Winter

[the Jester]

Cross-posted from Circvs Maximvs because there are a lot of non-overlapping people on both sites these days and I'd like to get the opinions of both crowds.

Winter is a lot rougher when you are in a non-heated vehicle such as your boots or a horse. Most groups of pcs don't tend to travel via carriage except in occasional Ravenloft or Eberron adventures, at least in my experience.

Rain, snow, hail, just plain cold- all of these things make it kind of a pain in the butt to travel towards that abandoned mountain fortress or that remote swamp full of lizard folk. Does anyone take this into account in their campaigns? Do the pcs hunker down for the winter? DMs, do you use weather as a plot point in adventures? Players, do your pcs buy cold weather gear for adventuring in winter? (Do you even know what season it is in your campaign right now, for that matter?)

I have used winter a lot. One group assembled at a waystation built by elves for sheltering travelers during the winter; the pcs and several npcs spent the night while one of the npcs gradually showed more and more signs that he was a creepy blackguard of legendary repute (kind of a spooky rp session with 1st level pcs). Another group had to venture out in order to stop the bad guy on New Year's Eve, the only time when he could perform some kind of ritual. (That one didn't work out so well for the pcs- they ended up captured and following him into the middle of an epic magic apocalypse.) There have been several times when weather has come up (heavy winds made ranged attacks hard, downpour makes fire hard, and of course in the old days no storm meant no call lightning for druids).

 

[Stormonu]

I haven't brought it up much, but I generally start my campaigns in Spring. Having not lived in an area that gets snow, I tend to forget about the snowy months. In contrast, living in the sticky heat of the South, I have had Pcs worry about overheating (having been in the SCA even only brifly, I've seen the chaos attempting to fight in plate mail can cause to folks fighting in Southern summers).

 

[Dice4Hire]

Weather and such like that depends largely on the campaign I am running. In my Dark Sun campaign, endurance checks are the norm for traveling in the wastes. But that is Dark Sun.

If I were running a serious winter-themed campaign, I would lay on the snow/ice penalties pretty heavily. But otherwise, I use weather pretty sparingly as a hazard or to mix up the fight a bit. Generally it is a minor plot point.

 

[thejc]

It seems most campaigns I've ran or played always start in the fall. Ive used it both ways as a DM. One campaign was less adventure path/big adventure and more a sandbox based campaign. they discovered an ancient viking ship landlocked and buried. so every winter they would return to work on it and such. It became their base of operations and eventually they turned it into an inn

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Yeah, winter is great for making things more difficult for PCs. Slippery ice and mud, blizzard blindness, falling icicles? You bet, anything to make a few hungry ogres a bigger pita for the characters is game.

Outdoor wandering monsters are also seasonal. So winter is when winter wolves (obviously) come out, while most animals, plantoids & humanoids are staying in or hibernating. Also, the Zombie Threat Level drops during the winter because they're frozen solid.

I've also used winter calendar events, because the conditions tend to be dark and cold, and partying is a good excuse to throw a lot of innocents in the way. That's why the orcs attack the village during Mid-Winter Feastnight: the villagers are plastered and can't see in the long night. Solstice and the deep-winter cross-quarter days are a good times for druidic rituals or religious ceremonies. And if nothing else, things like aurorae and weird ice formations make cool backdrops.

 

[kitsune9]

Yes, I have used winter with all the rules for survival considerably in my campaign when the player characters traveled up in near arctic conditions. They had to take shelter from blizzards, deal with avalanches, recover from the disorientation of snow blindness, and perform survival checks when foraging for food and avoiding frostbite. Fun stuff.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I use environmental conditions of all kinds: seasonal, natural, magical, etc.- but only when it really matters.

 

[The Shaman]

Winter is a lot rougher when you are in a non-heated vehicle such as your boots or a horse.

Lack of food can kill you in weeks. Lack of water can kill you in days. Exposure to cold can kill you in hours, or less.

Rain, snow, hail, just plain cold- all of these things make it kind of a pain in the butt to travel towards that abandoned mountain fortress or that remote swamp full of lizard folk.

And wind exacerbates all of them.

Does anyone take this into account in their campaigns?

Always.

Do the pcs hunker down for the winter?

One of my favorite published adventures for any system is Burned Bush Wells for Boot Hill. The premise of the adventure is that a brutal winter grips El Dorado County and the adventurers are holed up in the town of Burned Bush Wells - they can hunt wolves for the bounty on their pelts or gamble in the saloons, and there's a war brewing between the townsfolk and a wealthy businessman.

This is a regular feature of the games I run, particularly if the era is one in which muscle, water, and wind are the primary sources of power.

DMs, do you use weather as a plot point in adventures?

In my Flashing Blades game, it's March 1625 - I described the snow and the slush collecting on the north sides of buildings, the workers clearing floes away from the pilings of the bridges over the Seine, the icy quays where the mill-barges are tied up, and so on. One adventurer, an officer in a company of pikemen, was faced with finding shelter for the night and failing to deliver a dispatch as ordered, or pressing on and likely freezing to death; later he led a foraging party to scavenge for supplies for his men from the villages in the area where they are bivouacked.

Players, do your pcs buy cold weather gear for adventuring in winter?

I have a Patrick Bateman-like obsession about what my characters are wearing - I can't tell you his parents names beyond "Mom" amd "Dad," but I know all about his rabbit fur-lined hooded cloak insulated with goose down.

 

[Haltherrion]

For sure, winter matters for us. I also like the 4E endurance checks which give a crunchy, rules element to being in bad weather.

My current setting has very severe winters and seasons half as long as Earth's so the players are always navigating around the weather (both seasonal and storms and such).

I love the flavor of dealing with weather, myself Makes for interesting terrain, situations, even RP as they look for shelter, things to aid in the bad weather.

 

[Alzrius]

In the early portions of my Kingmaker campaign, where the PCs are exploring unexplored land, I piled on the penalties for movement, exploration, and combat in winter.

Now the PCs are all 7th level, and have founded their own kingdom. They still remember what it was like to go adventuring in the snow and cold, and refuse to do any exploring during the winter months of the year.

By the way, for fellow Pathfinder players who want to utilize the winter weather in their games, I did an altered layout of the rules for winter weather, subdividing the effects by temperature, wind, precipitation, ground conditions, and other. You can find it over on my blog, Intelligence Check, in the post Walkin' in a Winter Wasteland.