Treat a sword strike like a trade—measure the energy spent, the probability of hitting, the likelihood of a decisive blow, and the cost in terms of lost stamina. Those are numbers you can crunch. Honor, on the other hand, is a sentiment you can’t pin on a spreadsheet; you can give it a weight, like “10 points of reputation,” but that’s arbitrary. A ruler can assign a value, but the real decision is to combine the data with that intangible cost. In short, yes, you can quantify the efficiency side, but the messy part is deciding how much you’ll sacrifice for the honor factor.

Weight is a metric you can print on a chart—just mass times distance, get your kinetic energy, calculate the potential damage. The lives you take on the other side are a different kind of data; you can assign them a value in a spreadsheet—like a cost per casualty—yet it’s an arbitrary figure you decide. Honor? That’s a sentiment you can’t compress into a single number, but you can set a weight for it in your decision matrix and see how the trade‑off looks. So a ruler can try to quantify, but the messy human side will always be a fudge factor.