How to Use the Adventuring Day Rules in D&D 5e

December 09, 2025
Posted by Luke Hart

By Luke Hart

If you’ve ever run a D&D game where your players take a long rest after every single encounter—or even worse, try to long rest during the dungeon because “we’re low on resources”—you’ve likely felt the pain of the Adventuring Day going completely off the rails. The result? Encounters that should be challenging become trivial. Boss fights turn into speed bumps. And the entire resource-depletion design philosophy of 5e collapses into a mushy mess.

Today in the Lair, we’re tackling one of the most misunderstood, misused, and ignored rules in D&D 5e: the Adventuring Day. We’ll break down what it is, why it’s important, and exactly how to use it to design better adventures that challenge your players without blindsiding them. And yes—we’ll also cover what to do if your group still tries to long rest after every fight.

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What Is the Adventuring Day?

At its core, the Adventuring Day is a simple mechanic: it tells you how many encounters a party can reasonably handle before needing a long rest. Think of it as a stress test for the party’s hit points, spell slots, class features, and consumables.

A few key details:

An adventuring day assumes the party will take two short rests before finally long resting.
The term “encounter” here primarily means resource-draining encounters, which almost always means combat.
The rules are found on page 84 of the DMG.

There are two ways to figure out how many encounters fit into an adventuring day:

1. Estimate It and Call It Good

The DMG suggests this rule of thumb:

6–8 medium to hard encounters per adventuring day.
Fewer if encounters lean deadly.
More if many are easy.

“Encounter difficulty” refers to the classifications: easy, medium, hard, deadly—rules for this are on DMG page 82. Tools like Kobold Fight Club and D&D Beyond’s Encounter Builder handle this math for you.

2. Do the Math Properly

Each character level has an “adjusted XP per day” budget. Combined across the party, this budget determines how many encounters you can fit into your adventuring day.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. CR calculations in 5e are notoriously weak.
But the system is still useful for rough guidance.

Later, we’ll walk through an example calculation step-by-step.

Why the Adventuring Day Actually Matters

Here’s the real reason the adventuring day rules matter: they help you design the length, pacing, and difficulty of your adventures.

1. It Helps You Plan Adventure Length

I usually design adventures to contain one full adventuring day of encounters. That way:

The party does not need to take a long rest mid-adventure.
They will need two short rests.
Resource management matters.

If you knowingly design:

1.5 or 2 adventuring days’ worth of encounters, the party must long rest halfway through.
Half an adventuring day, they’ll steamroll everything and end the adventure with tons of unused resources—making the finale far easier.

2. It Helps Prevent Encounter Trivialization

The #1 pitfall in 5e is this:

DMs run one encounter → players long rest → players are at full resources → every encounter becomes trivial.

This isn’t adventure design. It’s a sequence of isolated fights with no cumulative pressure.

5e assumes resource depletion across several encounters. When you ignore this, the math stops working.

If you want a challenging encounter when the party is at full strength, you must use the Deadly XP threshold. Most “normal” encounters will be a cakewalk.

That’s why nearly all my overland random encounters are Deadly—because the party is at full strength and can rest right after.

How to Use the Adventuring Day in Your Game

We’re going to do two things here:

Show how to calculate an adventuring day’s worth of encounters.
Explain how to enforce the adventuring day so players can’t trivialize everything.

How to Calculate an Adventuring Day

We’ll use the “Adventuring Day XP” chart on DMG page 84.

Example: Five level-five characters

The adjusted XP per day for a level 5 PC is 3500.
With five characters, that’s 17,500 adjusted XP per adventuring day.

This budget is the total adjusted XP of all encounters the party can handle before needing a long rest.

Now let’s demonstrate using D&D Beyond’s Encounter Builder:

Encounter 1

10 hobgoblins
Medium encounter
Adjusted XP: 2,500
Remaining budget: 15,000

Encounter 2

4 hobgoblin iron shadows + 1 devastator
Deadly
Adjusted XP: 5,800
Remaining budget: 9,200

Encounter 3

7 hobgoblins + 1 captain
Medium
Adjusted XP: 3,500
Remaining budget: 5,700

Encounter 4

5 hobgoblins + 1 warlord
Deadly
Adjusted XP: 5,600
Remaining budget: 100

Boom. Four encounters = one adventuring day for a 5-player, level-5 party.

If I were designing a hobgoblin adventure, these four encounters would make up the core of it.

How to Run Adventures Using the Adventuring Day

During that adventure:

The group should be able to take two short rests.
They should not need to take a long rest.

If they insist on long resting, then…

What If Your Players Still Try to Long Rest After Every Encounter?

This is a common problem, and the solution is built into the rules.

1. Use the Actual Long Rest Rule: Once Every 24 Hours

If they long rested at 9 AM, they can’t long rest again until 9 AM tomorrow.

This means:

If they long rest after each room in a dungeon, days pass.
That gives the dungeon time to react.

2. Take Advantage of the Consequences

If they long rest inside or outside a dungeon, you have many options:

The dungeon reinforces its defenses.
The monsters call for reinforcements.
Patrols search for the intruders.
The alarm is sounded.
The BBEG relocates, fortifies, or escapes.
Other factions intervene.
The dungeon gets restocked using your random encounter table.

Suddenly, long resting becomes the dangerous choice.

3. For Event-Based Adventures

You’ll need a ticking clock:

Serial killer strikes every day? A long rest = a new victim.
Ritual completes at dusk? Long rest = failure.
Caravan being chased? Long rest = caravan overtaken.

Consequences don’t have to punish—they simply advance the world realistically.

Common Objections to the Adventuring Day

“I don’t want six to eight encounters in my adventures!”

Great news: you don’t have to.

As shown earlier, you can hit a full adventuring day with:

Four deadly encounters, or
Even two extremely deadly encounters.

Difficulty determines quantity.

“I want my game to be different.”

That’s fine! Use the rules—or don’t use them. Just make an informed choice.

If you ignore the Adventuring Day rules:

Your encounters will be easier.
Your pacing will be different.
Your players’ decision-making will change.

There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you understand why.

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