08 November 2026

Gaming With Scientists And Engineers

I ran a, successful, Twilight: 2000 converted to GURPS campaign for several years.

I lived in Ames, Iowa and we played at the Memorial Union on Iowa State University.

The player pool was full of STEM students.

That means they're familiar with the metric system.

Twilight: 2000 is in metric because the US military uses the metric system.

GURPS does not use the metric system.

The "conflict" doesn't really come up very often.

T2K uses real world items that we could get real world weights for, so the kg vs lb thing was nullified. 

Ranged combat in GURPS is given in yards, not meters.

The problem happens when I, keeping in the style of the setting, said that a target was X meters away and then using that same number on the range chart in yards.

I had two players doing the math on their calculators and demanding that since I said 100m, we should use the range band for 109.3613 yards.

That changes the range penalty from -10 to -11, so it was screwing them.

It was a little squabble, but it was persistent.

I think it was the first time I invoked the concept that π = 3.00 in GURPS, therefore 1m = 1 yard and 1 lb. = 0.500kg.

It's strange how that made the engineers happy, but the scientists still chaffed.

What finally got them to stop grumbling over it was to hand them my hoary old SMART book and show them the section on range estimation.  It's not what you call, "highly precise," which means that, "the target is 100m away," suddenly means 80 to 120m away and 100 yards fits in that range, so they finally accepted when I gave a range penalty lower than they calculated. 

I just realized that this NEVER came up in any of my conversions of Traveller to GURPS.  Traveller is even more metric than T2k! 

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