Would you play a TTRPG that used Meters instead of Feet?

[aramis erak]

I have no idea what 181 cm is, I know Im 6 ft though which is something between 180 & 182?

just shy of 6 feet. 182.88 is 6'.

So, rounding to the cm, 183 cm is about 6', and 2 ½ cm is close enough to an inch from there.

 

[aramis erak]

So... that's confusing. And where does this Wizard of oz. come into it anyway?

ETM and USTM are both derived from French Traditional Measures plus Greek traditional measures...

Both have two different weights called a pound, Pounds Troy for precious metals and sometimes gems. Pounds Avoirdupois for most other uses. At one point, the gold coin notionally valued at one pound was equal in value to one roman pound of silver... which is close enough to the Troy pound for most purposes. (and the symbol for their money is from the latin Libram and the French derivative Livre.)

Oh, and the pennyweight? 1/240 of a troy pound.
At one point, the roman penny was a piece of silver of one pennyweight, called the denarius... which is why the UK penny was (is?) denoted with a "d"... I don't know the post decimalization UK methods of noting prices...

 

[aramis erak]

That touches on one reason I suspect imperial mesaurements have stuck around in construction and a few other milieux: fractions (half, quarter, eighth, etc.) are easier to visualize/conceptualize than decimals in how they relate to each other. Not easier to count-add-subtract, perhaps, but to visualize.

I mean, if someone asks how much is left in a part-full milk bottle most (as in nearly all) people would answer "about half" or "about a third" rather than "about point 5" or "about point 3".

There's also the issue that, quite literally, buildings are one of the most durable elements in the environment... Japan went metric in teh 1800s... but still use the ken (6 shaku, 1.81818 m) because literally all the existing buildings needed replacement materials in ken-length, tatami mats are 3 shaku by 1 ken, and are woven to that for historical reasons (as many occupied buildings do predate decimalization), and the factories never switched over. Sure, if they wanted to, they could require new construction to use 2m instead, but then they'd wind up with the old and respected buildings wasting wood... and they'd need to convert the tatami factories and shoji...

So they keep building in ken. And furnishing in ken.

 

[Tonguez]

ETM and USTM are both derived from French Traditional Measures plus Greek traditional measures...

Both have two different weights called a pound, Pounds Troy for precious metals and sometimes gems. Pounds Avoirdupois for most other uses. At one point, the gold coin notionally valued at one pound was equal in value to one roman pound of silver... which is close enough to the Troy pound for most purposes. (and the symbol for their money is from the latin Libram and the French derivative Livre.)

Oh, and the pennyweight? 1/240 of a troy pound.
At one point, the roman penny was a piece of silver of one pennyweight, called the denarius... which is why the UK penny was (is?) denoted with a "d"... I don't know the post decimalization UK methods of noting prices...

Decimal penny uses p to differentiate from old penny d. So 50p = 50 pence

 

[mamba]

Kind of. More like it goes:

"How far is it to [place x]?"
"20 kay"
"20 kay what? Miles? Kilometers? Meters? Feet? [etc.]"

I guess you have never seen signs for a 5k, 10k, etc. race. No one ever wondered what that k refers to (and the fact that it is k and not km shows you that these signs are in the US )

 

[Bedrockgames]

Let's say a new TTRPG came out, and for its measurement of moving, ability/spell distance, falling, etc, they used Meters instead of Feet. Would you be fine with that, and would you play it?

Example: You move 10 meters (1 step is 3 feet aka 1 meter).
From pec to the tip of a dagger is 3 feet, aka 1 meter.
Falling 4 meters aka 12 feet (about 1 story in height) deals damage.
Characters occupy a 1 meter hex.

Meters are a standard over most of the world and would I feel be more recognizable.

This is for research, so please vote and discuss.

I can honestly say the measurements used by an RPG have never affected my decision to buy it. I might find some measures more tricky, but meters, yards, feet, centimeters, inches, kilometers, miles, etc I don't particularly care what they go with. I'd rather the designers use a measurement they are comfortable with so that the distances in the rules all make sense. I think that is more important to me than whether I am immediately familiar with the distances and weights. Also my expectation is usually that a book will reflect the measures from where it's made. If a designer or publisher comes from a country where kilometers are the standard, I won't be surprised or disappointed even if miles are what I am more accustomed to (just like I won't find it confusing or unexpected if they using spellings like colour rather than color).

 

[Umbran]

It is not a system built to human scale

That's just not true.
A meter is basically a yard.
A kilogram is the weight of basically a quart of water.
These are quite human scale measurements.

It an extremely useful system (and sometimes vastly superior) in an abstract academic context

You're typing on a computer, a very non-academic, common real-world physical item. The science behind it was uncovered using metric units. The design of the machine was done in metric units.

...but as applied to the real world, units based around what is customarily convenient based on the natural world, biomechanics, grouping objects for transport, or other concerns of commerce or life in general are often less cumbersome

Except, the above Reason was used to do just that. Again, the basic unit of mass was defined with respect to a volume of water that's pretty practical in day-to-day human life. The meter is also set at a length that's human-size scale.

For shipping - the metric ton is about 10% more than the imperial ton.

The temperature scale was set with respect to the freezing and boiling of water - very practical, human-life type stuff.

These things may seem inconvenient if you haven't lived with them, but any system you haven't lived with would seem inconvenient. Pretty much everyone else on the planet has no problem using them in everyday life. If you do, that's not a problem with the system.

 

[dragoner]

US and Imperial are so close... until you get to volumes of liquids and tonnages....
And both are based upon the French Avoirdupois measures, but only the pound and grain being kept exact...

the problem with humanocentric measures are that different populations have different median, mode, and mean sizes, and that the standards were usually set to the measures of the Royal. So the Shaku - the Japanese "foot" is 30.303... cm, while the US foot is 30.48 cm, the French traditional Pied 32.66cm....

Pretty much. It doesn't matter until it really matters, though I am also in a field where we use all sorts of measuring so it sits in the front of my mind. Average person no difference, and in the UK not only do they use both (or used to) they throw in others like "stone". Stone (unit) - Wikipedia

 

[Willie the Duck]

That touches on one reason I suspect imperial mesaurements have stuck around in construction and a few other milieux: fractions (half, quarter, eighth, etc.) are easier to visualize/conceptualize than decimals in how they relate to each other. Not easier to count-add-subtract, perhaps, but to visualize.

I mean, if someone asks how much is left in a part-full milk bottle most (as in nearly all) people would answer "about half" or "about a third" rather than "about point 5" or "about point 3".

I don't know that I agree. However, I do think that being evenly divisible by multiple factors is quite useful when the fractions are often part of the point*, when the addition is circumstantially innate**, and most importantly when a whole unit is a sufficiently large number that divisions within the unit occur more frequently than adding multiples of the unit. In the coinage example I bring up below, I think non-decimal coinage made all the sense in the world while a whole pound/peso/dollar was a huge amount of money, and it was more important that you could split one amongst you and 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 other people than how easily you could add multiple of them (and multiple partial ones) together. I don't see this as true for construction -- you aren't spending that much time dividing an inch three ways, but you are adding two multiple-plus-fractionals-on-each-side sections of things measured in inches together.
*example: you could empty a tun of ale into 8 barrels
**example: you have the coins in front of you, you can lump all your coins of types into piles and add all your farthings together and then combine sets of 4 with your pennies and that odd tanner you found until you got a shilling's-worth

At one point, the gold coin notionally valued at one pound was equal in value to one roman pound of silver... which is close enough to the Troy pound for most purposes. (and the symbol for their money is from the latin Libram and the French derivative Livre.)

Oh, and the pennyweight? 1/240 of a troy pound.
At one point, the roman penny was a piece of silver of one pennyweight, called the denarius... which is why the UK penny was (is?) denoted with a "d"... I don't know the post decimalization UK methods of noting prices...

Lindybeige has an interesting video about the evolution of UK coinage and relation to a pound of silver. Caution: he bungles some D&D-isms, and has as much self-congratulatory speech related to his own preferences as Benjamin Olson sees in Metric System aficionados. Still worth a look.

I can imagine that I might refuse to use a system based on the metric measurements, so I voted no. But it would have to be pretty obtrusive, and there would have to be very comparable games equally available.

Basically I think the metric system is a stupid system based on fetishizing ease of conversion between units at the expense of having units that actually organically make sense for things humans do. It came out of an Enlightenment era belief in eliminating doing things based on custom and tradition in favor of doing them based on Reason (which I'll capitalize, in the style of the time), and has never shed the basic arrogance wrapped up in that way of thinking. It is not a system built to human scale and can't describe anything without a cumbersome amount of syllables. It was imposed on the world by a condescending intelligentsia, and it's fundamental hubris is not challenged enough. It an extremely useful system (and sometimes vastly superior) in an abstract academic context, but as applied to the real world, units based around what is customarily convenient based on the natural world, biomechanics, grouping objects for transport, or other concerns of commerce or life in general are often less cumbersome than units which exist only because of a x10 relationship to some other unit. All systems of measurement are mostly stupid and arbitrary, where the metric system gets on my nerves is that because it's arbitrary units are derived from other arbitrary units based on Reason it's proponents think it's intrinisically less stupid when, in many contexts, it is actually slightly stupider. And that sort of arrogance I can't abide.

However if I were to reject an RPG based on usage of the metric system, it would probably not be because of my hostility to the system, but because it either used it extensively in a way that was aesthetically really obtrusive to the setting of the game, or just demanded too much visualization in metric from my not very metric accustomed brain. Still these would just be points against a game for me, not dealbreakers in their own right.

There is an interesting phenomenon I've noticed -- amongst everyone, but especially amongst nerd circles and anything on-the-internet (and to be clear, I am very very guilty of falling into this trap myself more often than I would like to admit) -- of worrying excessively that someone on the other side of an issue thinks too highly of themselves and/or is being arrogant. There certainly are people on the internet who are derisive towards... well, anything and everything; and people who try very hard to treat whatever side they aren't on as doing something inherently wrong/foolish/inferior. There are also quite a few faulty justifications for preferring metric over Imperial (and as we are discussing, many many contexts where the perceived benefits don't come into play). However, it seems odd to me to associate the metric system itself (outside some schmoe on the internet telling you you're inferior*) with arrogance -- it's literally one of the most mundane components of the day-to-day lives of billions of people (who are superior or inferior to anyone else for reasons completely separate from their use of the metric system). It would be like wearing pants or grinding flour or cars having key ignitions being arrogant in some way.
*which they can do just as well with your preference of on-foot team-athletics games, preference for dogs over cats, or the right way to hang the toilet paper roll (cue bidet sub-argument).

 

[Aldarc]

I can imagine that I might refuse to use a system based on the metric measurements, so I voted no. But it would have to be pretty obtrusive, and there would have to be very comparable games equally available.

Basically I think the metric system is a stupid system based on fetishizing ease of conversion between units at the expense of having units that actually organically make sense for things humans do. It came out of an Enlightenment era belief in eliminating doing things based on custom and tradition in favor of doing them based on Reason (which I'll capitalize, in the style of the time), and has never shed the basic arrogance wrapped up in that way of thinking. It is not a system built to human scale and can't describe anything without a cumbersome amount of syllables. It was imposed on the world by a condescending intelligentsia, and it's fundamental hubris is not challenged enough. It an extremely useful system (and sometimes vastly superior) in an abstract academic context, but as applied to the real world, units based around what is customarily convenient based on the natural world, biomechanics, grouping objects for transport, or other concerns of commerce or life in general are often less cumbersome than units which exist only because of a x10 relationship to some other unit. All systems of measurement are mostly stupid and arbitrary, where the metric system gets on my nerves is that because it's arbitrary units are derived from other arbitrary units based on Reason it's proponents think it's intrinisically less stupid when, in many contexts, it is actually slightly stupider. And that sort of arrogance I can't abide.

However if I were to reject an RPG based on usage of the metric system, it would probably not be because of my hostility to the system, but because it either used it extensively in a way that was aesthetically really obtrusive to the setting of the game, or just demanded too much visualization in metric from my not very metric accustomed brain. Still these would just be points against a game for me, not dealbreakers in their own right.

Nah.

These things may seem inconvenient if you haven't lived with them, but any system you haven't lived with would seem inconvenient. Pretty much everyone else on the planet has no problem using them in everyday life. If you do, that's not a problem with the system.

This is the bottom line.