Going to try and keep this simple:
Any ideas on how the Northern Lights would affect vision.
Trying to help my teenager work on his first gaming group (mirroring Skyrim for easy group understanding). I have never been far enough north (or south) to witness the phenomenon personally so I really have no idea what to expect or how to put into game mechanics.
Thanks.
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Well, the basic idea (in the real world) behind the Aurora Borealis/Australis is that the effect is caused by charged particles emitted from solar storms hitting the earth's magnetic field. The higher energy that the particles have, the brighter the effect will be, and the stronger the storm on the sun the higher energy the particles will have. So fierce solar weather means a bright aurora and calm solar weather means no aurora.
So a lot of the time you won't see the effect if there's too much moonlight, but given a particularly strong geomagnetic storm it can be much brighter than even the full moon.
Of course, your game takes place in a fantasy world so if you wanted to have particularly strong or weak solar weather you should feel free to do so (or just have the effect caused by the gods throwing stuff at the planet, or whatever.) Realistically the effect shouldn't really be brighter than twilight, but it's more dramatic if the effect is stronger. Probably the biggest impact is just going to be atmosphere, but sometimes at night (at higher latitudes) folks with normal vision should be able to see reasonably well during a strong aurora (i.e. no penalties for darkness.)
You could just take the random weather chart and apply it to the sun. Random weather chart is just a d100 roll, and 1-70 is normal, 71-80 is abnormal, 81-90 is inclement, 91-99 is a storm, and 100 is a powerful storm.
So a quick and dirty way to do it is roll d100:
100: aurora provides bright light
91-99: aurora provides normal light
81-90: aurora provides dim light (i.e. 20% concealment)
71-80: no additional light, but visible aurora
1-70: no aurora.
It may not be hugely common, but "you can see at night 20% of the time" is significant. You could add modifiers for different latitudes (I would say the above is probably for the region in which a visible aurora is most common) but a roll of 100 should make it visible pretty much anywhere (in June of 2015 there was a severe geomagnetic storm that resulted in an aurora visible as far south as Texas.)
Thank you PossibleCabbage, or is it just Cabbage.
I might tweak those numbers a bit, expand the 71-80 and the 81-90 ranges, the aurora always seem to be visible at night in the computer game (I know limited graphic rendering). We're planning on a one-step reduction in racial vision abilities across to board (only Khajiit seem have any enhanced vision and that seem to be low-light at best), so adding more dim light might be beneficial.
As far as latitudes go, all in the far north, cold and starvation rules in full effect.