The Case Against the Adventuring Day

5e puts emphasis on the Adventuring Day.

I designed and played a campaign that focused heavily on the concept of the Adventuring Day and received a ton of pushback from some of my players. I tried to explain that taking a rest for narrative purposes is different than a rest for the adventuring day; I struggled to add the concept of distance to my world (e.g. a side quest at a farm that was two hours away from town made side quests difficult to fit into the day).

Fifth Edition is Designed Around Resource Attrition

The game is designed around

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1000hw0/a_chart_to_explain_the_number_of_encounters_per/

3 Deadly encounters is insane

The Short Rest Problem

Since some classes are to recover some resources on short rest, it's encouraged to have a cadence of 1-2 short rests per long rest (and 2-3 days between level up).

I had an encounter where the town the party was in was attacked by undead. It was a single deadly encounter. To balance this narrative around a single adventuring day, I'd need the same attack last the entire day. As in, they have a deadly encounter then somehow have a short rest before continuing the defense of the siege, repeating this process one or two times. Good luck trying to explain to players how they find 2 hours to take a quick break.

A Retrospective

A lot of the issues surround the Adventuring Day comes down to pace of play. My table is relatively slow and it's sometimes difficult to get through an encounter or two in a three hour session -- we start late, we get side tracked, etc. This resulted in having side quests where they might fight a single monster in a single encounter/session. A five encounter dungeon might take 3-4 weeks.

The side quest quality probably needs to go up where instead of fighting a single Basilisk for the side quest (and allowing multiple side quests in an adventuring day), I need to create 1-3 smaller encounters before they run into the Basilisk and get their reward.