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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 9085394" data-attributes="member: 2629">You can go crazy on weather and things like that - but after spending a lot of time building a tool to really have detailed weather to make a 'realistic world', I realized that I would have been better off just picking weather and encounters based upon whim and estimation.I built a series of spreadsheets in the 1990s (in Lotus 1-2-3! initially) that designed (simple?) weather patterns for my entire world for approximately 100 years of time. It was built as an overlay for my world mapping, which I do both on physical maps, but also via spreadsheet by tracking zones. It has over 2000 zones with flowing weather patterns, humidity, temps, rain totals, etc... calculated 3 times per day. The first attempts were regional, then spread out to cover the entire globe.  It was a pet project I worked on for an insane number of hours (likely 400 over the years) - but in the end, after showing it off to a bunch of DMs and using it for over a decade: It wasn't worth the effort.  Even though I really enjoyed the challenge of making it, and tweaking it to improve it was an interesting challenge, and sometimes it is really cool to be able to tell a player that their upcast control weather spell actually changed the weather across the globe months later ... it is a beast to use and more of an obligation than a benefit most of the time.As I have it, I use it.  It is also uniquely fun for my campaign setting which has a cyclical nature (time travel allows for me to "repeat" the world with new groups but capitalize upon prior edition continuity) it is fun to see the same storm hit different groups in the same location under different rule sets.  If I didn't have it, though, I'd just drop weather and monsters in to fit the storyline, not based upon calculations, random chance or other factors.</blockquote>

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