Some stuff about units of measurement and spelling

[Morrus]

Fahrenheit = 9/5 * (Celsius) + 32. It's not the most pleasing conversion.

For a very rough approximation Fahrenheit -> Celsius I just minus 30 then divide by 2. It's close enough for me to understand Americans in everyday conversation, though it takes a quick moment.

(Or in reverse, times 2 then plus 30).

 

[tetrasodium]

With the early American nativists were more radical with their spelling reforms. I would be nice to have a truly phonetical and consistent spelling system for English.

You can't really do a phonetic spelling without switching to a syllabary like japanese uses. Even though Japanese uses a syllabary & can be converted to roman/english letters using something called romanji here is nice little article nearly highlighting some problems in using it that doesn't require you to know any japanese or the associated charactersets to grasp. Put in different terms, english has 26 letters & 44 sounds, by contrast japanese has two sets of 46 characters plus around 2000 or so kanji and 84 sounds. How many people do you think are going to learn a whole new syllabary when most people don't really even know what it means when a letter has a hat line dot or whatever over it?

 

[Ryujin]

For TTRPG measurements just use abstract "squares" and don't bother with how many feet/metres it is. Using other abstracts like melee/short/medium/long doesn't take into account things like the different in effective ranges between thrown and mechanically assisted ranged weapons, let alone variations on those assisted ranged weapons. A dagger should not have as good an effective range as a heavy crossbow.

And it's not nucUlar, it's nuclEar. When even the people who have their finger on the button can't say it right, you've got a problem.

 

[shawnhcorey]

You can't really do a phonetic spelling without switching to a syllabary like japanese uses. Even though Japanese uses a syllabary & can be converted to roman/english letters using something called romanji here is nice little article nearly highlighting some problems in using it that doesn't require you to know any japanese or the associated charactersets to grasp. Put in different terms, english has 26 letters & 44 sounds, by contrast japanese has two sets of 46 characters plus around 2000 or so kanji and 84 sounds. How many people do you think are going to learn a whole new syllabary when most people don't really even know what it means when a letter has a hat line dot or whatever over it?

Well, you can learn IPA.

 

[MoonSong]

but converting is easy, just divide feets by 3 for meters and multiply miles by 1,5 for kilometers. even if it is not 100% correct.

A quick and more precise way to get km from miles is to duplicate four times then divide by ten. Then add a km for every hundred miles.

 

[Orius]

For a game like D&D, metric units feel anachronistic. But in a sci-fi game, well any sci-fi media really, hearing non-metric is like nails on the chalkboard of my mind. I'm not worried about battle maps, for dungeon scale maps, I'd just use 1.5/3m for 5/10ft., the difference is only off by millimeters/fractions of inches (and I've done the math to check it), so it's not really going to make a difference in game scale.

 

[Umbran]

A quick and more precise way to get km from miles is to duplicate four times then divide by ten. Then add a km for every hundred miles.

When characters don't have a way to measure with precision, precision in conversion is hardly necessary.

 

[Ryujin]

When characters don't have a way to measure with precision, precision in conversion is hardly necessary.

Very few people who played 1e D&D understood what the 10' pole in the equipment list was for