Weather

[was]

Do you keep track of the seasons and the weather? and do you regularly use it in adventures or do you generally ignore it?

 

[Jhaelen]

Yes and yes. I mostly use it to get a better idea how to describe scenes. But since there's about a 10% chance for really bad weather on average, I also regularly use fitting environmental effects in combat encounters. Since I'm making weather rolls well in advance, they sometimes also serve as a source of inspiration for designing encounters.

 

[Technomancer]

D6, roll once in morning and once in afternoon. Adjust as desired for the local climate and season

1-3 Clear
4 Overcast
5 Rain
6 Same as previous roll

 

[Celebrim]

Do you keep track of the seasons and the weather? and do you regularly use it in adventures or do you generally ignore it?

I regularly make mention of it, but in general weather or even the changing seasons is not sufficient to have a large role in the game. Most play tends to happen in either civilized areas or their immediate environs, and so most weather conditions are temporary, escapable, and insufficiently immoderate to make more than a passing inconvenience. Problems that commoners can deal with generally don't rise to the level of significant hardship for PCs.

That may change shortly in my current game, because play is moving from a civilized area to a wilderness area where weather conditions will be less escapable. Again, here there will potentially be problems commoners would have difficulty dealing with, so they'll rise to a greater level of concern for PCs.

I used to randomly generate weather with increasingly complex tables, generally generating several days of weather in advance (so that for example, divination on the subject would work). But that was before the internet. Now what I tend to do is set a date and location which will be my weather generator - say 2009 Norfolk Virginia or 2010 Port of Prince Haiti - and then simply record the archival information about the real weather at that location over a time frame.

 

[Evenglare]

In my game I have some rather harsh storms that happen periodically called magistorms. If you are caught out in them chances are you are going to die. There are 6 crystals (earth fire wind water blah blah) that protect the major cities, and these crystals grow and periodically chip off, then those smaller shards are granted to heroes or whoever and they can go and start smaller towns. The crystals protect you from the storms. So short answer is yes, I do track weather, and my weather hurts... bad.

 

[Serendipity]

Yes and yes - in fact, it's become something of an expectation if I start a new D&D game that the moment the characters travel anywhere, it will be raining profusely and they'll be camping in mud.
Not true but close enough.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I use Almanacs - You get more useful information from them, just select a region and season that best matches your setting.

See: http://www.almanac.com/weather/history