hyperoperationfractallisation:
rpg setting with multiple competing units of damage/resilience used in different regions. you gotta worry about the conversion between hp celsius and hp fahrenheit
“1 hp is the amount of damage dealt by a one gram sphere of pure iron traveling at one meter per second against a 1x1x1 meter cube of graphite at standard temperature and pressure” versus “it’s so intuitive, 100 hp of damage hurts a lot and 0 hp of damage doesn’t hurt at all so you can just think of it as ‘percent pain’”
it actually makes a lot of sense if you look into the history of it, see back in the first age Fantasy Dan Fahrenheit was a skilled artificer who designed high-precision health bars that were way more reliable and consistent than anything else that existed at the time. yes, the calibration points might seem archaic now, but at the time it was the most practical system realistically possible to reproduce at scale. and also it’s like so intuitive because if an attack does 100 hp of damage it hurts a lot so it’s l
well technically originally* the international wizard council defined 0 hp to be equal to the “KO point”, and yes for most practical applications when someone has 0 hp remaining they fall unconscious and need immediate medical attention (which we can all agree makes way more sense than how it works in hpF), but our understanding of health and damage has grown a lot in the centuries since then, and we now understand that the “KO point” isn’t a true constant. so these days it’s incorporated into the rest of the Fantasy Metric System by defining the Gargamel Constant precisely in terms of hp/mp*s², which is much more rigorous and exact.
*well if you want to go all the way back, when it was originally proposed the standard Health Point Celsius Scale was the opposite of what it is now, so someone’s hp total represented the amount of damage they’ve taken instead of the amount of damage they could still take before reaching the KO point. this was extremely hard to use so it didn’t last very long
i love the idea that health bars are physical objects
The international prototype health bar is kept inside a nested bell jar at the Archives Nationales in Paris.
Is this like an organ in a jar or measurement instrument
Bc like we put both in museums
in this “what if hp is like temperature” analogy a health bar is like a thermometer. I imagine in this world when you go to the doctor they stick a health bar in your mouth to check your hp. but of course adventurers would just carry their health bars around with them
So is there also a watts vs horsepower debate for mp?