Do the Non-US Players and DMs use the metric system?

[Conaill]

The imperial system does have a nice medieval feel to it. Appropriate for a world with horse drawn carts, full of barbarians and orcs, no science or technology to speak of, and lots of things where common sense just doesn't hold up.

Of course, that's how I feel about countries that use it in the *real* world as well.

 

[hunter1828]

Imperial for D&D, metric for Star Wars. Hell, I learned to convert between the two thanks to the Star Wars d6 RPG.

And as a side note, I saw someone mentioned measuring long distances in Canada by time. We do that in the states, as well, primarily here in the less-populated Great Plains states.

hunter1828

 

[Seule]

It's obvious, isn't it? It means the Millennium Falcon is... errr.... is.... quite fast?

Or it could mean that George Lucas didn't bother learning what a parsec was either, other than it sounds cool and scientific!

I believe that an explanation was retrofitted into the movie universe so that the comment would make sense:
The Kessel run slingshots around a black hole, and the faster your ship the closer you can afford to get, so if you have a fast ship you cover less distance.
It only barely makes sense, but at least they tried. It's obviously a goof thet they've tried to cover up retroactively.

I'm also in Canada, and any distance more than a block or so is measured in driving time. A block, for those who don't know, is equal to the distance between two parallel streets. Other than a few holdouts (personal measurements for example) pretty much everything is metric, but we learn both.
Metric is just such a superior system in every way, the only advantage Imperial has is installed user base, and it's losing that everywhere in the world other than the US.
For games, we use whatever units the game is written with.

--Seule

 

[trentonjoe]

But we never would use Fahrenheit, converting F into C is really to difficult to compute it regulary in your head.

It isn't perfect but F=2C+30

C=1/2F-30

Works real well between 0-60ish (Celsius) breaks down as you get higher.

 

[Seule]

It isn't perfect but F=2C+30

C=1/2F-30

Works real well between 0-60ish (Celsius) breaks down as you get higher.

I do find Fahrenheit amusing... basically, it's two arbitrary numbers, and an arbitrary scale between them.
My understanding is that 0 fahrenheit is the coldest the inventor could get ice to go by adding salt, and 100 was Mrs. Fahrenheit's body temperature (seems she was hot-blooded). Celsius at least makes sense. Having freezing point be at 0 just makes intuitive sense, as does boiling point be at 100.

--Seule

 

[Arnwyn]

Canada uses the metric system with old hold-overs from the imperial. A sort of mish-mash system, a form of weights and measure bilingualism.

Not surprising, this carries over into our game. So our group mixes feet, yards, metres, kilometers, miles, and hours freely when discussing distances within the game. And pounds and kilograms for weights. Pints, quarts, liters, milliliters for liquid measure.

Yes. Exactly so.

(Though I will only use Celsius when discussing temperature - never
Fahrenheit.)

For our futuristic game, we use metric exclusively.

 

[Capellan]

Mora accurately:

F=9/5C+32

C=5/9F-32

(it's not that hard to do in your head, you know )

Also:

KG = 5/11LB
LB = 11/5KG

km = 8/5miles
miles = 5/8km

metres = inches/40
inches = 40metres

litres = 3/5pints
pints = 5/3litres

(or liters, for those of you who use US English)

And to answer the original question: we play D&D in imperial. For real life, we use metric (except for people's heights - for some reason I can still visualise what it means to be 6' tall than 180 cm)

 

[tarchon]

no, we get the very same books as you, much to our chagrin...

Fortunately, as an engineering student, I am conversant in the imperial system, as are my players. thus it is not an issue for us to use imperial measurements. It is still unnatural though, and requires mental conversation to get ideas of scale...

Yeah, but doesn't it give you that authentic Medieval feeling?

 

[Turjan]

Yeah, but doesn't it give you that authentic Medieval feeling?

Not really. It might give you a British medieval feeling . Except miles, which meant something different in every country anyway, there's not much similarity to the Middle Ages. Then you would have to invent your own system for each and every little town .

In central and northern Europe, miles were between 7 and 10.5 km long, compared to the mere 1.6 km of the statute mile.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Imperial System all the way, baby! Long live the Queen!

The Imperial System is Evil and makes probes crash into Mars. It must be stopped.