The 2024 DnD Rules Include no Guidance on the Pacing of Combat Encounters

The Adventuring Day is Dead

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide did away with a long-maligned portion of the 2014 DMG which detailed “The Adventuring Day.” This section described a daily XP budget to be used to balance encounters throughout a busy day of adventuring, and suggested 6-8 encounters per day of roughly medium difficulty, with that count moving up or down to accommodate variations in difficulty.

This section had two major problems: First, 6 to 8 encounters per day is a lot to do. At low levels, there was simply no way to slog through that much fighting and survive. At high levels, that many encounters often meant weeks of real-world time between long rests. It was also difficult to justify so much combat in such a small time frame unless the party was crawling a dungeon and had some time pressure compelling them forward without rest.

Second, almost no one knew this section existed. Hidden away behind the Combat Encounter rules, it was very easy to skim past, or to read once and forget about.

Despite its obscurity, this assumption was baked into the difficulty of the game. Players were expected to endure resource strain across 6 to 8 encounters per day in order to be sufficiently challenged. Spellcasters needed to ration their spell slots, and everyone needed to manage healing resources if they wanted to survive.

If you didn’t take Short Rests or if your party’s spellcasters burnt all of their high-level spell slots right away, later encounters would kill you. Players needed to learn to use resources responsibly, to weigh risks and rewards, and to conserve whatever resources they could. This resource management has been core to the D&D experience since OD&D, though you admittedly need to worry less about arrows, food, and torches these days.

Did we Actually Lose Anything?

With the removal of the Adventuring Day section, there is no official word on how many encounters to use in a day. There’s no indication of pacing. There’s no hint about how many Short Rests to allow. We’re essentially told to consider individual encounters in a vacuum with no thought given to resource management over an extended period.

This leads to a phenomenon that we called “The 5-Minute Adventuring Day” back in 3rd edition. Spellcasters would cast all of their biggest spells in the first encounter, then everyone would take a long rest. It was horrible. It was boring. There was no challenge to it. And, yes, people would wait however many in-game hours were required before they could rest again.

Of course, a lot of 5e players face the same issue in the 2014 rules. Because the Adventuring Day rules are largely unknown and difficult to use, the balance assumptions that the 2014 rules make are broken at a conceptual level.

But the 2024 rules have altogether abandoned any guidance here. The 5-minute Adventuring Day may now be the baseline assumption for the 2024 D&D rules. We don’t know for certain because the text is silent on the matter.

The 2024 DMG also removed the monster design rules which gave us the 3-round combat assumption, so we can no longer expect combat encounters to take roughly 3 rounds. That shared assumption has been replaced by guesswork.

Long Live the Adventuring Day

In the absence of official guidance, we’re left on our own to figure out how to pace encounters.

The 2024 D&D rules updated the math for building encounters, significantly raising the XP budgets for individual encounters, often fully doubling the XP budget for an individual difficulty tier, and significantly increasing the assumed difficulty of a single combat encounter.

I frequently advocated for using 3 Deadly encounters per day with 2 Short Rests in the 2014 rules. This meant that individual encounters were always an exciting challenge, but you didn’t need to find a way to squeeze filler encounters into a day just to keep your party appropriately challenged.

If we use the 2014 Adventuring Day’s daily XP budget table alongside the 2024 XP budget per encounter, we have roughly enough space for 3 Moderate Difficulty encounters per day, or one each of Low, Moderate, and High Difficulty. We can expect players to take a Short Rest after each encounter, allowing them to heal back to roughly full hit points and recover some or all of their limited resources.

We will likely see longer combat encounters, too. With increased budgets but with no significant damage increases for players, it’s going to take longer to deal enough damage to get through encounters. Encounters which took 2-3 rounds might now take 4-5, but that’s an educated guess.

Conclusion

Players will need to update their assumptions. With fewer, harder, and potentially longer encounters, buff spells may be more valuable. With more multi-enemy encounters, area damage may be more valuable relative to single-target save-or-sucks spells which have dominated the game since 3.0 (though save-or-suck is still the defining tactic).

Characters which recharge on a Short Rest (Warlocks, etc.) will be able to use their resources much more freely, but even spellcasters like the Cleric and the Wizard can be more aggressive with their limited spell slots since they don’t need to stretch them through 6 to 8 encounters.

I have no idea if the designers planned to shake up the game this way with the 2024 rules update, but the resulting changes to encounter difficulty and the pacing of multi-encounter days are going to make things much more interesting.

It’s a dangerous, exciting new world.