The use of weather is a staple in most fiction, but I've rarely seen it figure in to most RPGs. The assumption seems to be that it's pretty much always a mild 20° partly cloudy day with no wind in every RPG everywhere.  The old Greyhawk boxed set had fairly sophisticated weather rules, but I know of no one who ever used them.

How about you?  Have you ever used (or had a GM who used) weather as part of the background setting in your RPGs?  How was it used?

Absolutely. Outside of any mechanical influence, it adds to the tone of the game. Not developing atmosphere just seems like a lost opportunity.

Heheh, my first houserules were an elaborate weather system for ElfQuest (BRP), with exploding d10 for wind strength (the set came with 2 d20's, with numbers running from 1 - 10, and +1 - +10, and I felt so clever...)

Nowadays, I use weather mostly to set the atmosphere, separate days from oneother, and to remind the players in which season they are, etc. Not much for mechanical effects, though. Although if they insisted going out in bad weather or poor conditions, I would whip up something.

Quote from: daniel_ream;904801The use of weather is a staple in most fiction, but I've rarely seen it figure in to most RPGs. The assumption seems to be that it's pretty much always a mild 20° partly cloudy day with no wind in every RPG everywhere.  The old Greyhawk boxed set had fairly sophisticated weather rules, but I know of no one who ever used them.

How about you?  Have you ever used (or had a GM who used) weather as part of the background setting in your RPGs?  How was it used?

I've only ever used weather to set the tone for a scene, setting, or challenge. Nothing really formal like a random table, or a weather "system" or anything, but I've applied some penalties to perception rolls, etc, things of that nature.

If its not a focus of the RPG then weather will vary as seems appropriate for mood. RPGs I have run where weather had a mechanical impact:

- Ryuutama - travelling in the wild
- The One Ring - travelling in the wild
- Hellas - sailing in the void
- Heroes of Hellas - sailing

We also use a weather mechanic in D&D5e as we have a Drow PC in the party.

My players have made choices to role-play in weather or not. Depending if it made things more interesting for them is all.

Not sure this counts as weather but in our last session we used environmental effects. During a fight the heroes ignited an underground pocket of methane gas. This made things rather interesting as flame geysers began popping up across the battlefield.

I haven't done it in the past, but I'm going to include it in my campaign that starts up next month. However, rather than rolling, I'm going to use Wolfram Alpha to access historical data. Even though I'm using the Forgotten Realms, I'm going to just pick a real world city that is approximately the same location/climate as whatever location in the Forgotten Realms the characters are currently at that day. Example:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weather+london+united+kingdom+june+29,+1977

It's really cool with times of day charts for temperature, weather, wind, etc.

I ran a game in Eberron nigh on a decade ago that spent two or three sessions where the biggest challenge was surviving, as a party of urbanite city dwelling adventurers tried to traverse the wilds in the middle of winter without taking a single act to prepare.  Oh sure, I threw in a few fights with corrupted goblin things (Eberron critters... don't recall what they were called), but mostly it was saving throws against ever accruing fatigue damage from a lack of appropriate clothes... and the one player survival never even tried to build a fire to warm up!

Good times.  The party lived, but I think the players hated me for that. Almost as much as they hated me for giving them a halfling hexblade for a nemesis/rival adventurer...

Quote from: daniel_ream;904801The use of weather is a staple in most fiction, but I've rarely seen it figure in to most RPGs. The assumption seems to be that it's pretty much always a mild 20° partly cloudy day with no wind in every RPG everywhere.  The old Greyhawk boxed set had fairly sophisticated weather rules, but I know of no one who ever used them.

How about you?  Have you ever used (or had a GM who used) weather as part of the background setting in your RPGs?  How was it used?

mild sounds damn cold to me
all jokes aside yes my old group used it a few times and i can imagine running  a game with out it

Used weather every session and every game world day of my Balazar/Elderwilds campaign. Griffon Mountain came with a nice seasonal weather chart.

In Call of Cthulhu weather is usually only an atmospheric add on or else is key to a specific scenario.

In Star Wars weather is usually indicative of the typical mono-climate worlds we see in the movies. So Sidron, a desert planet, will have dust storms. Lanthrym an ice planet gets snow, winds, and blizzards. The tropical rain forest world gets...daily rain. Osirrag, the nice world where nothing ever happens...gets nice weather every day.

For Honor+Intrigue I use weather, but it's not something I check for every session. I check weather if the session involves a lot of overland or sea travel. Cold and snow were a major factor in one series of adventures set in an especially cold winter with a vicious pack of wolves led by a loup garou. Rain and wind is an issue for matchlocks and to a lesser extent for wheellocks and flintlocks. So it's something I occasionally check for.

Including weather, using a calendar, tracking the days of the week, experiencing the passing of seasons, and celebrating holidays all add to making the world seem like a real place.

Yes. Weather in my sessions comes up in varrying degrees. Usually rain. Sometimes wind storms, once a flood. And of course BX had the sea travel weather effects.

After effects of weather are another fun one to use. Roads turned to mud. Flooding. etc.

Oriental Adventures also had some weather events.

For my part, when I'm doing up an adventure, I work out the weather six days in advance, which doesn't take me very long -- 15 minutes or so?  The following is an example:

Weather for north and east coastal Avanari regions, next week:

1) Scattered clouds, Morning fog; Silver Moon: waxing crescent, Red Moon: new, Blue Moon: waning gibbous

High 79 degrees, Low 66 degrees
Wind from the W, 11 mph; veering due south at night, 6 mph
Waves 2 ft or less

That's more or less what it looks like.  Wind speed and direction, and wave height, are important for my heavily-nautical campaign; they might not be for yours, although a 25+ mph crosswind is something of a suckfest for archers.  If the group's doing a planned night assault, I'll throw in when those moons are rising and setting (GURPS has night time vision penalties depending on the lighting), information I have on hand but don't often bother with putting out there.

Another method is a surprisingly simple one I wonder why more GMs don't use.  Want random weather for your setting's area today?  Terrific.  What season is it?  Winter?  Fair enough.  It's summer here in New England as I type, but that's okay.  Fire up the weather site on your computer (you can find those in carload lots, too, and I use wunderground.com, myself) and pull up a town on the other side of the world.  So okay ... the weather report for Melbourne, Australia, right now has a daytime high tomorrow of 47 F, a nighttime low of 41.  There's intermittent rain going on.  Light winds from the N of 2-3 MPH.  Morning twilight is at 7 AM, sunrise at 7:30, sunset at 5 PM, twilight until 5:30.  That's something you can get at a glance, and that's good enough to be going on with.

When I still ran my M&M 3e game, which is set in last year, which they'll be flipping over into January, I was using a local weather broadcast news website to find out what the day and night would be like.

I use weather all the time.

I run a 5E sandbox that is heavy on resource-management, so weather is essential. I bought this die: https://www.thediceshoponline.com/dice/1287/D-G-Opaque-Blue-Weather-D6-Dice

5E has some decent rules and guidelines for the effects of weather on the characters. During in-game winter I roll twice if the first result is not snow, but definitely keep the 2nd result.