come back he's done his job - he found danger.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If the scout gets captured/killed and doesn't come back he's done his job - he found danger.

sure, you takes flying and you takes your chance. It might be good on a very tanky character, but it’s basically like wearing a “kill me first” sign on your back.

It encourages the flyer to separate from the rest of the party, and that makes them VERY vulnerable.

 

[Zardnaar]

Nope, they attract players who think it’s smart to fly ahead of the party and scout around, and get piled on by monsters when the rest of the party is too far away to help.

/experience

That as well.

 

[tetrasodium]

That would be interesting.

If everyone has flight, then there's parity between the PCs, so no issues there.

And since everyone has flight, the challenges would certainly have to be approached differently.

I could see a potential problem with low level published adventures, but otherwise I would hope to run with it - would be fun!

That said, I am more in the -if the DM doesn't want to deal with an issue like flight at low level- then he can certainly make that known and reject flyers at low level. If nothing else, I can certainly see a new DM (or even an experienced DM) not want to deal with the extra hassle.

Yea. It was a generally fun game & I've done similar in 3.x when maneuverability ratings were a thing (PCs were all dragon hatchlings to start) but there's a stark difference between players proactively saying "hey guys we can/can't use flight for this thing we are planning but should keep in mind x & y, how are we going to do this given everyone's maneuverability?" and "wait wait wait no guys, the tree cover in the forest is too [ low/dense/whatever] here for that"

☆Races of dragons or whatever was out at that point so there was a lot of feats they could use to improve their starting dragon hatchling on top of class levels

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

Isn’t this how 4e handled it? Build a budget and each creature has a related “cost”? Or am I remembering it wrong?

 

[tetrasodium]

Isn’t this how 4e handled it? Build a budget and each creature has a related “cost”? Or am I remembering it wrong?

4e was ADEU powers, 5e went back to the pre-4e attrition across an adventuring day model & 2024 PCs are still on that same attrition
edit I accidentally typo'd 3e was aedu & fixed that

 

[Vaalingrade]

Other RPGs don't do this.

Isn’t this how 4e handled it? Build a budget and each creature has a related “cost”? Or am I remembering it wrong?

4e built monsters based on expected level with one monster = 1 PC in an encounter unless they were designed to be weaker or stronger.