I Ran A D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide Adventure With No Prep, & You Should Too

screenrant.com:

The 2024 packs a lot of advice and material for DMs into 384 pages, but there might be nothing in the book that's more condensed than the sample adventures. Five adventures appear in the course of four pages — three, really, if you discount an introduction to the concept and some splash art of a ballroom. Compared to the size of a modern campaign, these materials are absolutely miniscule, but the bare bones aspect is a large part of the point.

I've had a digital copy of the 2024 for a while now, and over the past few weeks, those sample adventures have been calling my name. I'm never exactly at a loss for material, with years of experience writing homebrew campaigns and plenty of books to turn to when I'm not. Truly bare-bones official adventures are an unusual offering, however, and I leaped at the opportunity to test one out when it came.

In an odd twist on the usual bane of, it was actually an issue with scheduling that led me to run one of the 2024 sample adventures. The past month has been a nightmare to align with my usual group, and of the five players in the campaign, only two could commit to the usual time this week. Instead of calling it off, I put forth the proposition of running the level one adventure, The Fouled Stream, and both of them agreed to help determine its merits.

The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide makes a big change to the recommendations for combat design, and it isn't kind to players at high levels.

Although we could have spent a little time preparing things, I wanted to make this as much of a stress test as possible. While I would typically read through pre-written material ahead of time and think about how to best rework it to my needs, I intentionally hit the ground running without a warm-up. My players did the same, grabbing two of D&D Beyond's pre-made level one adventurers from the '80s cartoon and jumping in. They went with Presto, the Wizard, and Diana, the Monk, although the latter was quickly abbreviated to Diane for the sake of a