: Re: What are good words to refer to the condition of objects? In RPG games objects such as weapons or armor have a certain durability represented by a number. For example a sword has 100/100 Durability.

@Nimeshi163

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Usually adjectives are grouped into pairs of opposites such as "good and bad" or "light or dark". We don't really have a word for "10% good" or "70% light", in fact all words that might fall in between the extremes usually have specific meanings: "murky", "grey", or "ashen" all fall somewhere between "light" and "dark", but they aren't one of them more or less bright than the others but rather express different ideas about "neither light nor dark".

If you use existing adjectives to express a meaning they do not commonly have, you will confuse your readers. In your example, I'm not sure whether "good" or "chipped" are supposed to be harder; to me something chipped might still be good, so both might even refer to the same level of hardness.

A better idea for a scale of hardness, instead of finding one adjective for each level of the scale, would be to use pronouns in combination with adjectives in the same way that psychologists do when they construct Likert scales.

Here is an example from a psychological test, illustrating what I mean:

In the same way you could create a scale of hardness:

soft
very soft
somewhat soft
somewhat hard
very hard
hard

If you use additional pronouns such as "most" or adjectives such as "extremly" to further differentiate that scale, you can create 11 different levels of hardness.

You could also use the Mohs scale of mineral hardness as an example and use numbers.

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