I like the numbers zero through nine. As a game and systems designer, their differences are meaningful in relation to each other, and orthogonally. When you divide or multiply or add one against another, you see a broad series of relationships and results.

I find double digits quickly ambiguous. When I’m working on something, the difference between 16 and 17 starts to lose its meaning. Is there a difference between having 872 pieces of candy or 874 pieces?

So, my first suggestion.

During your design, consider keeping game object values in the single digits as long as possible.

You have 3 health, the monster has 6; not 300 vs 600. The backpack can carry 8 objects, not a weight of 80 lb.

1. Any numerical change has meaningful impact on the design. The flip side is that any adjustments may have too much impact. A tabletop design pal once told me to raise all my card values by one, because all my cards had values ranging from 1-4. That range was too dramatic for him; he wanted them 2-5. He could be right.
2. Most of us, players and designers, have better clarity around lower numbers. I can picture 8 objects; it’s more difficult to picture 80 lb.
3. At larger values, you need larger differences to mean something. Adding 800 plus 2 means something less than adding 8 plus 2. At larger orders of magnitude, the differences have to be higher to cause meaning.

Another pal, a theoretical physicist, confirmed this:

“Perturbation theory” is what we call the approximation method where we first solve the easy problem before considering small corrections. Like let’s say some variable x is 0.99. you might first compute the case when x = 1, and then figure out what the corrections are in powers of a = 0.01. You might need the correction that’s proportional to a and a^2, etc but at some point you can see that the corrections are so small that you can ignore them, depending on how precise you need to be.

But this gets more interesting, to my second, deeper point.

I believe interacting with different orders of magnitude of any object or concept changes the domain of interactions.

I’ve talked about this in the past, but I'm fascinated by communication in the age of sail. Communication that takes place over weeks and months, getting a single written message across the Atlantic, creates a very different relationship than communication that happens in minutes. Near-instant communication shifts our relationship with communication entirely. The result is that communication itself fades into the background, and the high order of communication magnitude creates ripples and results at a different level.

My theoretical physicist pal shared a fascinating (and short) physics article called “More Is Different”, by P.W. Anderson. The 1972 piece talks about “emergence” in physics. The key quote:

The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.

In games, we often talk about emergence as the depth afforded and desired by orthogonal designs overlapping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEF4GVNzkUw

In the physics example however, new properties appear just because there are a ton of something, such that the organization is itself complex.

Cells make a body, and a brain, and the brain has some form of consciousness. The domain is no longer the same, though the parts remain individual cells.

Another [more] unsettling example is guns. When it takes you time to reload your musket, then each bullet means something very different than when you can fire multiple bullets near instantly with one press. The domain changes, new and different properties and consequences emerge, an awful probability space.