They were worried

Sarlax: It’s great that your players made some really keen adventuring/roleplaying actions. Those are some “big picture” players — rather than be concerned with leveling up, they are taking responsibility for “their” world. It must be a treat.

By the time the snow hit, the PCs were already of sufficient power that movement in the snow wasn’t an issue – the druid could use Master Earth to get anywhere, while the psion/cleric and even the necromancer were capable of using Teleport to jump around.

The weather affected the campaign most in that the PCs had taken stewardship of the world’s largest surviving humanoid city and the town in which they started adventuring before the snow hit. Rather than snow being a problem because it made it harder to walk around, the snow destroyed food supplies, killed people from exposure, and filled the cities with refugees. It was up to the PCs to deal with the humanitarian crisis, as well as determine whether and how to change the weather back to how it had been.

I’m using weather hindrances to help put Skill Challenges in the forefront, since this is a 4E game, and to help the players feel the pressure. Not only is the citadel on the mountaintop native to the Feywild and only appears in the Material Plane once every 30 years for 30 days, but a day after they started their long journey, they spotted an all-dwarf climbing team behind them making a path to scale the nigh-impossible side of the mountain (to avoid the hobgoblin camp the less-skilled PCs were planning to face head-on, natch).

When it comes to combat, I use snow primarily as set dressing, but do always include some weather-based terrain challenges. It’s really allowed the wizard in our party to shine, whether it’s using thunderwave to blast deep snow out of the way for his comrades, or using flaming sphere to strategically weaken the ice over a frozen river during a pitched battle with a wolf-mounted hobgoblin patrol.

If they decide to hang out in the mountains long enough, eventually theyll run into the cousins of the typical tunnel-dwelling dwarves they’ve met so far: a nation of nomadic dwarves who trek the snow fields deep within the mountain range, inspired somewhat by Dune’s Fremen. That’s one of my favorite things about different climates in D&D: coming up with different versions of familiar creatures that have adapted to their unique environment (even if only the mechanics are familiar, and the “skinning” is totally new). And of course, it’s only natural that these adaptations give them a leg up on the all-star team that is the PCs.

Thankfully in D&D, orcs and goblins and hobgoblins pay no mind to such niceties of warfare. That’s why there has to be some DM leniency on the numbers. You don’t want to make it “impossible” for your players to have “fun” with snow warfare.

I post hole every fall to help my wife install this wood cutout of Santa climbing on the backs of taxed elves to reach the rooftop of our house. Thankfully, most years it’s done before we have any serious accumulation. That job is hard enough. I can’t imagine doing that with snow up to your hips. Yuck.

For melee combat, I’d say that with either system, some snow (up to the knee) is a -2, and deep snow (above the knee) is a -5. I have direct experience with attempting a grapple in deep snow (it sucks and you can drown). I can’t imagine what real melee, with weapons, would be like… A comedy of errors?

Deadlytogue: Vampire, eh? Predators, counting on the fact the crime wouldn’t be discovered by the weather. Very clever. We do seem to have a horror-theme running here with snow.

Sarlax: Because you were running a 3.5 game, did you find the mechanics of snow to be a hindrance to what was going on? Or because the snow was ever-present, were those modifiers accounted for and you just played through? The Day After Tomorrow-style thing sounds like a great solution to get the players out of the “endless summer” that many campaigns seem to get stuck in.

Telas: In comparing the 4E and 3E weather conditions modifiers, clearly the new rules offer a simplified way to handle terrain as an obstacle. On the other hand, as you say: “Melee combat is nearly impossible in deep snow”, which is true in real life, which means the rules simulate that fairly accurately. D&D DMs might be advised simply to invoke the +2/-2 all-purpose modifier for snow. “It’s snowing, so everything suffers a -2 penalty.” Or, “It’s a heavy snow with a lot of accumulation, everyone suffers a -5 penalty.”

How would I use this in a game today? The weather is a complication, not the actual problem itself. Movement is much more difficult, especially if you’re trying to stay covert. Melee combat is nearly impossible in deep snow. You’ve got to stay warm and dry. Building a fire can be a challenge.

And then there’s the question of gear: Do we travel slowly and carry what we might need (expedition style mountaineering), or do we travel light, and depend on our speed and skill to survive (alpine style mountaineering)? A Bag of Holding or Portable Hole (etc) may change that formula, but only if you have access to one.

Thanks for posting this, Troy; I will definitely use weather in my next campaign!

This wasn’t natural, however. For thousands of years, the dominant breed of dragon on Reyha (this continent) had been red. In my game, dragons have links to the Elemental planes (based on the fundamentum from Draconomicon). With so many reds in the area, the Plane of Fire was effectively drawn “closer” to the mortal world.

When the PCs caused the stirring of the dead god on which the githyanki have built their capital city, that race called its red dragon allies to assist them, and many of the more powerful reds went to the Astral plane – in the middle of the winter. The result was a very Day After Tomorrow-style onset of deep winter, freezing much of Reyha, killing hundreds of thousands, and destroying crops everywhere.

As a consequence, a couple of adventures revolved around the weather directly (battling white dragon immigrants, negotiating with better-protected cities for their food), while the winter has been in the background of every other session since them. In the game now, they’ve only just started coming into spring, in which the landscape has been deeply damaged by the cold, and the ecology largely destroyed.

HB doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules for cold and inclement weather, but because it has broad narrative rules and because the heroes are basically impossible to kill (a PC can’t die until their “Passion” trait maxes out, and then the player gets narrative rights over the death), it let my players really revel in the winter environment, describing how ice and snow and wind took their toll on the battlefield, and how the horses of cavalry troops were foundering for lack of fodder, and men were just lying down to die in the cold rather than trying to march any farther.

A few years back I was running a game of Vampire: The Dark Ages, wherein the players were travelling across Europe in the winter. They made great use of deep snowdrifts (burying themselves to avoid the sun — maybe not entirely believable, but functional for story purposes), and when one character went into Frenzy on the edge of a remote German village, we discussed how his methodical and maniacal slaughter of every living thing in the village (he was reasonable old and powerful by this point; we’d started in about 1190 and this action was taking place around 1350) would likely not even be noticed by any outsider until spring when the folk of the nearest town noticed they didn’t come to the regional market.

It was a great effect adding to tension in the story when we first saw the carriage it was a looming dark shadow and we couldn’t tell if it was a large creature or not. Fumbling around blind in a blizzard with little or no visibility, is like darkness and can conceal hazards, friends and foe alike.