Experimental Meta-Weather Rules

Weather. I've wanted a weather system that possesses the following qualities: is simple enough to be memorable, allows for the weather to be naturally and randomly changeable AND stay the same for long stretches, to show weather patterns/trends within a season and most importantly allow for the weather to become 'weird' so that the players can experience wild or dramatic weather phenomena (but not too often) and to try to do all this with as little die rolling as possible. With these criteria in mind, I tried to make a weather system that could achieve them. I don't feel entirely satisfied or successful with the result, the system is more complicated than I would like and janky at times. I am sharing for posterity as I think it's kind of interesting and for the RPG Blog Carnival. I'd love suggestions on how to make the idea that little bit more workable while retaining those design goals. There is a summary of the system at the end of this post.

(All shall be explained)

Find the other season lists here

The system works off of seasonal weather lists. They are 2.?D as opposed to hex-flower weather systems that are 6D.  This system is both more and less predictable than hex-flower weather systems. The weathers are arranged on the table from colder and wetter weathers to hotter and dryer ones. In hot/dry seasons like summer, the wet/cold weathers may not be particularly wet or cold and vice versa. Each weather should logically flow into the next, and the most common weathers will be found in the middle of the table. I have not strived for realism. Adjacent to each weather is a type of weird weather phenomena that could reasonably emerge from the mundane weather it is twinned with.

But how does it work? Place a marker on the current weather in your game (I used a matchstick) and, when you are asked to make a weather check, roll a d12. There are a number of possible results. On a result of 1-2 or 11-12 the current weather will remain the same. On a roll of  3, 4, 5 or 6 the weather will move one increment toward the wetter/colder end of the table, moving from a 10 to a 9 for instance. On a roll of 7, 8, 9 or 10, the opposite effect will occur and the current weather will move one step toward the warmer/dryer end of the table, IE from a 7 to an 8. If the weather cannot move up or down, i.e. is at 3 or 10, then the weather remains the same. 

Should the number that matches the current in-game weather be rolled, it indicates a sudden change. Roll the d12 again and change the weather to that result. If the new roll results in either 1, 2, 11 or 12 OR the same number as the current weather, then the weather will become weird. If the weather becomes weird, move the marker on the current weather one column to the right onto its matching weird weather. Once the weather becomes weird, roll weather checks as normal. Rolls of 1, 2, 11 and 12 results continue the weird weather. Weird weather is detailed a little more later in the post. 

But wait! There's more! In real life, over the course of a season there can be several periods of high and low temperature and dry/wet humidity. In order to replicate these kinds of weather trends I have once again gone META or more accurately (I think) extra-diegetic. Real world weather is taken into account when making weather checks using this system. The real-world weather the day of your game is used to modify the results of your in-game weather checks. The wetter, hotter, dryer or colder a day is compared to the average day of the season you are in, the wetter, hotter, dryer or colder your in-game weather will become. If a weather the day of your game is wetter/colder than usual; apply a -1 or -2 to your weather check, if the day is hotter/dryer than usual apply a +1 or +2. These positive/negative modifiers give the feeling of weather patterns. As a reminder, unmodified rolls of 1, 2, 11 or 12 always result in the weather remaining the same, but rolls that are modified into these ranges do not cause the weather to remain the same, simply changing one step in the relevant direction. Optionally, such rolls can cause the weather to change by 2 steps in the relevant direction. If the campaign is happening during the winter but being played in summer, this is fine. You can have hotter/dryer spells and wetter/colder spells relative to whatever season you are in in-game. 

But, what happens on game days where the weather is weird? When you have sessions on during heatwaves, cold snaps, hail, Saharan dust clouds, unexpected snow, eclipses? On such days the the probability of your in-game weather becoming weird increases dramatically. On 'weird' days, (until a weird weather results is procured) weather checks have the following results - on the roll of d12, a 1, 2, 11 and 12 do not result in the weather remaining the same but becoming weird, as does rolling the number that matches the current weather. As above, when making weather weird, move from the current weather to the right, onto the matching weird weather phenomena. On 'weird' days, the chance of the weather becoming wild or weird becomes 5/12. On normal days it is something like 5/144 (but I'm really not sure about the math for this). Once the weather has become weird, make weather checks as normal and is detailed above. 

How does weather stop being weird? Whenever the weather changes - moves up or down as a result of 3-6 or 7-10. Usually, the weather moves diagonally, up or down, to the mundane weather column. Many weird weathers will have lasting after-effects - such as flooding and wildfires.

I think that's everything. Here are the example seasonal weather tables. I haven't come up with mechanical effects for the different weathers as I am not sure of the viability of this system yet. I have rolled up a month's worth of summer weather using real-world weather data. I assumed one game session a week, rolling for three in-game days of weather per session. As you can see there are three different trends in this 30 period, a warm beginning followed by hot and humid weather in the middle of the month and then a dramatic week of thunderstorms. The bold days are when the weather changed as a result of a reroll and the Lightning Storm phenomena came about as the result of the influence of real world weird weather. 

Summer:

Here are some additional thoughts and optional rules:

• Seasonal weather tables can easily be turned into regional weather tables. Weather might be worse in the mountains, very different in a coastal deserts and rather peculiar in the worm-wastes.  
• It may be worth having a 'weather-master' or 'forecaster' player who is responsible for the tracking and rolling for the weather, just as you might have a mapper and caller. This would help to reduce your mental load. Some players enjoy such rolls and are all are motivated by a 100xp reward for doing them. It would also encourage the players to learn the weather system and become more experienced at forecasting like their characters would. 
• Mundanity is often necessary in fantasy role-playing games. Nothing seems as weird or special if the everyday baseline is already so foreign and removed from the player's lived experience. This applies to weather. Instead of a sun, having a neon-pink, glowing ball of tendrils might sound cool, but unless you mention it a tedious amount your players will forget about it. If the sun turns into something abominable for a week, that's cool and memorable. As a player, one of my best and most evocative memories of weather was when the party got lost in heavy rain in the middle of the night without any shelter. 
• Being very experimental, I would consider a weather phase during combat. Just as some rules have phases for magic, missiles, movement and melee there could be a phase for weather. This phase would see combatants deal with the weather and allow for the weather to act on and in the scene. For example; repeatedly prompting saves against heat exhaustion, seeing snow devils move around the combat map, see if a rain shower starts, how high the flood waters rise or where the lightning strikes. There are many options for weather to take more of an active and present role in combat encounters and the game as a whole.
• When to roll weather checks? That is up to you. Some roll them once per day, others integrate it into their wilderness encounter rolls/checks. I would have weather checks made at regularly times of the day - dawn, midday and dusk and once per day during downtime.
• The 'meta' aspect need not be limited to how hot/dry or wet/cold a day was. It can be linked to anything; windiness, amount of bugs you saw, how well you are feeling, how cloudy the day was. Having it solely based on comparative temperature/humidity limits excludes game-masters who live in equatorial countries. 
• These weather lists make for good rumour and spell fodder.

Summary:

Weather check:

• Roll a d12, considering the real-world weather, if hotter/dryer than usual add +1 or +2 to the result, if colder/wetter than usual -1 or -2 to the result. 
• Unmodified results of 1, 2, 11 or 12 result in the weather remaining the same. If modified into these ranges, treat the result as below;
• If the roll results in 6 or less the current weather decreases by 1 step. 
• If the roll results in 7 or more the current weather increases by 1 step.
• If the weather cannot move up or down, then it will remain the same.  
• If the roll results in a roll matching the current weather, roll the d12 again: 
• If 1, 2, 11 or 12 the weather stays the same.
• If the roll matches the current weather a second time then that weather becomes weird, moving to the right onto the adjacent weather on weird weather column. 
• If the d12 results in any other number, the current weather changes to the weather that matches that number.
• Once 'weird', the weather remains weird until a weather check moves the weather up or down the table. At which point the weather moves diagonally left, up or down, onto the mundane weather column. 

If the current real-world weather is unusual:

• Roll a weather check as normal. Results of 1, 2, 11 or 12 do not result in the weather remaining the same but becoming instantly weird. Likewise, rolling the number of the current weather causes it to become instantly weird.
• Once the weather has become weird, make all subsequent weather checks as is detailed above, even if the weather in the real world remains unusual. 

EXAMPLE SEASONS HERE

Meta-Illness and Extra-Diegetic Disease in RPGs

This is a tangent on my meta-narcotics post and only really half, or the start of, a mad, little idea. Sickness, illness - having your character contract and deal with a disease in a game is rarely very exciting from a mechanical or roleplay perspective. It could be... much goofier. Having your character take one-off or cumulative stat damage is dull and forgettable, we could make it more engaging and present in everyday play - we could make it META. So;

A disease is made of three different components; a symptom, one or more triggers and an effect. I will show this with the following example: 

--

Oh no! The adventurer, Gorto Gold-Groveler, has contracted Dungeon Lung! Now Gorto's player (not Gorto the character) must pretend to wheeze before they try to speak to an NPC. Each time Gorto's player does not wheeze or forgets to do so, Gorto will lose 1 HP permanently until his sickness is cured. When cured, Gorto will regain any lost HP. If uncured, Dungeon Lung becomes progressively worse and soon Gorto's player will have to pretend to wheeze whenever they make an ability check. The Dungeon Lung may even progress to a final stage, where the player must wheeze if they are making Gorto do anything other than lay prone. If another player tries to remind Gorto's player to wheeze whenever there is a trigger, that player has opened themselves to risk of contagion and must make a save against becoming infected with Dungeon Lung themselves. 

--

Does that make sense? While the symptom, trigger(s) and effect can be remixed and swapped out entirely, the core of the idea is - the illness's symptom must be performed the afflicted player whenever a trigger is encountered during play, if not, the afflicted character suffers from the disease's effect. This way, disease becomes more interactive and present for the afflicted player and the rest of the table. With this method, a disease has no other effects than when those caused by a trigger - either the player acting out the illness's symptom or forgetting to do so and suffering an effect. For me, it simply simulates the experiences and feel of actually being unwell - and it is funny and a little gross. Be weird, try it.

Meta-Narcotics - Experimental Rules for Extra-Diegetic Drugs in RPGs

Psychoactive drugs alter mental states. The players themselves represent their character’s minds, so logically, drugs must alter the behaviour of the players. 

This is achieved by getting very meta, player-facing, extra-diegetic or even paratextual with the effects and mechanics of the drugs - certainly one of those terms is accurate. In affecting the player in this way we are in essence altering the mind of the player-character in the fiction - creating an effect on the fiction of the game by holding the player themselves to rules, strictures and behaviours that exist outside of the game world. In this post you will find some meta-effects for the three aspects of psychoactive substances most relevant to roleplaying games - what the drug's benefits are, the drug’s side effects and how the drug’s particular high is ended.

The meta-gameplay effects I have listed are far from exhaustive; expand on them, use them to add meta-elements to pre-existing drugs in your campaign world or use the effects to create entirely new and weird meta substances for your players to partake of. All effects were written with standard OSR style games in mind. At the end of this post are rules for gaining addictions and the effects of addiction on a character. Additionally and very importantly, all of these effects are standalone and can be used in any context, be it traps, spells, weird dungeon effects, a monster’s special ability, odd class features - anything.

Tonally and aesthetically, this post appears quite serious, in actuality having players affected by their character’s drug use in ways listed below can be rather humorous. These extra-gameplay effects are not well suited for online play, though I am sure one could create an online variant quite easily. Thanks to Thomas of Everythings the Meta-Magician for suggesting some effects, check out his blog and feel free to suggest more meta-effects you might think of in the comments. 

An important note, the 'you' in the following lists refers to the player acting in the real world, not their character. You (the player) must abide with the narcotic’s effects at all times. In a blurring of the lines between player and character, the player’s character is assumed to be acting strangely in obviously peculiar ways in accordance with the narcotic’s effects and the player's own odd behaviour. 

Creating a Meta-Narcotic:

Creating your own extra-diagetic drug is quite easy. First choose a method by which the high is ended, a beneficial effect and a side-effect. Lists for these effects can be found below in this post. Carefully consider how these effects might interact with each other. Once happy with the three effects, name the drug, give it an addiction rating and provide it with a in-universe description.  For example:

Name: Dodona’s Eye, 1 dram

Description:

Dodona’s Eye, a colossal liquid loop found spinning a great distance into the continent’s core. It’s precious waters once used sparingly, intravitreally imbibed by Hermitian mystics to glimpse the universe’s unseen truths, it has since been devastated by far-travelling camel-riders who caravan the oracular fluid to hedonistic princes of wealthy cities. Imbibers enter fleeting and teary-eyed trances, their bodies becoming numb and ungainly, and through bleary eyes they see strange and terrible, epiphanous dreams.         

Ending the High:

Corneal Reflex: The high ends when you blink or otherwise close your eyes.

Beneficial Effect:

Precognition. You can look at the DM's notes for an unmolested but limited amount of time.

Side Effect:

Gross-Motor Malfunctions. You can only use the fingers on your non-dominant hand (no thumbs) for the duration of the high and must limp using your non-dominant foot when walking.

Addictiveness:

Negligible

(These effects play quite well with each other. The drug will affect a player thusly - the player may look at the DM's notes for as long as they can keep their eyes open while awkwardly paging through the notes using their non-dominant hand)

Ending the High:

Rather than a drug lasting for however many units of in-game time or even a non-diegetic 'session', meta-narcotics only end when certain extra-roleplaying requirements have been fulfilled. These can result in very controlled on uncontrollable durations as well as highs of random or interminable lengths. Once a high ends, that meta-narcotic's benefits and side-effects also end. 

• Corneal Reflex: The high ends when you blink or otherwise close your eyes.
• Tussal Expulsion: When you cough, voluntarily or involuntarily.
• Exhalation: The narcotic lasts for as long as you can hold your breath. 
• Isolation: when you cannot see or hear any other real-world human being. 
• Jubilation: when you laugh.
• Exsanguination: When you put your own blood on your character sheet. 
• Immolation: When your character sheet is exposed to flame.
• Ablution: When you next go to the toilet. 
• Balneotherapy: When you next bathe or shower.
• Klazomania: When you scream or shout.
• Saccharphagy: When you eat sugar.
• Hematophagy: When you taste blood.
• Somesthetic Shock: When you pull out one of your own eyelashes or any other hair. 
• Dilution: When you eat or drink anything.
• Detoxification: When you drink a full glass of drink in one go.
• Insolation: When you are directly exposed to the sun's rays. Not through a window. 
• Perspiration: When you have sweat on your brow. 
• Medication: When you next swallow a pill or otherwise take medicine. 
• Meditative Retreat: You must play as a different character for a session. 
• Precisely Timed Dosage: The high ends at the turn of the next real-world hour. For example, if you make your character take the drug at 10.35 (your time) the drug will affect you for 25 minutes, wearing off precisely at 11.00. The length of time that passes for your character is irrelevant. 
• Number Fixation: You must keep a running total of all your rolls, recording each die roll on your character sheet. When your total reaches a set number the drug wears off. 20-30 times the total of the game system's standard die is recommended, so a total of 400-600 for a d20 system is needed to end the high. 
• Brain Imps: DM writes the name of a reasonably standard monster (such as a creature from the monster manual or a very common monster from the campaign) and keeps it a secret from you but shows the note to all other players. You must guess the creature for the drug to wear off. You can only ask yes or no questions. 
• Focus: When you build a dice tower using all 7 polyhedral dice. 
• Somnolence: When you sleep.

Beneficial Effects:

Why take the drug? Effects guaranteed to be more interesting than +2 strength, -2 wisdom.   

• Precognition: You can look at the DM's notes for an unmolested but limited amount of time or at any point as long as the DM cannot see you doing so. 
• Physical Previsualisation: If you the player perform a comparable act to the one your character is about to perform gain a +4 to that roll. IE jump a distance if you character is about to leap a chasm, lift a heavy object when your character is about to do the same, sufficiently strike a living thing with an implement when your character is about to make an attack, etc.
• Healing Enzymes: Lick your character sheet to heal your character, 1 hp for a little lick, d4 if licking from top to bottom. This works on other's characters sheets (if everyone is ok with that).
• Psycho-Survival Instinct: Avoid character death by ripping your character sheet in half at the moment the DM pronounces your character's death. You have to repair your character sheet manually and your character is out of action until the sheet is repaired. 
• Oracular Superego Scarring: Rip off piece of your character sheet write a question on it, pass the piece to DM. The DM will write an accurate answer on the same piece of character sheet you asked the question on. The bigger the piece the longer/more legible the answer. The DM will not discuss or clarify anything about what they have written.
• Hyperphagic Delectation: heal 1 HP for each and every food item that you consume in real life, so a whole apple, an entire packet of crisps.
• Machine-Elf Communication: DM will send you cryptic messages about the campaign via GIFs, songs and pre-existing memes via your phone or computer. The DM can do this for as long as the drug is in effect, even and especially outside of session time. You cannot directly reference the character or form of these strange messages but can vaguely describe them to your fellow players.
• Confidence Instability: Build a dice tower using a standard set of 7 polyhedral dice, the height of the dice tower +12 is your new armour class. If the tower falls your AC collapses to 5. If your character takes damage the DM knocks your tower over. 
• En Bloc Blackout: Your character can gain experience from sessions you don't attend. Your character will suffer from each and every misfortune and depredation possible in that given session, such as mutating if there is a pool of mutagenic sludge. The DM decides whether to run your PC as a stuporous NPC or just to keep them in the background. The other players should be encouraged to suggest things that could happen but your PC cannot die. 
• Joviality: DM has to get you a beer or a bar of chocolate.
• Psychedelic Mind Tunnel: This effect works on two or more people that take the same batch of drug at the same time, including NPCs. You and your fellow imbibers can send messages to each other's characters (regardless of where the characters are in the game world) if both players completely crawl under the gaming table to talk. If talking to an NPC both you and the DM must crawl under the table.
• Emotional Vampirism*: You must complete an act of emotional-vampiric feeding to gain a +1 to all rolls. The DM selects one of the following feeding behaviours and tells it to you in secret. Once the mission is complete, you will gain your +1 to rolls and the DM will pick another feeding behaviour for you to complete and so on until the high ends. The +1's are cumulative. Here are 20 example feeding behaviours:   
• 1. Make another player yawn.
• 2. Get a player tell you about a dream they had.
• 3. Get another player hit you (playfully or not)
• 4. Have a player insult you.
• 5. Have a player compliment you.
• 6. Make another player groan.
• 7. Have a player ask you if you are crying. 
• 8. Get a specific player to give you 3 high fives. 
• 9. Have a player tell you a joke.
• 10. Purposefully get a quote wrong and have a player correct you. 
• 11. Get a player to finish one of your sentences.  
• 12. Get a player to argue about which way north is.  
• 13. Pretend you have something in your eye and get another player to check. 
• 14. Get a player to attempt to touch their nose with their tongue. 
• 15. Balance several items and have a player knock them over. 
• 16. Make up and repeatedly use a word until a player asks you what it means.  
• 17. Have a player take a selfie with you. they must use their own phone. 
• 18. Pretend to be too weak to perform a everyday task and have another player do it for you.
• 19. Try to get another player to chant something with you. 
• 20. Make up a wild-sounding rule and have another player check the rulebook for it.  
• Distracted Mood Swings: Find a competitive sports match either online or on a television. Preferably taking place concurrently to your gaming sessions. If none can be found the DM will find a random pre-recorded match. You must pick a team/player. Whenever your player/team scores a point/goal/touchdown/strike you gain 50xp and can instantly succeed in any one die roll. If the match concludes before the end of your trip find another competitive sport, whenever the opposing team score lose 50xp. The DM can disallow any sport if it is unsuitable for this extra-gameplay effect.

Side Effects:

All drugs have adverse or inconvenient effects. How do this drug's side-effects manifest? Player's must be wary of their chosen drug’s side-effects, failure to follow them may result in a Psychological Break, the rules for which follow this section of the post.    

• Auditory Hallucinations: You must continue playing with ear or headphones on that are playing sounds/music of the DM's choosing at a comfortable volume. 
• Confusion: Your vision is obscured by the DM, such as having a thin scarf veiled over your eyes.
• Brain-Needling: You must poke a hole in your character sheet for each hit point your character loses.
• Paranoia: You cannot talk to anyone outside of your gaming group during session time. This effect works better if you play in public or semi-public places.
• Yes-Man Syndrome: You must agree with (but not necessarily do) whatever anyone says or asks of you. You cannot suggest alternative ideas or other courses of action.  
• Oppositional Defiance Disorder: You must disagree with whatever anyone says or asks of you. You can only be obstinate and must suggest alternative ideas or other courses of action, even after others may have agreed with a plan you might have suggested. 
• Autophobia: You cannot look directly at your character sheet. It can only be looked at via some medium such as the camera of your phone, a mirror or through the glass of your drink. 
• Gross-Motor Malfunctions: You can only use the fingers on your non-dominant hand (no thumbs) for the duration of the drug and must limp using your non-dominant foot when walking. 
• Nervous Creative Energy: You must be constantly drawing and doodling, your pen or pencil must never leave the paper or stop mark-making. 
• Infantilism. Must play under the table or otherwise on the floor.  
• Depersonalisation: You must leave the room and can only continue play via speaker-phone or by talking loudly. Other players must perform that player’s dice rolls and keep note of changes to their character sheet, ie HP. 
• Heightened Proprioception: You must adopt the general stance of your character. If your character is knocked prone, you must lay down, when the character is standing or crouching the player must do the same. 
• Autocannibalism: Rip off little bits of your character sheet before announcing what your character does or says. 
• Arithmomania: You must pick a number between 1-6, whenever you, the player, see this number all can can do is sit saying the number over and over again until another player removes the number for you. Try not to pick a number on your character sheet, if you pick 1 the 1 in 16 does not count toward your paralysis.
• Histrionic Personality Disorder: You must be the first to answer any question the DM asks.
• Nervous Tic: You must lightly slap your cheek or your head as many times as the number of sides of the dice you are about to roll - d8 = eight slaps. You must slap yourself the correct number of times before every dice roll. A d100 might be too much of a strain for you.
• Obsessive compulsive: You must tap your knuckles on the table as many times as the number of sides of the dice you are about to roll - d10 = 10 slaps. You must slap yourself the correct number of times before every dice roll.
• Hemophobic Hand Washing: You must wash your hands after every combat encounter. 
• Diffidence: You can only talk by whispering into your fellow player's ears. 

Psychological Breaks:

When a narcotic is taken by a player explain the effects of the drug, having the player write the details of the drug on a separate piece of paper. Explain that this piece of paper is used to represent the player character's mental state or brain. Whenever they, the player, break one of the drug's meta-rules or side-effects, tear a rip into the paper. For example, when a Paranoid player talks to someone outside of the group, they will have to add a rip their character's brain. When the paper has been ripped three times a mental break or freak-out occurs and the player’s character loses a level as if level-drained. This penalty is serious and must be for the drug-user, DM and fellow players to willingly follow along with the drug’s effects. 

Meta-Addiction Test

Each type of drug has a different capacity for addictiveness. In keeping with the meta nature of these rules, we won't be making a saving throw to test against addiction but an actual throw. The DM will ask the player to toss a coin into or onto a designated thing from a specific distance. The size of the target and the thrower's distance from said target is determined by the DM based on the drug's addiction rating. Upon being asked to make the throw, the player can make arguments for or against their character's resilience to addiction - high constitution score, good saves, backstory, racial factors such as poison resistance, class abilities, etc. Ultimately the DM decides whether these arguments affect any particular effect on the test - allowing the thrower to move closer, give multiple throws, substituting the target or even the thrower. If the throw is a success, the character has avoided addiction - if the coin misses, the character has become addicted. The same mechanic is used to test for breaking an addiction once a character has become addicted.    

Effects of Addiction:

While addicted to a substance, characters cannot access the experience points that they accumulate while adventuring and they can only ‘unlock’ those points to level up by taking the drug to which they are addicted. Once the character has built up a backlog of XP large enough to level up, they cease accumulating XP until unblock those addiction-trapped points and actually level up. You need to take as many doses of the drug as the level you are trying to attain, these doses do not need to be taken in one go. 

*Most of the Emotional Vampirism feeding behaviours come from the party game Don't Get Got

This concept started life a very long time ago, inspired by James Young's Cleric Rework and was originally going to be about mechanizing different forms of madness. Meta and extra-gameplay features in ttrpgs appeal to me at the moment and may yet provide some more ideas of  reasonable interest. The effects and ideas in this post could be applied to many, many different things. *EDIT* such as Disease.