quinta-feira, 21 de dezembro de 2017

Them Bones of Adventure - XIV: Weather

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.



Introduction

I’ve been holding off on a big one for some time now: Weather.

I wanted something that allowed for more than just a shrugging off of weather as a game element, for I find a lot of the difficulties inherent to surviving the great outdoors derive not so much from making miles of progress, but from doing it while facing down a gale that hardly even allows one to draw breath. Finding shelter because the party decided it was time to do so is nothing but a chore, having to do it under a torrential downpour before exhaustion piles up and precious hit-points start being washed away is an adventure. I’m here to sign up for that last one.

It’s easy to conclude that this could get icky and complicated pretty quickly if going for an exhaustive approach. Luckily, my scope of interest is bounded by what I’ll need at a table in the heat of the running. I can bear to make do with some a lot of arbitrariness here.

Note that the intention is neither the lazy thinking approach of “I can just dictate whatever weather I need” or “I’m sure there’s an app for that” nor is this the overly self-indulgent “translating a complex weather algorithm into dice-roll notation, complete with subtables for phases of the moon”.

No, this is just plain young me, doing it like Sinatra.

The Safest of Topics

Talking about the weather? Well, not in an RPG context.

Afterthought to some, wooly mammoth of an issue to others, weather generation in a procedural manner is probably well beyond my ability to create and I’ll admit straight at the launchpad: I’m deliberately biting off way more than I can chew here. If there is a practical and convincing take on weather systems out there I’ve yet to see its presentation or meet its author.

Christmas is nigh and I feel like I don't ask for much: I wish for a procedure that is elegant, that preserves the running’s momentum, something that can be done at-a-glance and dispenses with consulting any but the most rudimentary of tables, something eminently usable and that doesn’t feel like it’s been frontloaded to serve the party’s narrative, for detriment or benefit.


Gameable Weather

I’ve consulted with the gogs and magogs of Wikipages, I’ve learned a bit about Köppen climate areas and generally become better informed for it, but I’m not about to define traits for inches of rainfall or miles of windspeed, no, I’m after the gameable fatty portions, not the marrowy numeric hairsplits.

Even for a system that embraces modelling an order bordering on chaos, I’ll still need at least a couple of stable points of comparison, needles with which to spin the thread. For this I choose to turn to the directions of the compass and an array of temperature descriptions, then narrowed by climate type, to base the die-roll’s results upon.

I’ve seen online the whole “Weather as Reaction Roll” and I wish to move past that a bit while shooting to keep the parts that enable the same kind of simplification.

The weather roll, despite some interpretative differences, is then to be distant kin to a reaction roll for the very basis of how the weather is shaped (improves and worsens). Its reading is to be somewhat subjective, its result dispersion to rely on uncle Gauss’s help, its results mainly descriptive. These are still just bare bones, waiting on testing and refinement before table use is forthcoming.

Left to the Seasons’ Random Display

When to make a weather roll?

Being as I’m no climatologist, let me stress once again: I’m not out looking for the correct but rather the game-relevant answer.

Drawing from my rich double-paned-glass-filtered experience with weather, I’m thinking weather rolls might be appropriate (and easier to remember) at liminar junctions during a given day: one daily roll seems plenty good for the parameter of temperature, with partial rolls at every four-hour watch after that being usable for precipitation and the shifting of the wind’s direction, this for a generic temperate climate. When we get to the more tropical latitudes, more frequent rolls for precipitation might be desirable, the opposite applying for the more stable climate types, such as deserts.

Of course it need not be as intensive as this, a single roll can be extrapolated to last for several days and ad-hoc rolls can also be made simply for partial consultation, such as determining just the shift of the wind’s direction or speed, iterating as long as the matter remains important. If the fastidious approach doesn’t turn out so good, I’ll have to think of something else, such as keying weather roll triggers on Wilderness encounter tables. Realism is just a yardstick, one that I’d rather bend than break.

The Crunchy Bits

For the simpler reading, go with just the leftmost columns, growing complexity can then be added by extending the reading to the right, culminating in the use of the ancillary worksheet that tracks the evolution of weather over an extended period of time and which is intended to be used either by the party for record-taking or, more importantly, by me as referee, to plot out a week’s worth of weather in advance.

Anatomy of a Weather Roll

I endeavoured to atomize the constituent elements of weather that I’ve found to be gameable, trying to answer the question of how deep can one mine a simple 2d6 roll for meaning before out pops the Balrog of overcomplexity?

To maximize the possibilities, I started by differentiating the two six-siders used (colours being good for this) and then decided on the categories to decode from rolling the bastards. Note that all of the following have some sort of effect or implication on travel, shelter, survival, vision and combat. Hence me dubbing them gameable elements:

Turn of the Weather: The Reaction Roll’iest part of the roll, as simplicity is better served by a degree of randomization inherent to the roll instead of trying to accurately model temperature drifts like an almanac. In effect, this will mainly determine if the weather is getting warmer or colder, with the effect evenly spread out over the duration until the next roll. 

Though the temptation presents itself, I cannot shirk numeric signifiers – they feel very modern and thus inadequate in the context of fantasy – despite my view that I should avoid conventions common to our contemporary upbringing, such as that of measuring temperature in clearly defined scales, still the implication remains that the referee must get the meaning across, and records of the weather must be kept, in order for the whole system to mean anything. The graded approach is a concession, as I don’t see the verbal descriptions catching on or being sufficient in transmitting the idea of temperature to the players.

Temperature Die: One of the differentiated d6s is used to mark the temperature. This is the most objective part of the roll, keying into the ancillary table that relates the temperature’s descriptive term.

Precipitation Die: The other differentiated d6 is reserved for precipitation, with six different degrees. It only means anything when it rains, with rainfall being dictated by the 2d6 roll.

Prevailing Wind Direction: Determine North as facing the roller. Trace an imaginary line from highest to lowest die result.

Wind Speed: Measured from categories 0 to 5, subtracting the temperature die’s result from the precipitation’s. This works out to a nicely embedded secondary stratified probability curve.

Duration: After a fair while spent experimenting, I settled for slicing time into daily for temperature and once every four-hour watch for rain and for wind. Should one of the durations expire during gameplay, simply recheck the lapsed result if it is at all important, or default into calm air/lack of rain if not.


Larger version


Closing Thoughts – Crucial Extrapolations

Never a slave to the die roll, the understanding is that the weather is only rolled to unearth some bare bones, the interpretation of that which is seasonable, along with some other deductions must all rest on the referee’s shoulders. For example: it is ever obvious that the temperature must drop by 10 to 15 Celsius at night, no matter what.


Careful reading will also yield results for Fog, Sleet, Hail, Cyclonic winds and Snow, as these are all a matter of crossreferencing temperature with precipitation level and windspeed. The present geography too must play a role, as each local climate will imply a different set of expectations regarding Precipitation and Average Temperature. Elevation, presence of an active volcano, mountain chains and shelter in the woodland or deep valleys. There are things no simple table can do for the referee. You just have to know how to play it by ear.

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