Weather: How much does it matter?

[herrozerro]

It's a simple question, but none the less to me it seems like an often neglected variable in my own games. Unless there is some kind of dramatic tension, like a battle on top of a tower in a thunderstorm, most of my games seem to be in sunny or partly cloudy land with not a dark cloud in the sky ever.

Personally I don't know the best way to go about it. Whether a random table by day or making up a forecast up and sticking to it is the better method. Even something as simple as a 1d20, where 1 is severe weather, 10 is mild and 20 is great.

How about you, does weather factor into your games?

 

[Janx]

well, my trees were dying in my yard again until it rained this weekend.


I think in gaming, you can at least approach it like the movies. Choose weather than reflects the mood.

It always rains at funerals.

It's always a dark and stormy night when there's a murder

Heroes always wait to attack the villain in a climactic sword fight when there's a thunderstorm.

 

[Morrus]

It's something I too-often neglect; which is a mistake because weather in movies is a tremendous moodsetter. That said, I'm not sure it would be in an RPG as it's one of those things that needs to be continuously visible (or audible or whatever) to set a mood - you can mention that it's raining, you can give combat or skill penalties if that floats your boat, but you'd have to keep reiterating over and over to keep the weather in mind.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that weather in an RPG an be a great scene-setter, but it's a little tougher to make it an environmental mood-setter.

 

[Hand of Evil]

My old trick, the Farmer's Almanac. Pull out check the day and add weather. Then have a impact chart: flooding, lightning strikes, drop in temp, bridge washes out, muddy roads reduce movement by X for 1d8 days, all the above.

People forget the impact, afternoon rains will mean a reduction in travel time. Heavy rains, change in travel conditions or flash floods in a city like Hong Kong. World Building, I take a bit more of a time, setting up the wet months, the dry, the average for the periods and stuff like that.

 

[Alzrius]

I really enjoyed using Dodeca Weather for the first several levels of my Kingmaker game; at lower levels, combining the weather results with the wilderness encounters really helped set a rugged feel for the first several sessions (before the game got to the kingdom-building setment, where each turn was a month of game time).

 

[amerigoV]

If you are in Sharn and its storming, you know an adventure is about to start.

In Hellfrost (a Savage Worlds fantasy setting) its a huge factor, but that is because winter keeps getting longer and moving further south. I would imagine it becomes meaningful in Game of Thrones setting.

Any other time, it has just been meaningful as the plot dictated.

 

[Umbran]

Weather often gets neglected, simply because most of the time it doesn't matter. Gaming is like theatre - you don't have lots of time for details that aren't relevant to the story at hand. If and when the weather is relevant (say, the hobbits are trying to get over Caradhras) it becomes relevant, but then you're out of habit of ever considering it.

 

[Hussar]

And, just to add to that, weather doesn't matter in a lot of the actual situations that PC's find them in. I mean, who cares that it's raining when you're inside that castle or dungeon?

 

[Umbran]

And, just to add to that, weather doesn't matter in a lot of the actual situations that PC's find them in. I mean, who cares that it's raining when you're inside that castle or dungeon?

Well, *my* basement floods. You figure the dungeon's better?

 

[Jhaelen]

Just like random encounters, I roll up weather in advance. This allows me to give correct information if a pc attempts to predict weather and in the (rare) case of weather resulting in conditions that actually affect encounters to look up the pertinent rules. Most of the time, though, it's just a piece of fluff that helps me in describing scenes.