An Update on the Adventuring Day

Apparently, the 2024 edition of the 5e DMG will not include the concept of "the adventuring day".

by Matt Ray

This isn't really much of a surprise to me. As my previous post detailed, the adventuring day has always been a controversial (and misunderstood) concept in 5e. People got hung up on the "6 to 8 medium to hard encounters" of it all, and ended up missing the forest for the trees - that is, that the adventuring day concept was simply demonstrating that player characters are intended to face a certain degree of challenge (measured in XP) between long rests.

What made the adventuring day helpful is that it attempted to quantify the attrition that player characters are expected to experience between long rests, when all of their hit points and abilities reset. The important thing wasn't the exact number of encounters or their difficulty, but simply that player characters should have at least three encounters (allowing for a minimum of two short rests) between long rests, and that these encounters gradually wear down the characters' resources. Attrition is the primary means by which the characters are challenged - not so much each individual encounter.

This was especially important in 5e, because characters recover resources (and especially hit points) much faster than in previous editions, where attrition could be drawn out over a longer period of time.

I felt that the adventuring day concept was - at the very least - helpful for planning dungeons. If I wanted a short dungeon, I could plan for it to have an adventuring day's worth of encounters. If I wanted a three-level dungeon, each level could have an adventuring day's worth of encounters. And in a dungeon environment, it has always made sense for there to be that number of encounters. The adventuring day worked perfectly well for me in dungeon-crawling scenarios.

The problem, as I see it, is that inexperienced 5e DMs don't run dungeons - at least not the kind that the adventuring day seems to encourage. The 5e DMG barely teaches dungeon design, and when it does, the guidelines are not great. (For example, according to page 296, 50% of dungeon rooms contain monsters - why yes, that does sound like an un-fun slog! Compare that to AD&D, where only 25% of rooms contain monsters.) 

Instead of running dungeons, most 5e DMs seem to Google "D&D battle map" until they find one that's like, a shattered causeway being held up by a petrified giant's hand while a volcano is erupting or something (which is cool I guess - I've never understood how people use these hyper-specific battle maps unless they are designing the whole adventure around them, but more power to them), then plop down some tokens on the map and voila - find a way to get the player characters to the big damn fight, and that's the session. At most, they are running Five Room Dungeons (which I have my own problems with).

Anyway, I thought it was funny that I just wrote a post about how the adventuring day is an unfairly-maligned concept which is actually kind of useful, then find out that, like many such things throughout D&D's history of editions, it is getting dropped in the 2024 rulebooks. What are we getting instead?

According to Christian Hoffer:

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. 

But we already had that. XP budgets for encounters of different difficulty levels were already in the 2014 DMG, it just also told DMs how to string those encounters together in a combination that would challenge the player characters. Instead, the 2024 DMG includes advice about "encounter pace and how to balance player desire to take frequent Short Rests with ratcheting up tension within the adventure." 

Sure. I'm sure those guidelines will be very...thorough.

This certainly isn't the end of the world. After all, the adventuring day is a very new concept - it's not some sacred cow of original D&D. In fact, I'm sure most gorgnards and OSR people alike detest the very concept. 

But honestly, one of the things I really like about 5e is that the designers explicitly say "X characters of Y level can handle A monsters of B CR, and they can do that C number of times per day before they need to take a break." It's clinical and math-y, but I also find it very helpful in broadly gauging what my players' characters can handle. I miss it when I play AD&D because it takes a lot of the guesswork out of prep. 

Sure, it's only slightly more useful than "X characters of Y level can handle A monsters of B CR - you decide how many of those encounters you and your players want!" But, I don't see why as a game designer one would design an "improved" version of the game with...slightly less useful guidelines.

We'll have to wait until the new DMG is more widely available to see what these new guidelines actually look like. I am trying to reserve judgment, but I do find it funny how the "refined" rules for 5e, with 10 years of hindsight, seem to be eliminating rules and advice from the original rulebooks, replacing them instead with flat DCs for hiding and tying knots. I look forward to perusing the new DMG to see just how much they've gotten rid of. (For free, of course - there's no way I'm paying for these books.)