Buckle up, kids… we’re goin’ for a ride.

I’ve finally gotten around to actually checking out the 2024 revision of one of the world’s roleplaying games. You know the one I mean. I’ve been focused, especially on the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which I will call the DMG (2024) even though it was stupidly released in 2025. Basically, I’m collectively calling all the recent revisions D&D (2024), and I’ll be referring to the older books as D&D (2014). I mean, they’re both still the fifth edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games, but they’re different enough that I need to distinguish between them to talk about the mechanics.

This ain’t gonna be a review of D&D (2024). I don’t do reviews; I’m too busy running games and helping you run the least worst games you can possibly run. If I have an opinion, I’ll troll you with it as an aside. That said, if you want to know what I think about the latest version of D&D, I’ll tell you that I thin:k it’s totally fine. Whatever. There is literally nothing in there worth getting worked up over that I wasn’t already kinda pissed off about when WotC did it back in 2014.

Who gives a shit? It works. Run games. Stop bitching.

Though, honestly, I’m probably gonna stick mostly with D&D (2014) and let this one pass like the fart in the wind that it is.

Enough reviewing, though. I want to talk about The Adventuring Day, which is a topic the WotC designers totally jettisoned from the DMG (2024), probably to the delight of a great many stupid people. Because The Adventuring Day was a big, important, useful idea that both Mere Adventure Builders and True Scenario Designers need to consider. Fortunately, The Adventuring Day is still a thing in D&D (2024). It’s just a secret now.

I actually want to talk about The Adventuring Day — and related topics like adventure structure and resting — twice. First, I want to talk about it from a Mere Adventure Building standpoint. I want to explore what The Adventuring Day was. Or, rather, what it still is. Because The Adventuring Day was and remains an idea that was very badly misunderstood and drew a lot of anger. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why the designers just left it on the cutting-room floor this time around. But if you want to make good, functional D&D adventures, you kinda need to grok it.

Second, I want to talk to my True Scenario Designer aspirants about The Adventuring Day and advanced adventure structure and open-endedness in design and Dark Souls bonfires and the secret Kraid kill in Metroid: Dread, and I swear all that shit’s related. But that’s a discussion for another day. Today, I’m keeping it simple. I just want to help D&D (2024) Game Masters build totally good, functional adventures by filling in the gap that the dumbass WotC designers left in their adventure-building instructions.

So, let’s do that…

The Lost Adventuring Day

Prepare to have your frigging mind blown; I’m gonna pay Dungeons & Dragons an actual compliment. The D&D (2024) Dungeon Master’s Guide is actually a pretty good resource for homebrewer Game Masters. If you run modern D&D — even D&D (2014) — and you want to build your own adventures, pick up a copy. It’s worth it. Mostly.

I’m kind of bitter about the lack of custom monster-building instruction, though. I guess even when the WotC dumbasses actually get something right, they have to fuck up something else to balance it. They’re like the True Neutral of making not shitty products.

That aside, the fourth chapter of the new DMG, Creating Adventures, is really good as published adventure-building instruction goes. In fact, even though it’s shorter than the previous version of the same chapter and leaves some stuff out, I actually think it’s better for it. It’s streamlined, it’s practical, and it’s approachable. Also, the Encounter Building math is way easier, and you don’t have to screw with that Adjusted Experience Point thing anymore.

Look, the logic and the math behind Adjusted Experience Points — the so-called Ghost Experience System — was totally correct and completely sensible. I just don’t think, in the end, it was correct and sensible enough to bother figuring outside of extreme cases that normal, rational Game Masters weren’t going to need.

One cool inclusion in the new DMG is the half-dozen example adventures. They’re not fully statted-up. Instead, they’re outlines that show you how to outline an adventure and that you can totally finish yourself just by dropping the encounters or events on a map or flowchart and then filling in all the fun, creative details Game Masters actually enjoy coming up with. I like how they show the actual foundational framework that underlies basic adventure design. I don’t think D&D has ever pulled that off before.

Honestly, it’s pretty close to the shit I’ve been telling all y’all about how to outline and plan adventures. Either Perkins and Wyatt actually unjammed their heads from their rectums before they wrote this shit, or else they just went through my rambling, disjointed, overlong work, gave it a much-needed edit, and passed it off as their own.

Either way, good on them.

There’s other good stuff in that chapter too, even though it seems, at first glance, like it’s less detailed and useful than the older version. The actual text — all the words between the tables and charts that no one ever reads — contains a lot of meat. Best of all, most of it’s presented not as firm rules and hard math, but loose, natural advice. It encourages Game Masters to try shit out. To experiment. To learn the craft by actually crafting. That’s the right way to teach adventure-building.

But I did notice one huge omission. The chapter does not mention The Adventuring Day at all. Not even loosely or naturally. There’s a little bit about Short Rests, which is helpful, but the idea of The Adventuring Day is just totally gone.

Now, I do get why the designers left it onr. Given some of the apparent changes to homebrew adventure design philosophy evident in the chapter, it probably seemed unnecessary, and given how much The Adventuring Day pissed off lots of mouthbreathing dumbasses back in the day, and given that, in an open-ended game like D&D, the whole issue of resting can just kind of sort itself out provided Game Masters aren’t complete asshats about it, I get why it seemed like a safe omission. But I think leaving it out actually sabotages inexperienced homebrewer Game Masters who are learning how to make games from the book.

To explain why, I first have to explain what The Adventuring Day actually is.

The Adventuring Day: Not What You Think

The Adventuring Day…

Actually, before I start, let me just make it clear for those of you learned in gaming history that The Adventuring Day is not the Fifteen-Minute Workday. They’re totally different things, and the latter is absolutely not worth bringing up. Fifteen-Minute Workday isn’t real. He can’t hurt you.

Moving on…

The Adventuring Day is described in the third chapter of the 2014 version of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. That’s the chapter about how to make a D&D adventure. You can find it on DMG (2014) 84, but you don’t need to bother because I’m gonna sum it up.

It’s like this…

To design a proper D&D adventure, you must throw six to eight combats at your players’ characters every game day. If you don’t, you’ve made a bad adventure, and you should feel bad. You cannot let them have just one fight in a day. You can’t let them get through a day without any fights at all. Those are the rules. There’s even a helpful Adventuring Day XP table which you can use alongside the totally simple-to-apply XP Thresholds by Character Level table and the Encounter Multipliers table to figure out the precise XP worth of creatures the players’ characters must kill every single day of their adventuring careers or else you’re not even running D&D, bro.

Yes, that’s the omission I’m complaining about. I totally think that passage — or something like it — belongs in the D&D (2024) DMG. Don’t agree? Fight me, bro.

Except…

That isn’t actually what DMG (2014) says. That’s what lots of people read, but it isn’t what the designers wrote.

Kind of.

Look, I can’t defend the text. The DMG (2014) was an absolute frigging mess. There are reasons for that, but they don’t excuse anything. People misunderstood all that Adventuring Day shit because it was written and presented like shit. The tables and math definitely didn’t help.

The Adventuring Day isn’t an adventure design rule and it never should have been presented as one. Instead, it’s kind of just a fact about how D&D works. It’s there to tell you, the Game Master who wants to make an adventure, something important about making good gameplay.

Modern D&D isn’t designed to push the players through a gauntlet of life-or-death struggles, any of which can totally end characters and campaigns. The individual risks and dangers aren’t that high, but they add up over time. One fight — even a hard fight — isn’t likely to kill anyone. Yes, I know the rules suggest that one or two characters might die in a hard fight, but that ain’t really as true as it is. Individual fights aren’t deadly dangerous. But each fight does chew up resources. Characters lose Hit Points and then start using up Hit Dice to recover, they expend spell slots, they waste ammunition, they unleash limited-use abilities, they burn through magical item charges, and so on. The primary challenge in a normal D&D ain’t about surviving the individual encounters, but rather, it’s about conserving your resources through strings of encounters so you can keep winning until you’re done.

That’s a feature, by the way, and not a bug. D&D has changed a lot from the crap Gygax and Arneson kludged together. When a character was just a string of random numbers you could shit out in five minutes, and the only goal was “explore the hex, delve the dungeon, and get the gold back to town,” dying didn’t mean anything, and characters were worthless. If Ragnar died, you just wrote “Ragnar II” on the top of the same character sheet, and you kept going.

Do some people prefer that style of play? Yes, absolutely. Is there anything wrong with that? No, not at all. Some people like that sort of thing. Others like actual, good, engaging games. Which is what I write about.

Modern D&D players invest more in their characters. D&D adventures are about more than just plundering every corner of a piece of graph paper. The game has grown beyond its roots to do more. But that also means it needs a different attitude toward character death. Character death used to be meaningless because characters were basically meaningless. Now, character death is a huge deal, and so it just shouldn’t happen unless a lot of shit goes really, really wrong. In a modern D&D campaign, it should not just be possible, but highly probable that every player is still playing the character they started with at the campaign’s end. All of that requires different ways of assessing risks, costs, complications, and challenges.

The Adventuring Day was the designers’ really crappy, unclear, confusing way of trying to explain that shit. It wasn’t telling you that you had to have exactly so many fights every game day. Instead, it was trying to tell you that if you’re building a fairly traditional D&D adventure based on putting a series of dangerous encounters between the players and a goal, you needed to approach a certain number of such encounters in order for there to be an actual challenge to the gameplay. Individual encounters are trivial challenges, by themselves, so if you don’t have enough of them, the game doesn’t feel risky. Meanwhile, if you have too many of them, the players just can’t win.

Stated that way — which, again, is not how the designers said it and I fully admit that — it sounds much more reasonable, doesn’t it? Especially with the word ‘if’ in there. Because there’s actually nothing wrong with an adventuring day that’s got just one dangerous encounter in it. Yes, I’m going to keep saying dangerous encounters, because this shit goes for any kind of encounter that risks the characters’ safety and costs them resources to overcome. Traps, hazards, and obstacles all count too.

If the characters are wandering from Townsville to Citytropolis by way of Bandit Forest and they get ambushed on the road just one time, that’s fine. You, the homebrewing Game Master, just can’t expect the players to feel seriously threatened by that. It’s more of an inconvenient speedbump than an actual challenge. There are good reasons to include inconvenient speed bumps in your adventures. Just don’t expect a single fight in any game day to be anything more than that.

That said, the players rarely actually know how many encounters lie between them and their goal. If the players get jumped by banditos at nine in the AM, they don’t know whether there will be more in an hour or whether there’s an owlbear scheduled for two or whether to expect a calamity dragon for afternoon tea. Incomplete information is actually part of the perceived challenge. A single encounter in a day feels more dangerous than it really is, just because the players never know if there’s another one coming. By math, though, it’s just feels and not real challenge. The end of the day is more likely to leave them saying, “Is that all?” rather than “Thank the gods we made it safely.”

Of course, if the players get ambushed for the first time late in the evening, they know they can just make camp afterward, so they’re not gonna feel stressed, and they’ll probably blast the hell out of those poor bandits with the most powerful options in their arsenal. Moreover, if the players notice that they never, ever have more than one encounter on the road to anywhere, they’re going to get a little nukey by nature, and woe betide the unsuspecting dire badger that comes snuffling out of the underbrush as the single, day three encounter.

That’s why you’ve got to understand this Adventuring Day crap. It’s not because you absolutely must always provide so many fights every game day. Instead, it’s so that you can design challenges that land the way you want them to land. If you want your players to feel threatened or challenged — and thus to feel accomplished when they win — you have to know how challenge actually works in the system you’re running.

But the designers didn’t explain it well, and so it was misunderstood, and thus it made a lot of people unhappy and was widely regarded as a bad move. So, this time around, they just left it out. But, the nature of challenge in D&D remains the same, and so The Adventuring Day as a fact of challenge is still there. You can see it in some of the example adventures. Most are so short as to comprise a single day of adventure, and most contain four to six dangerous encounters. Some have a random encounter element that’s likely to deliver the right number of dangerous encounters over the course of the game. The longer ones are split into chunks, and the primary or climactic chunk has the right number of encounters or potential encounters that the players might cleverly bypass by approaching in different ways.

There are even a few single-encounter days here and there in the examples, but those are mostly restricted to interludes or preludes. Like, say, the travel portion of an adventure. The designers know an occasional one-fight day is not going to break a game, but that one dangerous encounter can’t carry a whole adventure by itself.

All of those are valid approaches to The Adventuring Day idea. And now that you understand The Adventuring Day, you can build better challenges for your players.

Filling a Day with Adventure

In D&D, dangerous encounters don’t pose a significant threat until there are a few of them in a row. In game terms, “in a row” means “in the sixteen hours between one Long Rest and the next.” Generally speaking, players start to sweat in the third encounter in a game day, and six encounters is about where things go from scary challenging to deadly dangerous. That assumes you’re sticking with level-appropriate encounters of Moderate Difficulty. If you’re varying your encounter difficulty, that assumes about half are Moderate Difficulty, a third are Low Difficulty, and the rest — no more than one or two — are High Difficulty.

What’s that mean? It means that if you’re building an adventure whose main part fits into a single day, four or five significantly risky encounters will feel like a good challenge. If you push it up to six, most parties will end the day feeling pushed to the limit. If you drop it to three, most players will end the day feeling like they just barely broke a sweat.

But that ain’t your only option for stringing encounters together. Remember your algebra; if you add something to one side of the equation, you can balance it by subtracting from the other. Or something. I don’t know. Math is hard.

The point is, if you want a smaller number of encounters to feel like a challenging adventure or adventure segment, you can make the encounters more challenging. You can do it by the numbers, or you can use one of the many techniques described in DMG (2024) to tweak the difficulty. Mix in hazards, change the terrain, give the monsters an advantage, use advanced or reactive tactics, switch out single-monster fights for fights with groups of weaker monsters, and so on.

Likewise, if you want the players to push through a marathon of encounters, you can scale down the encounters the same way. That’s especially useful when you supplement your planned adventure encounters with random complications. It’s good practice, in fact, to populate random encounter tables with easy threats — often easier than Low Difficulty — rather than use normal encounters for the party’s level. That way, if the party has a bad run of luck and gets swarmed by rats at every intersection, they can still handle the planned encounters if they play conservatively.

Which brings up another side of this whole discussion that’s often overlooked. Player skill is a thing. Some players are good at D&D. They build effective characters, they use good tactics, they grasp basic-ass teamwork, and so on. Other players, meanwhile… well… they’re not… that. Other players just kinda suck.

Remember that everything in the rulebooks was ultimately set by playtesting — in theory, kind of — and it’s all graded on a curve toward the average everyplayer. If you’ve got a party of skilled players, or even just one skilled player, assuming the rest of your players aren’t narcissist assholes who consider advice and teamwork an insult, normal strings of average encounters aren’t going to tax them the same way. Meanwhile, if you’ve got a suck-ass party of sucks — you know, normal players — three moderate encounters might be pushing it.

See, the point of tools like XP Budgets and Adventuring Day Guidelines isn’t actually to tell you how you must build a proper D&D adventure. They just give you the baseline assumptions about how challenge works in the system and how the average group of players experience it. Those assumptions just tell you where to start building, not where you have to land, assuming challenge is an important aspect of gameplay for you. Which, by the way, it should be. I explained that last time, but I know I can’t make you believe me. If you want to run a bullshit collaborative storytelling fanfic performance, that’s on you and your poor victims who don’t know how much better D&D is when it’s an actual fucking game.

You and the old-school grognards actually have way more in common than you think, by the way.

As a homebrewer Game Master, you’re meant to adjust your encounter design and adventure building based on your goals for the adventure and also based on the players you’re building it for. If you aren’t building a dungeon full of monsters, but instead, just a single epic fight with a dragon, pump the difficulty. A lot. If your players aren’t challenged because they’re hot shit, do the same. If your players keep getting their characters killed in the second room of the dungeon, adjust accordingly. That’s your job. That’s why these knobs and sliders exist and why the designers tell you they’re there.

At least, in theory. But designers be crazy, yo. What can you do?

So let’s end here with that. Let’s call that the basic-ass way to use The Adventuring Day assumption. As long as you understand that dangerous encounters aren’t actually dangerous until the third one between rests and the sixth one is where most parties have to peace out to rest, you’re set as a Mere Adventure Builder. You can build strings of encounters, and you can also adjust the encounters for longer adventures or adventures that only have one or two really dangerous encounters. You can even adjust for really skilled players or for the dumbasses you probably actually have at your table. You can also now spot patterns in your game and adjust your adventure-building over time based on what provides the best experience for you and your players.

But if you want more than the basic-ass approach — if you’re an advanced ass — and you want to build more complex adventures around The Adventuring Day assumption, come back next time for a discussion about resting, checkpointing, adventure structure, and maybe even some video game references. I might even work in a little True Scenario Design you can spice your Mere Adventure Building up with.