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Kursk wrote:

For WoTC (like any other business) it's decided by market forces. My guess is that the U.S. is by far their largest market. Their decision to create a 4E rather than expand the # of people that play 3.X tells me that they want to sell primarily to people who already own 3.X. In short, metric won't be in any core books

I dont have a clue about their sales, but i doubt that is no longer true. International markets are more and more important every time for US companies, including game companies. Just think about World of Warcraft in Korea and China for example (as well as Europe)

Paper_Weasel wrote:

Yeah, SI works better for most things than US standard. No, the US isn't going to change all at once. We'll all be happier if we just accept this, and stop trying to argue the point.

That's just becouse US (and UK) are more stubborn about it that every other nation in the world. I'm from Spain. When we moved into the international metric sistem we left behind our "leguas", "varas", "arrobas", "cantaros" and "fanegas". We did it, it wasnt that hard, therefore you can do it as well as long as you try. It is not like every other nation in the world is smarter, isnt it?

triqui wrote:

That's not enterelly true. World of warcraft was launched in english long before it was launched in chinese. But chinese market is not "small" by any means.

?? So? Where do they make more money? In the Chinese or U.S. market? If you don't know the answer why did you post your comment?

The funny things is that it SEEMS the d&d manuals use only the imperial system and that the problem was the "complex conversion"!

Italian books are converted to the metric system... not only the "distances" (entangle has 12m radius, web 3m radius, and so on), but also weight (a short sword weight 1kg) and so on
The height of creatures in the monster manual and races in the PHB are metric (meters and centimeters), the weight are expressed in kg
The entire the system is already converted to metric since the first translation of the phb! There ins't any reference to feet, pounds or the like in the Italian books
That means they DIDN'T want to make a metric system English manual. There were never been any "conversion problem"... they simple preferred to use that system in original language because the U.S. is the bigger market that speak English

triqui wrote:

TI'm from Spain. When we moved into the international metric sistem we left behind our "leguas", "varas", "arrobas", "cantaros" and "fanegas". We did it, it wasnt that hard, therefore you can do it as well as long as you try. It is not like every other nation in the world is smarter, isnt it?

Apples and oranges. Spain has an economy about the size of Los Angeles county. It's a tiny economy. The U.S. dominates the world culturally. Eventually it will change, but slowly. And BTW, it takes more brain power to figure out everything in Imperial/US than decimal based S.I. so maybe whoever has difficulty has the int deficiency...