Unusual Units - and D&D?

[Khedrac]

The other day at work I cam across what I thought might be a contender for the silliest unit of measurement: the "DM" as a unit of distance.

Actually in context it was a speed "DM/h" where 1 DM/h was slightly less than 1 knot (nautical mile/hour).

First up - it's not decimetres (dm) or decametres (Dm) for two reasons - one is that the "M" is capital and the second was the closeness to 1 knot

Asking around I eventually found that this is the Data Mile and speed is Data Miles per hour!
Also known as the "Artillery Mile".

One Data Mile is 6000 feet (what my brother called a kilo-fathom when I told him) and was said to come from the US Marine Corp's inability to cope with hard maths.

So what use is a data mile? Not much, but consider the speed 1DM/h...

1 Data Mile per hour is 10 feet per 6 seconds, and what is 6 seconds? - It's a D&D round.
Yes, for those playing 3rd Ed D&D (rounds and turns changed a bit over the course of D&D so I don't remember for other versions) 10 ft / rd is 1 DM/h

Sticking with 3E and 3.5 D&D, 1 DM/h is a 5' speed and a double move or a 10' speed and a single move/round.

It's really very convenient for calculating overland travel rates, and it even has a related acronym...

So what other silly units are there out there that might work better for D&D than conventional units?

Oh - as for less useful but even sillier units, when I mentioned the data mile to a colleague he told me than when he used to work on oil-fields they measured volume in "acre feet", but I don't see that as useful for D&D.
(On one project, one of his colleagues wrote a report on their drilling progress in "furlongs per fortnight" as it was going so slowly, but that was done to be silly so doesn't count as a genuine 'silly' unit.)

[JeenLeen]

From XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/

I had some weird units in my last statistics test, but I can't remember what they were. Mostly sounded weird since they were jargon from areas I'm not familiar with, would probably make sense to those in the field or sport ("grass speed" for... I think it was golf).

[Cespenar]

I don't have any that would really be useful in a D&D game, but:

Gp/lbs, maybe, for loot value?

Or mansecond, for action economy?

[Leucis]

From XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/

I had some weird units in my last statistics test, but I can't remember what they were. Mostly sounded weird since they were jargon from areas I'm not familiar with, would probably make sense to those in the field or sport ("grass speed" for... I think it was golf).

This is amazing.
1 (poop/bird)/hour is an excellent unit of measurement

[Knaight]

I've had to get used to some odd units, most of which are fine: I can respect the cfs-hr and acre-in, and while I have a hatred of the BTU I can see where it exists in context and accept it. Then there's "Tons of refrigeration", which is an energy unit based on the latent heat of fusion of water, along with "barrels of oil", a volume unit that doesn't actually need to have anything to do with oil, and which is a different volume than the "barrel". If you're actually using oil it just gets worse.

Some of these are useful to D&D - the acre inch and acre foot units basically only exist because they're good for measuring precipitation (and large lakes), where the acre measurement comes from the area and the inch or foot comes from the depth of rain/standing water. They can be justified for most anything with an irrigation system. Tons of refrigeration, not so much.

[Fri]

I remember in nautical term, Beaufort Scale which measure how strong the force of wind is actualy subjective. Like Beaufort scale 0 (calm) means "smoke rises completely vertically" and Beaufort scale 4 (moderate breeze) means "loose paper and dust flies away, small branches on tree moves).

I'm mentioning this because I read someone who's learning to work at ship and he always thought beaufort scale is an actual measurement scale (like kph or mph or joule/s, whatever), only to find that it's actually based on watching stuff flies away.

[factotum]

While it's true that the Beaufort scale was originally based on physical phenomena like you mention, I'm pretty sure it's been codified to particular ranges of wind speed nowadays, in the same way that the measurement called a "foot" (originally the length of a person's actual foot) was locked down to a specific length a long time ago.

[tantric]

li, chinese mile: before it was standardized, a li was more a measure of the effort required to get some where than distance. a mountain path was more li uphill than downhill.

in steven brust's Khavern Romances, he freely switches between metric, us and weird english units to reflect the conflicting systems used on that world.