So, just out of curiosity, mechanically speaking, would l break anything if l switched the Imperial measurements for Metric. For example, Humans walking speed from 30ft to 30m? (Which, according to google, would more than triple the movement speed (98ft), mathematically. But I'm not asking about Mathematically. I want to know if changing the "ft" to "m" has any mechanical differences which l should know about.) (Also, as I said, l just want to know about what would happen if l changed ft to m. If l do decide to implement this idea, l would not take the time to convert everything into their metric equivalent (such as making 30ft be 9 meters rounded down.) I'm also not asking if it's something l should do. At the moment, this is just a idea i'm looking into. I currently have no plans of implementing this idea, no matter the results.)
provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
Well, for one, it's just something l thought of and wanted a answer for, and second, l don't have any measuring sticks, so my only "real" frame of reference for length/distance is Minecraft, with each full block being 1 meter cubed. So since i've spent many hours in minecraft, and have used it to build many structures, it's easier for me to visualize things in minecraft blocks, which, again, is 1 meter cubed. So, instead of "Your movement speed is 30 feet" l could think "you can move about 9 blocks in 6 seconds,18 if you dash."
Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
Well, it is and it isn't. Remember that this is an abstraction of a real world, and while it is fantasy we tend to better connect with what's familiar to us. We can more easily visualize a 6ft person than a 6m person. We can more easily understand how difficult or painful it might be for a 6ft person to fall 10ft than we can a 6m person to fall 10m.
I think you'd find a lot of things spring up that make the world feel wrong, or at least you'd have to stop and think through stuff that would otherwise be pretty simple to grok.
I think a better, easier conversion is your minecraft example - 5ft is one "block." You can move 6 blocks with a move action. The game grid already works this way and dividing by 5 is easy.
Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
Well, it is and it isn't. Remember that this is an abstraction of a real world, and while it is fantasy we tend to better connect with what's familiar to us. We can more easily visualize a 6ft person than a 6m person. We can more easily understand how difficult or painful it might be for a 6ft person to fall 10ft than we can a 6m person to fall 10m.
I think you'd find a lot of things spring up that make the world feel wrong, or at least you'd have to stop and think through stuff that would otherwise be pretty simple to grok.
I think a better, easier conversion is your minecraft example - 5ft is one "block." You can move 6 blocks with a move action. The game grid already works this way and dividing by 5 is easy.
Well, a lot of stuff will definitely feel wrong, but nothing changes mechanically by calling feet meters.
The thing is, if you do this, you aren't gaining any of the benefits of using metric measurements, nor are you in any way helping your players convert to the metric system. If you're going to do something like this, you might as well convert to made up units to avoid confusion.
Specifically for this conversion, I don't know why D&D is measured in increments of 5ft instead of 3ft. 3ft is practically 1m. Everyone who uses Freedom Units knows what a yard is. Instead of your standard 6 spaces of movement, you have 10 spaces of movement. Easy peasy.
provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
Km = kilometres. A human is certainly not 6 kilometres tall.
Personally I would say that every square is 2 metres. It's not perfect, but it's closer to D&D's grid measurements than just saying "1 foot is 1 metre". 1 metre is 3.28 feet.
provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
Ok, let’s get our units straight here
to answer the OP’s original question - can I just switch meters for feet as units? The answer is a big NO - you have to convert all the units - THEN you can switch. And, no Thoruk the units aren’t arbitrary a 10’ wide corridor could be converted to a 3 m wide corridor but a 10 km wide anything converts to @ 6 miles wide, a 5 km wide square would be about 1.6 miles by 1.6 miles I really want to see the character that can really control that space.
Can metric units be used? Sure just convert properly first.
provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
Km = kilometres. A human is certainly not 6 kilometres tall.
Personally I would say that every square is 2 metres. It's not perfect, but it's closer to D&D's grid measurements than just saying "1 foot is 1 metre". 1 metre is 3.28 feet.
It is true that a human is not 6km tall. But, if you just dislike using the word "Feet" then simple replace the word with "Meters", and change nothing. 5ft. becomes 5m. A dwarf is 4m tall, not 5ft. In this sense, it is arbitrary.
provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
Ok, let’s get our seats nits straight here
to answer the OP’s original question - can I just switch meters for feet as units? The answer is a big NO - you have to convert all the units - THEN you can switch. And, no Thoruk the units aren’t arbitrary a 10’ wide corridor could be converted to a 3 m wide corridor but a 10 km wide anything converts to @ 6 miles wide, a 5 km wide square would be about 1.6 miles by 1.6 miles I really want to see the character that can really control that space.
Can metric units be used? Sure just convert properly first.
I mean, the units are kind of arbitrary.
Change them to fantasy units if you like - a Human is between 5-6 Splinks tall, whereas a dwarf is about 4 Splinks tall. Each character has a reach of 5 Splinks, and with a polearm or reach weapon they have a reach of 10 Splinks. They can move 30 Splinks in a round, except for dwarves which move 25 Splinks, and a corridor is typically 10 Splinks wide.
Is a Splink a Foot, or a Meter? Depends on the theater your mind creates for you.
Also I'm curious as to why you firt converted Feet into Meters, and then converted (Kilo)meters into Miles, and seem to have drawn the conclusion that this disproves converting 10ft. into 3m?
1 mile is 5280ft, whereas 1 Km is 1000m, so you've completely skewed off as soon as you used a metric expansion alongside an imperial one!
10ft. is 3.048m 100ft. is 30.48m 1000ft. is 304.8m
The proportion of inaccuracy doesn't change, and neither does the conversion factor. 10ft is 1.6% larger than 3m. 1000ft is 1.6% larger than 300m. 1,000,000ft is 1.6% larger than 300,000m
As for a character controlling a 1.6 mile square, if they were 6km tall, and could move (magically, behold the get-out caveat of all fantasy!) as fast as if they were 6ft. tall, then they would control that space. The relevant thing is that if the corridor is 10km wide and the characters can control a 5km square, this is mechanically identical to a 10ft. wide corridor with a character controlling a 5ft. square - it's just significantly less easy to picture!
Ah, my bad, I thought hill giants were shorter than that this edition. However, a 4m tall dwarf would be over 13 ft tall. My point is, just swapping ft for meters 1:1 is ridiculous. 5 ft ≈ 1.5 m, just use the official conversion.
Ah, my bad, I thought hill giants were shorter than that this edition. However, a 4m tall dwarf would be over 13 ft tall. My point is, just swapping ft for meters 1:1 is ridiculous. 5 ft ≈ 1.5 m, just use the official conversion.
I agree, I was mainly trying to say that it is arbitrary if you use it in isolation - A hill giant in 5e is 24ft tall (I think), and a dwarf is 4ft. tall. If you change that to 24m and 4m, the proportions remain the same, they occupy the same number of 5m squares as they did 5ft. squares, and the mechanics of combat, movement, and so forth is unchanged!
Nobody gets Thoruk's point, and it's hilarious. He's saying that it's all relative. A dwarf can substitute feet for meters if everything else does. A 10km wide hallway is fairly easily controlled if everything moving through takes up a 5km by 5km square and has a 5km reach. Of course, this would be realistically incorrect, but it honestly doesn't matter what you call THE UNIT as long as it is consistently THE UNIT.
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Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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No, we get Thurok’s point, and while technically they’re correct in their statements about the relativity of things, we just disagree with them that it doesn’t matter.
Splinks are fine, meters are not changing a known/defined nit to an unknown fantasy unit I have no problem with. Changing the unit label without converting properly I do. So no quart on you are missing a point - feet and meters AREN’T just blank labels that can be freely switched - they are well defined and k own units with a actual conversions to switch between. I don’t have a problem with converting using the proper factors ( I don’t mind converting with a little fudging like calling 10 ft 3 m) what I minded was was calling 10 ft 10 m. Actually, if you want to call the world Gulliver and we are the Lilliputians I can accept that as well.
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So, just out of curiosity, mechanically speaking, would l break anything if l switched the Imperial measurements for Metric. For example, Humans walking speed from 30ft to 30m? (Which, according to google, would more than triple the movement speed (98ft), mathematically. But I'm not asking about Mathematically. I want to know if changing the "ft" to "m" has any mechanical differences which l should know about.) (Also, as I said, l just want to know about what would happen if l changed ft to m. If l do decide to implement this idea, l would not take the time to convert everything into their metric equivalent (such as making 30ft be 9 meters rounded down.) I'm also not asking if it's something l should do. At the moment, this is just a idea i'm looking into. I currently have no plans of implementing this idea, no matter the results.)
The official conversion to metric is
15 ft. = 5 m5 ft. = 1.5 m.Edit: Corrected.
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provided that you convert everything, it doesn't actually matter if it's feet or meters or kilometers - as long as everything is changed - a 10ft. wide corridor becomes 10km wide, whilst a player commands a 5km wide space and has a reach of 5km. Ultimately, it's just an arbitrary unit - so long as it is applied to everything (EG a human is around 6km tall).
With that being the case, why are you contemplating this?
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Well, for one, it's just something l thought of and wanted a answer for, and second, l don't have any measuring sticks, so my only "real" frame of reference for length/distance is Minecraft, with each full block being 1 meter cubed. So since i've spent many hours in minecraft, and have used it to build many structures, it's easier for me to visualize things in minecraft blocks, which, again, is 1 meter cubed. So, instead of "Your movement speed is 30 feet" l could think "you can move about 9 blocks in 6 seconds,18 if you dash."
Well, it is and it isn't. Remember that this is an abstraction of a real world, and while it is fantasy we tend to better connect with what's familiar to us. We can more easily visualize a 6ft person than a 6m person. We can more easily understand how difficult or painful it might be for a 6ft person to fall 10ft than we can a 6m person to fall 10m.
I think you'd find a lot of things spring up that make the world feel wrong, or at least you'd have to stop and think through stuff that would otherwise be pretty simple to grok.
I think a better, easier conversion is your minecraft example - 5ft is one "block." You can move 6 blocks with a move action. The game grid already works this way and dividing by 5 is easy.
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Well, a lot of stuff will definitely feel wrong, but nothing changes mechanically by calling feet meters.
The thing is, if you do this, you aren't gaining any of the benefits of using metric measurements, nor are you in any way helping your players convert to the metric system. If you're going to do something like this, you might as well convert to made up units to avoid confusion.
Specifically for this conversion, I don't know why D&D is measured in increments of 5ft instead of 3ft. 3ft is practically 1m. Everyone who uses Freedom Units knows what a yard is. Instead of your standard 6 spaces of movement, you have 10 spaces of movement. Easy peasy.
Km = kilometres. A human is certainly not 6 kilometres tall.
Personally I would say that every square is 2 metres. It's not perfect, but it's closer to D&D's grid measurements than just saying "1 foot is 1 metre". 1 metre is 3.28 feet.
[REDACTED]
The official conversion is 5 ft. (1 square) is 1.5 meters.
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Is that in the new-ish translations of 5e? I recall reading that they use metric instead of imperial.
[REDACTED]
Yes, at least for the languages spoken where metric is used.
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Ok, let’s get our units straight here
to answer the OP’s original question - can I just switch meters for feet as units?
The answer is a big NO - you have to convert all the units - THEN you can switch. And, no Thoruk the units aren’t arbitrary a 10’ wide corridor could be converted to a 3 m wide corridor but a 10 km wide anything converts to @ 6 miles wide, a 5 km wide square would be about 1.6 miles by 1.6 miles I really want to see the character that can really control that space.
Can metric units be used? Sure just convert properly first.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
It is true that a human is not 6km tall. But, if you just dislike using the word "Feet" then simple replace the word with "Meters", and change nothing. 5ft. becomes 5m. A dwarf is 4m tall, not 5ft. In this sense, it is arbitrary.
I mean, the units are kind of arbitrary.
Change them to fantasy units if you like - a Human is between 5-6 Splinks tall, whereas a dwarf is about 4 Splinks tall. Each character has a reach of 5 Splinks, and with a polearm or reach weapon they have a reach of 10 Splinks. They can move 30 Splinks in a round, except for dwarves which move 25 Splinks, and a corridor is typically 10 Splinks wide.
Is a Splink a Foot, or a Meter? Depends on the theater your mind creates for you.
Also I'm curious as to why you firt converted Feet into Meters, and then converted (Kilo)meters into Miles, and seem to have drawn the conclusion that this disproves converting 10ft. into 3m?
1 mile is 5280ft, whereas 1 Km is 1000m, so you've completely skewed off as soon as you used a metric expansion alongside an imperial one!
10ft. is 3.048m
100ft. is 30.48m
1000ft. is 304.8m
The proportion of inaccuracy doesn't change, and neither does the conversion factor. 10ft is 1.6% larger than 3m. 1000ft is 1.6% larger than 300m. 1,000,000ft is 1.6% larger than 300,000m
As for a character controlling a 1.6 mile square, if they were 6km tall, and could move (magically, behold the get-out caveat of all fantasy!) as fast as if they were 6ft. tall, then they would control that space. The relevant thing is that if the corridor is 10km wide and the characters can control a 5km square, this is mechanically identical to a 10ft. wide corridor with a character controlling a 5ft. square - it's just significantly less easy to picture!
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A meter is longer than a yard. A 4m tall dwarf would be the size of a hill giant.
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That is correct, if you only change the scale for the Dwarf. A 4m Dwarf is not as tall as a 24m Hill Giant!
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Ah, my bad, I thought hill giants were shorter than that this edition. However, a 4m tall dwarf would be over 13 ft tall. My point is, just swapping ft for meters 1:1 is ridiculous. 5 ft ≈ 1.5 m, just use the official conversion.
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I agree, I was mainly trying to say that it is arbitrary if you use it in isolation - A hill giant in 5e is 24ft tall (I think), and a dwarf is 4ft. tall. If you change that to 24m and 4m, the proportions remain the same, they occupy the same number of 5m squares as they did 5ft. squares, and the mechanics of combat, movement, and so forth is unchanged!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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Nobody gets Thoruk's point, and it's hilarious. He's saying that it's all relative. A dwarf can substitute feet for meters if everything else does. A 10km wide hallway is fairly easily controlled if everything moving through takes up a 5km by 5km square and has a 5km reach. Of course, this would be realistically incorrect, but it honestly doesn't matter what you call THE UNIT as long as it is consistently THE UNIT.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
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No, we get Thurok’s point, and while technically they’re correct in their statements about the relativity of things, we just disagree with them that it doesn’t matter.
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Splinks are fine, meters are not changing a known/defined nit to an unknown fantasy unit I have no problem with. Changing the unit label without converting properly I do. So no quart on you are missing a point - feet and meters AREN’T just blank labels that can be freely switched - they are well defined and k own units with a actual conversions to switch between. I don’t have a problem with converting using the proper factors ( I don’t mind converting with a little fudging like calling 10 ft 3 m) what I minded was was calling 10 ft 10 m. Actually, if you want to call the world Gulliver and we are the Lilliputians I can accept that as well.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.