Community

Kill the 5' increment.  But don't move back to squares.

Go with yards.

You have a movement speed of 5 yards per round (or whatever).  Standing up costs 1 yard of movement.  Every yard you move through difficult terrain costs an extra yard of movement.  Medium sized creatures take up one square yard of space, roughly.

Yards, for people not from the USA, are about as long as a meter.  (1 yard is about 0.9 meters)  It is also about as long as a reasonable stride length (ie, you can approximate how far something is in yards by counting steps).

Am I crazy?  Probably.

The game designers would have to pull together new math and calculations for Rate of Travel...since the change is significant but not halved from current calculations.

Using a meter increment instead of 5ft increments is mathematically quicker. If your speed is 6m, you move 6 spaces on the battle mat. If your speed is 30ft, you divide 30 by 5 ... and then move 6 spaces.

Using metric instead of imperial measurements is also mathematically quicker. We write numbers in decimal and everyone finds it easier to divide and multiply by multiples of 10 as a result. If we wrote numbers in hexadecimal, I would probably be suggesting a measurement system that uses multiples of 16 instead of 10. The programmers among you will understand that multiplying or dividing by a constant to convert between unit types is generally a few orders of magnitude faster than looking up arbitrary values in a table to do so.

Shardey - You say you find it unnecessary to change terminology. That's fine, why then do you find it necessary to change editions? If you stay with 4th or 3rd or whichever old edition you like best, you won't have to contend with change. I could make the same argument about any change between any editions, classes, races, feats, anything.

In 3rd edition they had Attacks of Opportunity, then in 4th they had Opportunity Attacks. In 3rd edition the top three ability scores were Str, Dex, Con, then in 4th they changed the order to Str, Con, Dex. In both of these cases is was "unnecessary" to make such trivial changes, but both offered advantages over not changing. Opportunity Attacks is faster and easier to say (even if only marginally) and the ability rearrangement was to line up with the 4th edition Defences list.

If anyone can think of even a single reason to stay with either imperial measurements or 5ft increments instead of yard increments, I'd love to hear it.

Jun 20, 2012 -- 3:51AM, Kalranya wrote:

..."window.parent.tinyMCE.get('post_content').onLoad.dispatch();" contenteditable="true" />And by the way, this whole feet vs. yards vs. meters vs. attoparsecs vs. light-nanoseconds vs. Smoots thing is why I like squares. How big is a square? Who cares! Use whatever you're comfortable with! 

+1.
Squares rule.