D&D 5E Seasonal and day-night cycles

[Yama Dai O]

I have been mulling over ways to make the players feel as if they are a part of the in-game world, as opposed to it being just a static background that affects them very little. One way I want to do this is to play up the importance of the world's natural cycles, in particular seasonal and the day-night cycles. I thought I'd post my ideas here and get some feedback.

Seasonal cycles I think are missing from way too many games, in which the season is left undefined, usually something like summer but without the increased temperature. The obvious way to emphasize the passage of seasons is to keep track of the date on a calendar and season (sorry) your descriptions of the outdoor environment appropriately. But that pretty much leaves the whole thing just window dressing. To make the world like winter, spring, summer or autumn, the season will have to affect what the players do.

• Mark passes and fords on your world map as unpassable in winter and spring, respectively. When the players need to travel near the beginning of that season, have the threat of getting there too late hang over them. They could even get stuck and have to overwinter.
• Players travelling in winter need warm clothes and other equipment; as long as they do, they auto-succeed on most tedious survival checks.
• Make animals and monsters behave differently depending on the season, like owlbears becoming aggressive in their mating season or when they have young to care for, but more reclusive otherwise. Extreme cases could make some regions nearly impassable, like a forest infested with ravenous swarms of stirges in autumn, when food gets scarce but the giant spiders didn't yet eat the excess stirges.
• Have local people celebrate seasonal festivals, like after a successful harvest or when the grasp of winter finally relents and hey! Everyone made it through just fine!
• Tempt the players to make a nice tidy profit trading goods like an especially famous mead that ripens over winter.

The day-night cycle is not neglected as much, but most games could still get much more mileage out of leveraging the proper atmosphere, especially with a little tweaking. I am thinking of stuff like the introduction adventure in (IIRC) the Mentzer boxed set, where ghouls do not pursue the player character into broad daylight, or the old Arena CRPG where the night is full of monsters, or the original Witcher game where in addition, certain magics work only at night.

• Make the night feel more dangerous especially in low-level adventures. This could be concrete danger like more wandering monsters or implied danger like unpleasant noises in the deep of night. When the players finish their rest and get going, occassionally have them find signs of monsters (tracks, droppings, gnawed bones) that passed at night.
• Make undead more of a threat (in numbers or relative threat) but add a type of sunlight vulnerability. Exposure turns (and destroys) undead, perhaps at different cleric levels for indirect and direct, broad daylight. The idea is not to put a powerful new weapon in the players' hands, but to make them feel dependent on the safety of daytime. I'd like some advice on how to implement this in particular.
• Once or twice put in a local nocturnal threat that the players might have to identify, track and maybe build some sort of trap for during daytime because it is too dangerous to face head-on. Encourage them to keep track of the time of day versus their distance to the town walls. Then they'd better get back 'cause it'll be dark soon and they mostly come at night. Mostly.
• Healing magic might be more effective in daylight (perhaps have them make the roll with advantage). Some ritual spells might have to be cast at night.

I would really like feedback on these, especially if you implemented similar ideas and can tell me how it panned out in your game.

 

[DEFCON 1]

In my Curse of Strahd games, the book has distinct sections about the differences between day and night, and warmer areas in the valley versus extreme cold in the mountains. And I did follow along, giving nods to the differences as they traveled.

But truth be told... in both cases neither of my groups cared.

My groups are not all that concerned with the mechanics behind day versus night or warm versus cold... what they care about is the story they are a part of. If going out at night meant a deadlier time out in the wilderness... if that's what they had to do because that's where the story was taking them, then they did it anyway. And if they got attacked an extra time that they ordinarily wouldn't have had they gone out during the day... they dealt with the situation and moved on to where they needed to go that inspired them to journey out at night in the first place.

But what they didn't do is then "compare and contrast" those extra fights versus what might have happened during the day. So there was no thought about "Well, we shouldn't have gone out at night because we got into extra fights and lost X, Y & Z resources, which we still would have had in our possession had we waited until the daytime..." It was instead "Well, my brothers and sisters, that was a difficult journey we all went through to get to this place, but Sir Alaric made it a point that we had to do it in order to rescue the prisoners and he turned out correct. It was hard, but in the end I'm glad we did it."

This is how my groups behave towards "differences" in time, weather and the like. They're all just challenges in their story that they try and overcome, and nothing that I as a DM need to quantify or make charts for, or really worry about. Which is exactly the opposite of how many other groups will look at the same situation, so hopefully they will also respond to you to give you a different perspective.

You might find your group deals with differences in time, temperature, location, etc. like mine does. Or you might find that your group puts a premium on these differences and really adapts their actions to each situation. No matter which way the end up leaning... you're going to have to adjust. Because that's our job as the DM.

 

[Yama Dai O]

Hmm. The lesson I am taking away from this is, start with the practical stuff.

Reading between the lines, your players seem to be deliberately avoid resource management to a fair extent, and to be honest I would be perfectly happy with that. With such a group I would be concentrating on clear obstacles they can overcome with effort, rather than unavoidable penalties to overland movement speed or the like.

 

[Alexemplar]

Eberron does this with its planar cosmology. Each of the planes is in orbit around the prime material and their relative distance has an impact on spells, planar access, monsters, etc.

I rarely use it outside of making it a plot point as it involved a lot more book keeping. That and the fact that most adventures only cover a period of a couple weeks. I've never had the chance to run one of those year(s) long campaigns where this kind of stuff would definitely matter a lot more.

 

[jasper]

For seasonal. Undead do max damage around Halloween. Cold critters do extra damage in cold weather. Harvest Moon, Spring planting etc Healing spells heal at least avg dice.

 

[aco175]

I found that this works well if there is a story reason why players need to care. One adventure was in winter and the snow blocked the pass forcing the PCs to take shelter in the inn before the pass. They could not press forward. Even better is when a player tracks this for you like when their mage gets bonus damage during certain times or when a werewolf character come out at the full moon.

Overall I find it rarely comes up.

 

[Lanefan]

Another thing to track is the phases of the moon(s), as this can greatly affect outdoors night vision.

I always tell the players what the game-world weather is doing where the PCs are, provided they can see outside; and sometimes it can make a big difference e.g. rain makes climbing more difficult, snow makes travel slower (and tracks easier or harder to follow depending whether they were left before or after the snow fell), rain or snow or fog impairs visibility, wind carries scent, high wind makes flying difficult for both PCs and flying foes, etc. And if the party is at sea then weather conditions become paramount.

If the campaign is set in a "southern" area e.g. the equivalent of California or Greece then season rarely matters - it's just varying levels of 'hot' broken by occasional storms and - in Greece - occasional winter snow for a day or two before springing right back to hot. If it's set near the equator then the only difference is whether it's raining or not. But if it's set in an area that gets 4 real seasons then seasonality is important, to the point that a party might even decide to take the winters off and only adventure in the summers.

Seasonality also impacts what goes on in the game world around the PCs - commoners are less available during planting and harvest times, military campaigns and wars (mostly) only happen in the summers, and so on.

Lanefan