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Weather in your Games?

Weather in your Games?

  • We don't bother with weather.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Weather is used but only for dramatic effect.

    Votes: 23 27.7%
  • We have weather charts and use them semi-randomly.

    Votes: 11 13.3%
  • Weather is random but with climatic and seasonal progressions.

    Votes: 18 21.7%
  • We sometimes use it to mix things up but not always.

    Votes: 23 27.7%
  • Other (please elaborate below).

    Votes: 8 9.6%

I think I picked up this link from another thread here, or maybe on Paizo's boards: Weather Forecast & Reports - Long Range & Local | Wunderground : Weather Underground . If you look there you can see what the actual weather was for a given place and date, covering up to the last ten years maybe. If you keep track of dates in your campaign, it would be easy to just pick a year and month and choose an appropriate analagous place to where your campaign is and you get weather that is very... realistic, ;) .

Great idea, thanks!
 

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As DM, I once killed a PC with a blizzard. Despite multiple warnings about the severe conditions outside, the player had his character leave the safety of a cave and got dropped by the cold damage. We talked about it afterwards, and it turned out that he just didn't believe I was serious about using the weather rules.

I have the opposite experience - unless "survive the bad weather" is very clearly part of the adventure, players will not risk their PCs against the fickle hand of the weather gods. There's a feeling I think that weather effects are fundamentally arbitrary and thus far more dangerous than 'balanced' combat!

This may be changing a bit with the 4e Skill Challenge system, where surviving bad weather can itself be an XP-generating 'balanced' challenge.
 


As DM, I once killed a PC with a blizzard. Despite multiple warnings about the severe conditions outside, the player had his character leave the safety of a cave and got dropped by the cold damage. We talked about it afterwards, and it turned out that he just didn't believe I was serious about using the weather rules.
Ditto. There are players that just don't understand that the environment can be as dangerous as the monsters.

Likewise, almost killing somebody with modifiers for trying to climb down a cliff in the sleet and freezing rain. He fell, dropped into the negatives, but still survived. The rest of the party found a narrow path down, and still needed to roll. Then they had to fight wreckers.... At the end of it, they used sail cloth to make a shelter, and did not try to climb back up. (Though, if I recall properly, gong down is more dangerous than going up....)

I'm from New England - and know that Mother Nature doesn't play around when it comes to cold. Both my girlfriend and I have done winter camping, though she had the extra special fun of doing it in the mountains of Vermont, near Sterling College, it was required for one of her courses there. I like winter camping, she, most emphatically, does not.

The Auld Grump
 

I find it strange that no one has voted in the poll that they don't bother with weather. I've certainly played in games where weather hasn't come up at all. Perhaps those who don't use weather have seen the thread title and figured the thread wouldn't concern them?
 


One of the best ideas I've seen for handling weather is to make a reaction roll. Poor reaction? Rain, snow, high wind, extreme heat. Favorable reaction? Clear, dry, warm relative to the season.
 

I sometimes use weather for dramatic effect, but mostly it's just a given. I ran a campaign set in Celtic Ireland, and the default weather was "rain". Occasionally I'd decide that it wasn't raining, which generally made the PCs uncomfortable.
 

I use to use weather a lot more when I had a cool program that would generate weather. It had long and lat, climate, location (forest, plains etc) and final time of year. It was a very good program, sadly a number of years ago my computer died and I never could find one anywhere near as good again.
 

Since my PCs have decided to be part of a farming community I determine the seasonal conditions that they will face, however since the druid PC is now pretty high level he determines the weather and I react to his meddling:)
 

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