I love your work so far. This could end up being the definitive first role-playing game edition for many years to come thanks to the clear and simple presentation. And in that light I have a selfish request to make for those of us across the pond. Would you entertain the notion of making a version with SI units (metric system)?
1 year ago(+3)
Thank you so much for your kind words :) and I love that you asked! The thing about the ruleset is that it is meant to be used on a table with twelve-inch rulers, which is why characters’ speeds tend to be from 12” to 3” with four degrees total.
The issue is that metric rulers go up to 15 cm, which is not divisible into four degrees of speed. However, at the same time, I think it is extremely difficult if not impossible to get to a speed of 3”. The only way I can see someone exceeding 1,500 coins of weight is by wearing plate armor and a backpack, wielding a two-handed sword, and carrying a large sack – which is pretty silly. If only speeds 12”/9”/6” are realistic, then we have a basis for saying metric speeds might be 15/10/05 cm. (Though still, these are not proportional to each other, since 6” is half of 12” but 5 cm is 1/3 of 15 cm.)
Overall, the goal of FMC is to be an accurate representation rather than a reformulation. I would really like to make it more accessible to people who use SI units, but base-12 math is just not friendly with base-10 math. At the same time, if you wanted to use SI units, it shouldn’t be difficult along the lines of above! It just would not be the “same”.
1 year ago(-1)
I think you are overthinking it maybe. First in these parts (Europe) and I would presume in every metric system country there are two main rule lengths, namely 15cm and 30cm. 12'' is almost 30cm so the speed/distance equivalent in SI units could easily be 30cm/22.5cm/15cm/7.5cm. Multiplying those by 0.4 (or dividing by 2.5) you get the dungeon movement distances in meters, namely 12m/9m/6m/3m, and multiplying those by 3 (or by 1.2 if using the former tabletop cm metric) you get the wilderness (or non dungeon) movement distances in meters, namely 36m/27m/18m/9m.
For completeness at least in the distance department hexcrawling is a simple conversion from 5 miles hexes to 8 kilometers hexes.
As you rightly say the conversion to me (and probably to most metric system players) comes quite easily as we have been doing conversions such the above (or similar) when playing, so in the end it is not a big problem.
I doubt many metric system players play the game in imperial units as they are not very intuitive but I may be wrong in this point.
1 year ago(-1)
Hey, I ended up thinking about it some more and then wrote a blog post! This is what I came up with, and a screenshot below of the conversion table: https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2023/02/od-metric-conversion.html
Please let me know what you think! :)