Waxing Gibbous

[jack]

I can't believe this never happened to me before! We were playing DnD, and the party was sneaking up to an abandoned fortress full of goblins, and we waited till nightfall, and then suddenly asked, "wait, is this actually dark enough to sneak? goblins have low-light vision, right?[1]"

And living in a street-lit country, using a calendar that doesn't reflect phases of the moon, I suddenly realised, I had no experience of how often the moon was light. We established the moon was waxing gibbous[2]. And then I realised, despite the fantasy novel staple of waiting for moonrise/moonset, I'd completely forgotten but it was obvious when I thought about it, that moonrise moved around, and I thought I could work out that new moons rose with the sun, and full moons rose at sunset, and presumably 3/4 moons left a few hours at dusk or dawn of complete dark, but I couldn't remember which. At which point it was too late to say "please, GM, just pick one, it doesn't matter if it's the same as our world" and people started pulling out phases-of-the-moon apps.

But I have no idea that hasn't come up EVERY time I've played DnD.

[1] Never ask the GM that :)
[2] Bad word choice in English isn't your first language and/or you haven't read lovecraft parodies.

Comments

[hilarita]

I just wanted to share with you (and your readership) that my mind immediately leapt to waxing gibbons by moonlight.

[jack]

:)

[gerald_duck]

Ah, now, y'see, what you need to do is read Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which applies to fantasy RPGs just as much as to fantasy novels. Perhaps more so, in fact!

I'd never wondered precisely the things you described, but back when I was a teenager playing first-edition AD&D, we certainly wondered out loud what the point was of having infravision if you weren't nocturnal, and therefore why all these critters were wide awake and waiting to attack us in broad daylight. Usually phrased as a frustrated "look, they must have some kind of daily cycle, and some hour at which they're likely to be asleep. They're not on shift-work!"

The good modules dealt with this kind of thing and set the action well in terms of time as well as place. Things happened at particular times of day for a reason, on particular days of the week or month for a reason. As well as the obvious lycanthrope trope, I remember The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (U1) had the [SPOILER]s choosing to [SPOIL] by the light of the full moon.

My advice is: ignore such niceties. After all, when was the last time you saw a tavern where the corridors were really five feet wide? And do you know even one person willing to take a ten-foot pole with them when they go potholing?

[jack]

I'm totally happy for the GM to say "tonight, assume there's a few hours of darkness at some point, and low light the rest of the time, and don't think too hard how that ties into every other night". But if it's going to matter, I think you need to specify one way or the other, not just say "you wander out and you don't know if it's dark or not"...

[naath]

A full moon with clear skies is IMO bright enough that regular humans wouldn't have a tough time spotting people in clear/open spaces (of course if there are lots of trees around then that makes spotting people harder).

I guess the GM could always declare that there was heavy cloud cover.