Think Challenge Rating is a joke? Fine. The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide puts encounter difficulty into your hands in three easy steps

In Dungeons & Dragons, the main job of a Dungeon Master is to create adventures for their players. Whether those adventures are 100% homebrewed or store-bought, the DM has their work cut out for them. Three core rulebooks—the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual—each stretch to 384 pages in service of adventure creation.

The Adventures chapter is all about preparing for your game as a Dungeon Master. This section is written out like a collection of notes, accessible and intuitive, making themselves useful for play. The designers thought to themselves, "How do I tell DMs how to give notes to themselves."

This note-taking process has four steps: 1) What's the premise of the adventure, 2) What's going on that's going to cause the conflict, 3) How do you draw the players in, and 4) What's the actual sequence of encounters.

The Adventure chapter covers so much more (rewardingly) challenging concepts:

• How to keep the narrative focused
• How to not wipe out the entire party
• How to not be a cakewalk
• How does the story unfold
• How to be okay with going off the rails
• How to get the train back on track
• How to build tension
• How to use NPCs to steer—rather than railroad
• Combat revisions:
  • Changing elevation, defensive positions, hazards, mixed monster groups, reasons to move, reactive tactics, accounting for player absence, accounting for outlier encounters (e.g. running a fight with 100 creatures)
• Adventure climax: [Rolls a 6] "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
• How to award treasure over the course of an adventure
• How does an adventure resolve? 
• Five adventure examples: "That's five more than the last DM's Guide had."

Being a Dungeon Master is an incredible act of creativity. The act of creativity, and thinking about the adventure's possibilities, is a major reward in and of itself—at least as far as lifelong DM Chris Perkins is concerned. 

I would agree. It's also a learning process. I screw up constantly as a Dungeon Master. I've berated my players for things I was wrong about. In my defense, I would also say I've been berated for things my players were wrong about. In the end, I think both sides would agree that it's still one of the most worthwhile and engaging hobbies a human being could engage in. What you put in is what you get out, of course, and there are times when I've given my players nothing, and times when I've given my players nothing. But there's nothing else I'd rather be doing with my spare time.

Every week, a Dungeon Master wants to think about: What's the magic sauce that will make your players realize, Oh, this was made for our group. Interviewer Todd Kenreck rightly describes Dungeon Mastering as "an act of purposeful daydreaming." 

Each character is on a character arc. When the adventure ends, no one will be in the same place they began. Where and when are the opportunities for a DM to craft portions of that narrative arc? Or what circumstances can a DM set up to allow for emergent gameplay opportunities like those to arise?

Hearing these three long-time DMs talk about adventure design theory makes it apparent just how deep the rabbit hole goes. I've been dungeon mastering for a few years now, and I can tell that what they're saying is not Starter Kit material. I have no doubt that the Adventures chapter is made with open arms for both new and veteran DMs. But these old salts are talking about really esoteric stuff that you'll only get a grasp of after many, many years in the DM's seat. In other words: I have a lot to learn.

The Adventures chapter has a table of the four tiers of play in D&D:

• Tier 1 (Levels 1–4) Saving the town
• Tier 2 (Levels 5–10) 
• Tier 3 (Levels 11–16) 
• Tier 4 (Levels 17–20) Saving the multiverse

I love tables. They have tables here for random adventure generation. They roll one up for Tier 2 play (the levels 5–10 "sweet spot" for D&D gameplay). It goes something like:

[Rolls a 15] A ship carrying a valuable treasure or an evil artifact sinks in a storm or monster attack. 

They rewind to Tier 1 play:

[Rolls a 6] A new sinkhole has revealed a long-buried dungeon thought to hold treasure. 

They fast forward to Tier 3:

[Rolls another 6] The ruler of the realm is sending an emissary to a hostile neighbor to negotiate a truce and the emissary needs protection.

They try out Tier 4:

[Rolls a 5] A god of agriculture is angry causing rivers to dry up and crops to wither. 

How would one appease such an angry god? Todd Kenreck immediately resorts to human sacrifice. Understandable. (See, this is exactly what our parents were afraid D&D would do to us back in the '80s. I guess they were right.) And though Chris Perkins acts shocked by Todd Kenreck's words, Chris is wearing a shirt that says, "When there's no more room in the ABYSS, the Prince of Demons EMERGES."

There are maps. Unmarked maps. Maps ripe for players and Dungeon Masters to mark up and make their own. I never tire of maps. I don't know a single DM that does.

There's now a three-step process for calculating a combat encounter's Challenge Rating, though they're not saying the phrase "Challenge Rating" anymore:

1) You choose the difficulty of the encounter.

Low = one or two scary moments with the players emerging victorious with no fatalities.

Moderate = absent healing, the encounter could go badly for adventurers; weaker characters might get taken out of the fight; there's a slim chance that one or more characters might die (he probably means go Unconscious by reaching 0 Hit Points).

High = This could be lethal for one or more characters, and to survive it, the characters will have to use smart tactics, quick thinking, and have a little bit of luck.

2) Determine your XP budget. There's a single table to cross reference the party's level with the encounter difficulty (Low, Moderate, High), which gives you your XP budget to spend on creatures. 

3) Spend away. Stay within your budget and this recalculated don't-call-it-Challenge-Rating encounter math should play out a little closer to reality.

Compared to the old (invisible) Challenge Ratings established by the old D&D 5e Core Rulebooks, the new encounter math, plus the changes made to creatures in the 2024 Monster Manual, means that monsters will be both tougher and more numerous. You'll be getting hit from both sides of this scale.

This is good, since many Dungeon Masters had come to the conclusion that Challenge Rating in 5e was a joke. I don't know that CR is a joke, per se, but I've long gotten into the habit of adding more monsters into every encounter of an adventure, even though my table is at the low end of "four to six adventurers" in the party.

There is a table to add some flavor to these monsters. Such as: the monster taunts the players during combat, or they surrender easily, they're greedy, disorderly, or brave. This is great. I use a table that rolls up random adjectives to tack onto monsters, and that has made all the difference in giving me, the Dungeon Master, something more to work with than just Armor Class, Hit Points, and "They attack until they die." This is important especially in adventures where you're meeting the same types of adversaries over and over again. 

What a meaty chapter. I can't wait. The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide launches November 12.