Twenty years or so ago, sometime before TSR released The Wilderness Survival Guide, I was working on a system to track weather in my Dungeons & Dragons™ game.  It was a very elaborate method, which used random rolls to determine temperature change at regular intervals, with an extensive chart showing the probability that any one set of weather conditions would change to any other, a temperature-based probability that precipitation would be snow rather than rain, month-by-month seasonal change, temperature shifts based on weather changes, flood conditions based on tracking precipitation volume and melt, wind direction and velocity, and variation by latitude.  To give you some idea of the complexity of this monster, I gave up attempting to code it into my Commodore 64 computer because there was insufficient memory to contain all the necessary information.

  That complexity was the first of the three reasons I eventually abandoned using it.  The third reason was that my player characters just didn’t have enough outdoor adventures to justify it–Bob Schretzman’s genius for organization soon had the first character party established in a secured section of the dungeon itself, adventure waiting just beyond their door.  The second reason I abandoned it, though, comes back to haunt me today.  The system created odd results.  It was entirely possible for it to snow heavily in the morning, clear up before noon, and end with a mild, even warm, early evening.  The odds were against it, but in rolling day after day for an entire year’s worth of weather it happened more than once, and I began to feel silly with these quirks.  I blamed the system for the flaw, and stopped worrying so much about the weather outside in a campaign that was mostly inside anyway.

  I say that it has come back to haunt me, because right now, on a morning in the middle of March, it is snowing.  That’s not really so surprising; it does snow in March.  It snowed yesterday, in fact, yesterday morning.  I was rather surprised when I looked out the window at six-thirty and saw everything covered in a couple of inches of heavy white fluff, and by seven-thirty decided that the child who had been ill the day before shouldn’t wade through it to the bus stop in his sneakers, so I kept him home.  Then, when I chanced to awaken again around nine-thirty and looked out the window, there was no trace of the white stuff.  Even the streets were dry.  I wondered whether it had been one of those strange dreams I sometimes have when I doze off while the kids are getting ready for school, but eventually it was confirmed for me that yes, there had been snow that morning.  By afternoon, when I am officially functional, it was warm, the sort of weather in which you remove the sweater you’re wearing because it is fully living up to its name.  Now this morning it is snowing again, covering the driveway, slushing the roadways, causing morning traffic snarls and accidents, delaying the school busses, insisting that winter is not over for at least another couple of days, and otherwise disrupting the premature fine spring we’ve been enjoying thus far.  Further, I fully expect that by the time I am functional this afternoon, it will once again be gone, replaced either by obliterating rain or, even more awkwardly, by warm, dry sunshine.

  All of which suggests that my aversion to unstable weather patterns, my embarrassment at the idea of telling the players that although it was bright and sunny this morning it is now turning cold and starting to snow, or that a thick fog has rolled in from the sea, or that the frost is vanishing under the hot sunshine, was all misplaced.  The weather does change in unexpected ways, even if you don’t live in London, where they say if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.  I wonder what weather reports are like there.  Today will be foggy until it starts to rain, then the sun will come out, and it will be clear and warm, cooling rapidly as it becomes mostly cloudy, with a chance of snow late in the day, and more fog this evening.  That’s not fair of me; I’ve never been to London.

  There are undoubtedly places in the world in which the weather is remarkably stable.  This is not one of them.  That, though, is perhaps a relative thing.  In the mountains of New Mexico, most of our ten days of hiking was sunny and warm, but the one rain we had nearly washed us away.  Israel’s summers are so dry that the prophet Samuel was able to impress the people with the power of God by calling for rain in the middle of it once.  The Pacific Northwest has more days rainy than not (and a very high suicide rate, blamed largely on Seasonal Affective Disorder, a clever name with the clever anagram SAD for depression caused by insufficient exposure to sunshine).  I’m sure we’ve all seen the nature specials about the deserts that get one day of rain a year, and burst into bloom with plants and flowers which have been waiting for that bit of moisture.  Stable, predictable, consistent weather is a feature of certain places.  If it’s good, their tourism boards promote it; if it’s bad, their xenophobes and curmudgeons do.  However, there’s no particular reason why weather has to make sense.  That is, to a meteorologist it all makes sense, because he knows the causes and effects and he’s tracking the storms and the fronts and the other significant anomalies that determine atmospheric conditions wherever we are; but to the layman, the fact that the snow which was falling less than an hour ago is now dropping from trees in melting clumps and shows every sign of dissipating into groundwater and storm sewers before I again emerge to face the world is incomprehensible.

  Thus I rarely if ever track weather in my games anymore.  That’s not to say I wouldn’t, if I started another long outdoor campaign–I might even dig out the old weather system and try once again to write it up for use in the computer–but for most of the games I run it’s more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s easier, and just as useful, to roll the dice to see whether the outcome is good or bad (I would use a General Effects Roll in Multiverser) whenever the question arises, and describe conditions accordingly.

  So don’t be afraid to do strange things with the weather.  God does, it would seem, and if it works for His model of the universe, there’s no particular reason it shouldn’t work for ours.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.