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Outside of Battlefleet Gothic, every ruleset seems to be the the Imperial standard of measurement.

I originally thought that the games were "translated" from the metric system into our crazed American form of measuring things, but I found out that our associates across the pond, were subjected to our slightly maddening rulers too.

What do you feel about this? Do you have house rules to put things into metric?

LOTR has cm and inches for all the measurements.

I grew up with both (despite my flag, I'm Irish) and am comfortable with both.

I think just because of the conventions of miniature scale that I am used to, inch sized bases makes it make sense that the unit of measurement is an inch. With older models that have 2cm sized bases I think it makes sense to use cm because two units is a base, and that seems easy to me as well.

With more modern minis with 32 mm bases I don't see an advantage to either method, and it's one reason why I like to stick to 25mm bases for my infantry.

Never met anyone over here in Germany who was bothered by using inches for measurement either.

Why does it matter? For anything important (will the shelves fit?) I use metric.

For a rough room size guide I literally use feet (Mine, shod, are 12" long)

For charge range, obviously every 1/32nd inch is critical (I lie, I was never that serious about it).

On this side of the pond all the rulers and tape measures I've seen have had both, but... why worry about what it is and simply think of it as a unit of measurement? 5 lines along the pointy thing.....

And no house rules here. Inches work as well as any other measure given the multiple distance time and scale compressions in 40k anyway.

Well.

GW is a British company.

Guess which Empire the Imperial system is named after?

When Britain adopted the Metric System we kept a few things

Miles on the road
Pints in our pubs and milk
Inches in our wargames

I've always assumed inches are more fitting to the standard scale of Warhammer style wargames, as something like metres in the world our miniatures live in. Not too granular, so that most commonly used ranges are rather low. Metric beats Imperial for everything else, but I got used to wargaming ranges in inches.

As an Australian using the metric sytem my whole life....

*Rolls 2d6 for movement*

7

*Moves 7 inches*
OR
*Moves 17.5cm* (and yes I had pause and calculate the answer)

My Rhino gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:
My Rhino gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!

For those of you who are interested...

A hogshead was 63 gallons.

Specifically, 63 gallons of wine. It's a term dating back to at least the 15th century, and it might be a corruption of the term hog's hide, which might make clearer sense for referring to a wine container, but we really don't know how the word came about. The casks are also repurposed to mature whiskey...

But...

You can have a double hogshead ...

Which is also called a port pipe, and it holds about 145 gallons...

... or a butt.

A butt holds about 132 gallons, so when someone tells you that they drank a buttload last night, they are either lying or dead.

For those that don't care feel free to ignore me, like you ignore those people who like to point out that Space Marines don't carry reloads for their weapons into battle.

Canadian here. We always choose our measurement system via a sophisticated system of pulling it out of our on a case-by-case basis.

Large Distances: km
Short distances: inches and feet
Construction: inches and feet
Construction when your boss bought European Machinery: Decimalized Inches
Construction if you are a CNC operator: really weird Metric numbers

Gas is in L
Beer is in oz
Soda is in mL
Hard liquor is served by the oz, but sold by the mL.

Government work is in metric.

Everything else is up for grabs. Have fun!

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
Canadian here.
Gas is in L
Beer is in oz
Soda is in mL
Hard liquor is served by the oz, but sold by the mL.

What's the maple syrup measured in?

 Cap'n Facebeard wrote:

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
Canadian here.
Gas is in L
Beer is in oz
Soda is in mL
Hard liquor is served by the oz, but sold by the mL.

What's the maple syrup measured in?

Liters.

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:

Decimalized Inches

That's just another level !

Think you’ll find a Hogshead is a terrible, former riverside pub in the Kent commuter backwater we moved from Edinburgh to.]

Best known for never, ever asking for ID, and a barman that looked and behaved like Beavis.

Tape measures has both imperial and metric scale, so i have never seen any problems with it.

I’m a Canadian that grew up as we switched from Imperial to metric.
I’ve learned to use both and convert them roughly in my head. I’m fine using either one.

That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C. That I still can’t manage to covert in my head.

Only thing in Imperial around here is wargaming, it's a struggle to even find a tape in inches outside the hobby store.

An inch is definitely a sensible and intuitive unit for it, as it's also the size of the normal base and you learn to judge it pretty fast. It's also inherently more lax when it comes to physical accuracy, having to be accurate to within 0.5cm with each move would get really tedious really fast.

My favourite unit of measurement is the Attoparsec. Its just over an inch, and therefore might be the perfect match to the 27.5mm and 32mm bases that are now de riguer

Epic used to be in cm as well, which worked a bit better with d6 rolls for random movement etc at that scale.

It never bothered me that Warhammer uses Imperial measurements. The whole game is make-believe. No reason why the measurements in it wouldn't be fanciful departures from reality, too.

Cyel wrote:
I've always assumed inches are more fitting to the standard scale of Warhammer style wargames, as something like metres in the world our miniatures live in. Not too granular, so that most commonly used ranges are rather low. Metric beats Imperial for everything else, but I got used to wargaming ranges in inches.

Main reason being if all stats on the unit profile is 1-10, you either have very short movement or move in Inch
In addition, by the time, a model used a 1" base, was 1" high and therefore moved 1" as moving 1 base width is even today a common system for scale agnostic rules
of course with GW moving away from 25mm bases and models, and profiles can be larger than 10, no real reason to use Inch outside of legacy

in games were this wasn't the case, metric was used and in addition, Warhammer in Spain used metric from the very beginning, hence why dice sets had 2 different artillery dice, one for inch and one for metric

 Ghool wrote:
I’m a Canadian that grew up as we switched from Imperial to metric.
I’ve learned to use both and convert them roughly in my head. I’m fine using either one.

That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C. That I still can’t manage to covert in my head.

You have to be good at math in general to do that in the head and not on a calculator.
That said, if you are, you just have to remember two things:
-Difference between F and C is 1.8
-At -40, both C and F is equal.

So, take the numeric value you want to convert, add 40. Then multiply by 1.8 if converting to F, or divide by 1.8 if converting to C. Subtract 40.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
I’m a Canadian that grew up as we switched from Imperial to metric.
I’ve learned to use both and convert them roughly in my head. I’m fine using either one.

That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C. That I still can’t manage to covert in my head.

You have to be good at math in general to do that in the head and not on a calculator.
That said, if you are, you just have to remember two things:
-Difference between F and C is 1.8
-At -40, both C and F is equal.

So, take the numeric value you want to convert, add 40. Then multiply by 1.8 if converting to F, or divide by 1.8 if converting to C. Subtract 40.

I'm sorry... just thinking of math gave me a flashback to primary school. I feel like I should've raised.my hand before talking.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
I’m a Canadian that grew up as we switched from Imperial to metric.
I’ve learned to use both and convert them roughly in my head. I’m fine using either one.

That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C. That I still can’t manage to covert in my head.

You have to be good at math in general to do that in the head and not on a calculator.
That said, if you are, you just have to remember two things:
-Difference between F and C is 1.8
-At -40, both C and F is equal.

So, take the numeric value you want to convert, add 40. Then multiply by 1.8 if converting to F, or divide by 1.8 if converting to C. Subtract 40.

I'm sorry... just thinking of math gave me a flashback to primary school. I feel like I should've raised.my hand before talking.

Then we are even as i genuinely belived you was pure BS about the hogshead, until i googled the word.

MUHAHAHA... My powers of confusion on working...

Now for the next part...

::waves hand::

You will give me all your cookies. (And not ones from the internet, I already get ads I cannot explain, nor understand)

 FrozenDwarf wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
I’m a Canadian that grew up as we switched from Imperial to metric.
I’ve learned to use both and convert them roughly in my head. I’m fine using either one.

That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C. That I still can’t manage to covert in my head.

You have to be good at math in general to do that in the head and not on a calculator.
That said, if you are, you just have to remember two things:
-Difference between F and C is 1.8
-At -40, both C and F is equal.

So, take the numeric value you want to convert, add 40. Then multiply by 1.8 if converting to F, or divide by 1.8 if converting to C. Subtract 40.

Curse you for making me memorize new math.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
GW is a British company.

Not just GW but virtually all of the wargaming pedigree is English of an age where everything was Imperial and it was more intuitive to estimate in Imperial. I'm (40) at that weird boundary where school had started to teach Metric but everyone still used Imperial so still find it more intuitive to estimate 8" than 20cm.

And to be fair it works fine, a standard infantry figure in 25mm scale is about an inch high and on an inch wide base, so a 1" grid makes sense and for the ranges we're talking about it's less work to deal with since virtually all movement type ranges are single digits.

There's no reason you couldn't use cm though I'm not sure it'd improve or worsen anything.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ghool wrote:
That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C.

I remember someone claiming F is a good scale for how people feel, and C is a good scale for how water feels.

Though I'm not sure I follow. In F, 98 is a normal body temp with 100 being a fever. Water freezes at 32 and a comfortable room temperature is 70. I'm not sure how that's more intuitive than the equivalent in C (37, 39, 0 and 20, respectively).

Herzlos wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ghool wrote:
That said, I cannot for the life of me understand why the US STILL uses F for temperature measurements instead of C.

I remember someone claiming F is a good scale for how people feel, and C is a good scale for how water feels.

Though I'm not sure I follow. In F, 98 is a normal body temp with 100 being a fever. Water freezes at 32 and a comfortable room temperature is 70. I'm not sure how that's more intuitive than the equivalent in C (37, 39, 0 and 20, respectively).

And Kelvin is how atoms feel is how the saying goes.

The thing with F has more to do with the weather. It's a 0-100 scale of how it feels outside, with those being the upper and lower limits of what you should be out in. It's absolutely arbitrary, but it does a good job of letting you know what kind of day it will be. The concept of "its freezing out" is just that its in the lower third of the scale. It absolutely makes sense for day to day life which is really all most people care about regarding temperature. Anything outside of that 0-100 scale is an extreme condition.

So with Fahrenheit you know when it starts freezing outside but with Celsius you don't?

And the scale has nothing to do with weather, 0 is the lowest point Fahrenheit could keep a water-salt solution liquid which isn't something you will find outside so the value isn't related to anything natural

and people having fever isn't the upper limit of being outside either

that people because they are used to it can connect it to events because they know 0 is cold and 100 is hot doesn't give it more sense over -18 to 38

Farenheit isn't good for the weather or people. It is good for people that grew up using F° and thus know what F° number means a good temperature, but the same exact same rule applies to people that grew up using C° and thus know what C° number means a good temperature.

The reason why America still uses F° is because America loves to be contrarian about it.

 kodos wrote:
So with Fahrenheit you know when it starts freezing outside but with Celsius you don't?

And the scale has nothing to do with weather, 0 is the lowest point Fahrenheit could keep a water-salt solution liquid which isn't something you will find outside so the value isn't related to anything natural

and people having fever isn't the upper limit of being outside either

that people because they are used to it can connect it to events because they know 0 is cold and 100 is hot doesn't give it more sense over -18 to 38

No, just that its more of a percentile scale. Almost like a letter grade or throttle gauge. I mean, realistically claiming the virtues of a -18 to 38 scale sounds like the kind of ugly awful numbers that makes Imperial such a mess, right? A zero to 100 sounds more natural and has been a pretty historically common bounds for a temperate climate, with anything going over the end being pretty extreme. Doesn't help if you live in Arizona of course, but for the most part, its a natural upper and lower bound for most people's day.

Now, I'm not trying to say its better. It's completely arbitrary and if it were replaced tomorrow I wouldn't bat an eye. I just understand why it makes sense to people that mostly only care about temperature as far as it impacts their wardrobe.