Weather and Microclimates

[MNBlockHead]

How are you all dealing with weather and climate in RW? Up to now, I've pretty much just fudged it. Either making it entirely up or using very simple random weather tables. I want to be able to offer something richer and more "realistic" without creating much work for myself. Below is my planned approach. I would appreciate any suggestions.

1. Since my fantasy world's climates are easy to match to IRL Earth climates, I plan use use historical weather lookup services, like Weather Underground.

2. I will prepare a list of climate types and put them in a column in a table, the next column will have a zipcode, airport code, or City-State-Country from real-life Earth that represents that climate.

3. When creating a Place:Region:Geographical topic, in I would enter the appropriate values in the climate fields. The climate would be selected from a tag list and the zipcode, airport, or city would be entered into the annotation (or just enter the URL to the page with historical weather info for that region).

But creating a region topic for every climate, even on the highest level is too much work. While I can, again, fudge the climate pretty well just but looking at my world map, that isn't really satisfactory, so my next step is:

4. Use Hexographer to create a simple color-coded climate map. I'm not going to plot out the entire world, but when preparing any overland scenes, I would indicate climate with color and with hexographer I can drill down further into a specific hex to account for microclimates due to lake effects, the windward/leeward sides of mountains, etc.

Anyway, I'd be interesting on how others handle weather and climate beyond making it up on the fly.

[Farling]

Weather doesn't have enough of an effect in my campaign unless it is relevant to the plot.

I guess it could come down to the GM wanting lots of detail, but the players not caring so much (a bit like has been said about detailed time-keeping)?

[Vargr]

I have never understood that it should not be in the players interest to know that.

Both time and weather is of paramount relevance in movies, books, plays and in people's own lives - even more so when you are dependent on them (a farming community, for instance).

If the players do not care, then it is because the GM does not use neither time nor weather in his world. Quite frankly, when I play with a GM who does not use time and weather I always get the feeling that I am in a 2D world lacking immersion.

That is not the same as having to invent new weird stuff as "today is the third plurf in the second me'ta of the Slarf circle in Emperor Augustus second reincarnation of the fourth reign; it is two meffles past the Dog's Sentinel".

But having no timesystem and no weather is akin to be a sailboat and dead in water out of sight of the coast - boring and pointless.

[Viking2054]

Although time and weather can be important to the game, is it important enough to have predetermined inside your Realm Works campaign data? I will use weather to set a mood or impose a condition on a scene but I rarely create it before I sit down at the game table. I'm just not sure it is worth it enough to worry about ahead of time. Now, I suppose if weather is key to the story... such as some cursed character that only comes out to play when it's cloudy or raining, then I guess predetermining the weather might be necessary. But then that might be something like a werewolf only coming out to play under the full moon kind of thing.

On the other hand, recording the weather conditions so the players can look up what the weather was like when something happened is fine by me and I've noted it down on old hand written or excel based calendars I've done for some of my campaign worlds.

[Lexin]

Originally Posted by Viking2054

I will use weather to set a mood or impose a condition on a scene but I rarely create it before I sit down at the game table.

If weather is really important to the game, I'll have written it in to the preparations for the scenarios. Generally, it's not that much of an issue, unless I decide I want to make the characters miserable for some reason (such as they're fooling around in a way that's irritating me) then I'll pretend to roll the dice and tell them that it's raining or snowing, depending on where they are in the world.

Usually in the worlds that I'm running, the phases of the moon are more important (like Hastur can only come down when Aldebaran is in the sky) and recording that information would be more useful. But obviously, as I'm the GM, it happens when I say it happens, even if it turns out I'm later wrong in RL terms, I'm still right in game terms. If you see what I mean.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by Vargr

"today is the third plurf in the second me'ta of the Slarf circle in Emperor Augustus second reincarnation of the fourth reign; it is two meffles past the Dog's Sentinel".

Reading that sentence makes me strangely happy. I would love to play in a campaign where the DM could actually pull it off.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by Farling

Weather doesn't have enough of an effect in my campaign unless it is relevant to the plot.

I guess it could come down to the GM wanting lots of detail, but the players not caring so much (a bit like has been said about detailed time-keeping)?

I agree that you don't want to be so bogged down in "realistic" detail that you detract from the tempo of the game, but pulling out weather details doesn't take too much extra prep (e.g. having a historical weather database like Weather Underground that you can use to look up weather for the environment your party is currently adventuring in).

It is nice to simply add some flavor about the party walking through a miserable rain. Also having weather slow down or speed up travel times, have negative/positive effects on battles, sneaking, passive perception, etc.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by Viking2054

Although time and weather can be important to the game, is it important enough to have predetermined inside your Realm Works campaign data?

No. But I *do* think that knowing the climate of where the party is, what the season is, and being able to quickly pull up weather details (either from a historical weather service, a table, or just fudging it based on climate and season) adds to your ability to describe the scene and build a mood.

What I like about weather, once you have a system (and it needn't be too complicated) you have an easy way to add some flavor that is not taxing on your attention and doesn't take much preparation.

I do think, however, if I'm going to go through the work of creating a geographical region, I might as well add the climate and link to historical weather for a similar area on real-life earth with that climate. But I would not create a Region:Geographic topic for the sole purpose of recording the climate (that's what maps are for).

[Viking2054]

I don't try to map the weather in my campaigns. I also don't much bother too much with recording weather, any more. I may or may not be asked what season of the year it is during character creation, but other then that my players don't care about the weather unless I make a big deal about it.

The season soon gets forgotten after character creation... My players feel prepared for whatever comes their way if they are prepped for the season at character creation. Besides, tracking that stuff usually gets lost over time when you get together to play once or twice a month and then end up on two to six month breaks because of real life interfering in the groups ability to get together. I'm sure weather might be important to those that can play every week but I find that weather is something that is determined either when I set down at the game table, or when a player happens to ask about it... and in both cases it's usually a toss of the dice modified by season, location, and maybe altitude.

[Vargr]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

No. But I *do* think that knowing the climate of where the party is, what the season is, and being able to quickly pull up weather details (either from a historical weather service, a table, or just fudging it based on climate and season) adds to your ability to describe the scene and build a mood.

What I like about weather, once you have a system (and it needn't be too complicated) you have an easy way to add some flavor that is not taxing on your attention and doesn't take much preparation.

I do think, however, if I'm going to go through the work of creating a geographical region, I might as well add the climate and link to historical weather for a similar area on real-life earth with that climate. But I would not create a Region:Geographic topic for the sole purpose of recording the climate (that's what maps are for).

I completely agree.

I don't need a table telling me, that today it will rain 0.8 mm and the it will be lightly clouded with sunny spots from differing directions.

But I need to know, that we are at the end of winter, that this is usually when the cold loosens it grip, but this year the winter drags on. I need to consistently being able to describe the impacts this will have. I need to have planned that the prolonged winter will mean an increased mortality rate among slaves, that the land will be boggy (if that is the word) from all the melt water and the harvest will be in danger.

I need this information to let the consequences slip into rumors and the everyday life happening around them. I need it to give some flesh to the story.

And I need to know, how cold it is, how tough it is to navigate the countryside and I need to be able to convey this to the players in a way so that it appears realistic. And they actually take the weather into their planning. The have decided to wait for better weather before going "bad-guy-hunting" in a huge forest - they don't feel like freezing out there and getting bogged down in all the snow. They - actually - don't - want - to - freeze - out - there... How often do you get a party to say that? Most of the time parties (or their players at least) don't care much for the hardships of the player characters.

And to pull this off, I need to have a pretty good idea of the seasons, the weather (at least in broad times) from day to day and how the weather will develop over time.

Not on a nitty-gritty detailled level, but in a somewhat broader sense.

Do I need a special function in RW for this? No. The features already available do the job nicely (I treat it as any other piece of information).

I can do a lot of this out of the top of my head, if I know my seasons and I know my reasons for what causes or at least influences future events.

*replace "need" with "want" in the above if you like.