How To Run An Adventuring Day
Header Art: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014) by Wizards of the Coast
As many know, the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014) recommends six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. The party can handle more than that if they are easy encounters, or less if they are deadly encounters. If you are anything like me, I often have a very good idea for big set piece fights, but then I’ll end up with only one or two encounters in a day, which means that the party has the chance to go nova, use up all their resources, and then that’s that. What I thought would be a horribly dangerous fight ends up just being a blip because the party wasn’t properly drained of resources before the end fight. The way to avoid this situation is to build an Adventuring Day.
What is an Adventuring Day?
An Adventuring Day is a single day, or even multiple days when the party doesn’t have the chance to rest and regain all of their resources, where they have multiple encounters. These multiple encounters can include any type of challenge but each encounter, to be a true encounter, should drain resources from the party. This could be a trap, an environmental hazard, a fight, or something else, so long as resources are consumed in overcoming it.
Of course, not every day has to be an Adventuring Day. In my opinion, Adventuring Days should be special days where the party has to go all in and are at the culmination or lead up to the culmination, of their efforts after several days of investigation, travel, or some other work. It wouldn’t make sense for every single day to be an Adventuring Day, or else you’d have level 20 characters within just a few weeks in the game world.
How Much XP in an Adventuring Day
As an example, I am going to start with a traditional mix of characters with a cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard. These four classes contain the widest variety of resources we are going to discuss. In addition, I am going to assume that they are 3rd level. Their specific level isn’t super important when it comes to an Adventuring Day, but we’ll need that information when we look at the Dungeon Master’s Guide and go over some basics.
The first part of planning an Adventuring Day requires us to decide on how many encounters we actually want, while remembering that six to eight medium/hard encounters ‘fulfills’ an Adventuring Day. Let’s go ahead and split the difference and say we are going to create seven medium or hard encounters for our party to deal with.
This is shaping up into a mini-dungeon, so let’s go ahead and flesh out our dungeon the party will have to move through - a large, haunted house. This haunted house gives us several rooms that we can use to separate encounters and allows the party to blockade a room to take a short rest or two in - which is an important thing to consider. If you are going to have a full Adventuring Day, make sure you think of a way the party could have a short rest (or two) as the game assumes that the party will need or want to take a rest after the first third of encounters and the second third of encounters.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 Wizard of the Coast
Now we have our general number of encounters, let's go ahead and check the charts on page 84 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. For 3rd level characters, we multiply the value in that table (1,200 XP) by the number of characters (4) for a total of 4,800 XP. This is our budget for the Adventuring Day - though this isn’t a strict number, it is ok to go slightly above or below this number. It’s just a guideline, in addition, I hardly ever look at this number anymore because I have a firm grasp on encounters and how many I can throw at my table. As you gain experience with building an Adventuring Day for your table, the less you’ll need this number until you just ignore it completely.
Note: If your party likes to drag along helpless NPCs or have a variety of pets like an owlbear or a giant space hamster, those individuals will increase the Adventuring Day budget. Increase the budget by the level value equal to their CR, so a CR 3 owlbear would increase the value of the budget by 1,200 XP to a total of 6,000. You would then balance your fights as if you had five characters and the owlbear would get its own “share” of XP - whether that means it will level up is up to you but that XP won’t go to the player characters.
How to Plan an Adventuring Day
We have our total XP budget for the Adventuring Day of 4,800 XP. We want to put together 7 encounters together, though at this point you might be thinking that we need to do 7 combat encounters when that isn’t wholly true. On page 261 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, there is a section about awarding XP for Noncombat Challenges, which is all the permission I need to declare that traps, environmental hazards, and anything else that we come up with that requires player resources to surpass are ‘encounters’.
It’s frankly a little baffling that the section on traps in the book doesn’t even talk about awarding XP for surpassing a trap when that is an obvious place where you could. Typically, I award XP for bypassing a trap based on the Trap Danger with a danger of Setback being equal to an Easy encounter, Dangerous is equal to Medium, and Deadly equal to Hard or Deadly depending on how many resources are used and how life-threatening the trap is.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 Wizard of the Coast
With that said, let’s go ahead and look at encounter budgets for 3rd level characters from the chart provided in the Dungeon Master’s Guide on page 82. We can see that an Easy encounter for four player characters will be 300 XP (75 XP times 4 player characters), while Medium is 600 XP (150 XP x 4), Hard is 900 XP (225 XP x 4), and Deadly is 1,600 XP (400 XP x 4).
We want to do seven encounters, which means we need to figure out how many of each encounter we can do, so I am going to start with first deciding how difficult I want my final encounter to be in the haunted mansion. I always pre-plan my big set piece fights and first decide how much XP that will be taking up, leaving the rest of the XP to divide among the remaining encounters.
Right now I know I want the final encounter to involve a ghost which is worth 1,100 XP by itself, which is somewhere between Hard (900 XP) and Deadly (1,600 XP). If I tried to give it a minion, like say a zombie (50 XP), I’d have to multiply each of their XP values for their ‘effective’ XP budget by 1.5 per the chart for Encounter Multipliers. This gives them a total ‘fighting power’ of 1,725 XP (1.5 x (1,100 + 50)). That is just too much XP for me to give up from our total budget of 4,800 XP so I’m going to remove the zombie, reducing this encounter’s XP to only 1,100 XP. I don’t like having a single boss monster at the end of a dungeon, but I think it will be OK due to how dangerous ghosts are already.
Monster Manual, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
So we have our first encounter decided… which happens to be the last for our players to face. This leaves us with 3,700 XP left in our Adventuring Day budget, and if we want to have another six encounters, we probably aren’t going to have any other CR 4 creatures and we will be relying on lower CR mooks. I know I want to include zombies near the end of the mini-dungeon, so I’ll go ahead and place them in my list of encounters.
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x6 Zombies / Medium encounter / 600 XP (awards only 300 XP) / Found in the family crypt below the house
Ghost / Hard-Deadly encounter / 1,100 XP / Sealed in the final resting chamber of the crypt
Based on the list, I have spent 1,700 XP and we have 3,100 XP leftover. At this point, I am going to say I am not a fan of how Dungeons & Dragons do their encounter calculation as it requires a good bit of backtracking and adjusting how much you multiply the entire thing by how many monsters are there. There are a ton of created encounter builders out there, I’ve even made one that I use all the time and have shared on here before (my builder doesn’t require you to do any multiplication based on the number of creatures, just combine their total XP and compare to the numbers displayed there). I recommend using them just to make your life easier.
Spending the Rest of Your Budget
Now that we have two encounters, I am going to quickly go through and spend my budget. The key to spending your budget is remembering what theme you are trying to have in your dungeon and finding monsters that highlight it. With that said, if you make every encounter just another zombie fight, it is going to be a boring slog and won’t be very exciting for them. By adding variety to your encounters, you can ensure that an Adventuring Day doesn’t feel like a slog.
With that out of the way, a few more recommendations:
Monster Manual, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
Vary the size of your rooms and ensure that monsters and characters move around each other, and use space smartly. A monster can hold a single 5-foot wide hallway, but it also means that its allies can’t move past it. In this situation, give your monsters ranged attacks.
Vary the number of monsters that your players face. A rough rule is that there should be a number of monsters equal to the number of characters in a party for best results (though not every encounter needs to be, again, variety is key).
Utilize the environment. If the party is outside a spooky house, bring in deep fog. This can help separate encounters as well as ensure that melee and ranged combatants get a chance to shine. If the party is in a cave, make sure to use darkness to have monsters hide in.
A group of monsters ‘effective power’ is not the same as the amount of experience points they are going to give out. Just cause six zombies may be worth 600 XP for our budget, the party is only going to get 300 XP divided among everyone. This means that if you want XP to be a bit slower, use lots of lower level enemies as they will give less XP but take up more of your Adventuring Day budget. If you want your party to level up quickly, you can instead use one or two monsters at a time, granting the party more XP for a monster’s cost in the Adventuring Day budget.
I am going to go ahead and spend the remaining 3,100 XP and ‘purchase’ two traps and the rest will be monster fights. This will be a good mix for the Adventuring Day and give your table plenty of variety as I will be using different types of creatures to make up the encounters.
Taken from Creature Compendium Vol. 5 from the Dump Stat Store!
x4 Zombies / Easy encounter / 400 XP (awards only 200 XP) / Arriving at the house, they erupt from the ground as fog rolls in / 4,400 XP left in Adventuring Day budget
Dining Set Swarm / Medium encounter / 700 XP / Entering the dining room, the silverware rises to attack the party / 3,700 XP left in Adventuring Day budget (Custom monster)
Trapped Staircase / Setback danger (Easy encounter) / 300 XP / Attempting to go up the stairs, the party must deal with the stairs collapsing and the party falling 1d6 x 5 feet. Must find some way to climb to the second floor / 3,400 XP left in Adventuring day budget
x2 Specters / Medium encounter / 600 XP (awards only 400 XP) / The restless spirits of the servants who were trapped and died in the house prowl the second floor, attacking any living creature / 2,800 XP left in Adventuring day budget
Necrotic Bleeding Door + Shadow / Setback danger (Hard encounter) / 900 XP for trap + 100 XP for Shadow / The door leading to the family crypt below the house is trapped by powerful necrotic energy, any creature that touches the door will take 4d10 necrotic damage and it summons a Shadow - this trap can be bypassed with Religion check to know to cast cure wounds or similar on the door, spell(s) must ‘restore’ a cumulative 10 hit points on door / 1,800 XP left in Adventuring day budget
x6 Zombies / Medium encounter / 600 XP (awards only 300 XP) / Found in the family crypt below the house / 1,200 XP left in Adventuring Day budget
Ghost / Hard-Deadly encounter / 1,100 XP / Sealed in the final resting chamber of the crypt / 100 XP left in Adventuring Day budget
That brings us to the end of our budget! We have 100 XP leftover, and so what I would do is simply take that remaining XP and award the party a bonus 100 XP for clearing the haunted house and grabbing whatever it was that they were sent here to find. You can do the same or just simply discard any leftover XP they might have.
How Long to Complete an Adventuring Day
Now that we have created an Adventuring Day, how long will this actually take to get through for our players? I’d typically say that a single Adventuring Day, using almost its full budget, is going to take 2 to 3 sessions to get through, though if your players are slow with combats, then it may take them up to 4 sessions.
This Adventuring Day also gives the party a total of 1,000 XP for each character. If the party just turned to 3rd level before the haunted house, they’d have 900 XP and need another 1,800 XP to get to a total of 2,700 XP and level up. This means that if you just repeat another Adventuring Day like this one, they will level up by overcoming about 12 to 16 encounters. Each level is going to be slightly different with how many encounters and Adventuring Days the party will need, but it is typically 2 to 3 full Adventuring Days.
In fact, many dungeons could be made up of 2 or 3 Adventuring Days, with mega-dungeons featuring up to 4 to 6 Adventuring Days - enough for the party to level up at least twice while in it. For those curious, I typically call any dungeon a ‘mini-dungeon’ if it won’t give the party all the XP they need to complete an entire level, a dungeon is a ‘dungeon’ if it will give the party all the XP they need to complete an entire level, and a dungeon is a ‘megadungeon’ if the party will level up multiple times while completing it.
Ending the Adventuring Day
By this point, the party is tired and exhausted, and hopefully didn’t simply nova your final fight because they were forced to spend resources. They have now earned their long rest where they regain their hit points, their spell slots, and all their fun abilities that will trivialize future encounters to come. If a party goes along with the Adventuring Day and completes it, let them enjoy their long rest as they have earned it. If, on the other hand, your party routinely just takes on a single encounter and then long rests, that is the time to start disturbing their rests with zombie attacks on the village, ghosts screeching through the streets, and more to try and get them to move quickly and complete the Adventuring Day. Once they have completed your Adventuring Day, only then do they get a chance to truly rest and relax.
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