RE: (TFT) Travel,terain and groups

[David Michael Grouchy II <david_michael_grouchy_ii@hotmail.com>]

> From: selfinflicted_wounds@boardermail.com
>
> I'm not pushing for something set in stone but rather looking for a
> baseline. How far can Joe Average travel over x terrain in y time? (4 mph
walk?)
> The reason I look for this is exactly because of questions of
> fitness, weight carried or encumbrance and STR comparisons,
> among others. What I'm beginning to think is that there is no such
> thing as a "standard" woods, or desert, or etc. For example sand is
> NOT sand. Some of the stuff has value to construction, other types
> are good for glass. Much of it is just sand. Then you take a look
> at stuff like dirt and you just about pull your hair out cause how
> are you going to try to describe all these details in game terms,
> you haven't even made it to plants and AUGHHHHHH!!!!! It'll never
> work! Too much detail.Jay,
   In my earliest approaches to setting up a campaign I did a series of three
weekends at the library to study weather patterns.  The intention was to make
a table that I could cross index to terrain type and latitude.  I immediately
realized that weather patterns are far too complicated.  I am better off just
improvising them on the spot.  After playing that way for a short period of
time I realized that my own imagination is far more limited and repetitive
than I thought.  I had to stand back in sheer awe at the wondrous variety and
chaotic subtlety of the natural weather.  Heck even when the weather was the
same the look of the sky around me changed from day to day.  When I realized
within myself that this vast cycle had continued without a single rerun,
through out thousands upon thousands of years, my brain locked.
   Luckily that weekend I found a new gaming product at the hobby store called
Harn.  I originally picked it up because it had higher quality maps.  Stuff
that looked like an actual cartographer was involved.  Inside was a weather
table.  All it did was start with the current weather and randomly move it in
one direction or another; from wet to rainy, or from wet to dry.  Cool to
cold, things like that.  I latched onto this weather table like a drowning man
to a life preserver.  After using it for a year, patterns became very obvious
to myself and the players.  The designers of Harn lived in Canada and the
weather generated by the tables spent a lot of time being Cold, Wet, and
Rainy.  After one particularly long spell of this, it finally became warm and
clear.  The players rejoiced.  They told me that their characters were so
happy at the good weather that they were all taking the day off from
adventuring to stay home and have a bar-b-que.  I still chuckle to think about
it to this day.

   Oh, also, about your first sentence up there.  The sheer percentage of
contributors who feel the need to tell you that too much realism is not
desirable surprises me.  It's almost as though your disclaimer was never
written.  And you wrote this all the way back in August, no less.  Like Bruce
Lee advocated, study a style so that we may forget it.

    So now I use weather in my campaigns strictly as a tool to influence the
mood of the players.  Sometimes I like to tell a ghost story.  The weather
turns dark and stormy.  Whey they are having trouble solving a mystery it
starts to get overcast, maybe even foggy.  When the king has them thrown out
of his castle, of course, the temperature begins to drop and it gets very
cold.  You get the idea.

    David Michael Grouchy II
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