Rules of the Game: Going Metric ...

I guess we have a month where Skip won't be changing any game rules ...

I was very curious as to the direction of the next set of articles. Needless to say, his choice took me completely by surprise. My first reaction was to check the calendar to make sure we hadn't hit 04/01 yet.

jgsugden said:

I guess we have a month where Skip won't be changing any game rules ...

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LOL

I was very curious as to the direction of the next set of articles. Needless to say, his choice took me completely by surprise. My first reaction was to check the calendar to make sure we hadn't hit 04/01 yet.

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I was pretty surprised as well, but hey, I'm sure they *are* useful to a lot of people.

I was wondering if this was a joke too. I don't really understand the need for this - unit conversion isn't really that hard. Getting it explained from Skip Williams is like having Bill Gates explain how to use the calculator in Windows

I'm not really looking forward to part II and II :\

--
Thomas

Aren't the translated versions already in metric anyway?

At least nowadays it's easy, when your ranges aren't triple outside what they're in dungeons...

I was surprise too but also quite offended that WotC considers us european unable to use decimals

Rounding 1.5m up to 2m is a big change IMHO. If you keep the maps with the same grid, you suddenly enlarge all your locales' linear dimensions by one third; if you instead keep the location size but cover it with a larger grid, you suddenly have a lot less space for combat.

More or less, it screams to keep using the imperial units and live with it, which also give a nicer feel in fantasy games IMHO (mind that I instead deeply despise their use in scientific or technology subjects).

It's a big change of the rules!!
People using the metrics system move a lot faster now!!
The Metric system is broken!!

On a more serious note, I find it hard now to change the entire way we see the game, five years ago we all had to learn (my friends and I) the system, now we won't change it =\

Rounding 1.5m up to 2m is a big change IMHO. If you keep the maps with the same grid, you suddenly enlarge all your locales' linear dimensions by one third; if you instead keep the location size but cover it with a larger grid, you suddenly have a lot less space for combat.

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Yep. I just have the US originals, but I'm rather sure that the German translated version uses 1.5m. I don't know where Skip is pulling these assumptions from...

jgsugden said:

I guess we have a month where Skip won't be changing any game rules ...

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Maybe not for you

Personally I prefer to avoid the term "meter", though I don't care whether "pace" now means "meter" or "yard", the players are estimating anyway. And when it matters, we probably switched to the playing board anyway where they can see the squares...

BTW, any good ideas for avoiding "minutes"? Second = heartbeat, hour can remain for most medieval societies, but minute...

Li Shenron said:

I was surprise too but also quite offended that WotC considers us european unable to use decimals

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Here here!

I think a healthy does of both is handy though.

mhd said:

BTW, any good ideas for avoiding "minutes"? Second = heartbeat, hour can remain for most medieval societies, but minute...

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Back in the mid 80s, when I was completely obsessed with creating a campaign world that didn't use English words for any measurement, I came up with the following system:

Heartbeat is the basic measurement of time, an interval close to 1 second (slightly faster - I guess people measuring time were a bit excited)

1 Moment is equal to 100 heartbeats (also called segments).

100 moments is equal to a period.

10 periods equal one day.

There are 86,400 seconds to the day and 100,000 heartbeats to the day.

It made time measurement rather easy in my game which was really important because we were using a segmented combat system (instead of 1 action per minute or per 6 seconds, we broke down activity into segments and people took actions that required X segments from which to recover ... for instance, a 1st level newbie swinging a sword in segment 13 would have a recovery time of 8 for the sword, so his next action would be in segment 21.) This system made tracking time a lot easier during long combats.

fellowship said:

I was wondering if this was a joke too. I don't really understand the need for this - unit conversion isn't really that hard. Getting it explained from Skip Williams is like having Bill Gates explain how to use the calculator in Windows

I'm not really looking forward to part II and II :\

--
Thomas

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So unit conversion are not that hard, but you seem to be have some problems converting Arabic numbers into Roman numerals.

Sorry, Im sure it was a typo but I couldn't resist.