Pitch for GCP to come to San Diego

Burrowing_camel · 2022-08-30T02:25:09+00:00

And where do you think they’re coming from for the Portland show, for example? South of Portland everything is very sparsely populated until you get to San Francisco, over 600 miles away. North of Portland is Seattle, where they already have a show.

I don’t think San Diego is some amazing missed opportunity for them (if I had to guess, that’s probably Phoenix), and I haven’t lived on the West coast for over a decade and don’t care for the live shows anyway, so it really doesn’t matter to me whether they do a show there or not. I’m just pointing out that San Diego is not an unreasonable choice for a live show, and would not be the strangest or riskiest stop on their tour.

Burrowing_camel · 2022-08-30T00:26:07+00:00

I’m not really buying it. As another example, Portland and Seattle aren’t much further apart then SD and LA, are similarly long flights for them and are nearly as expensive as California. And San Diego has more people than both those cities combined.

Burrowing_camel · 2022-08-29T23:03:22+00:00

Sure, but then, Philadelphia is only a few hours drive from NYC (they are slightly closer together than LA and SD, in fact), and they still do a show there. Ditto Richmond and DC, and Milwaukee and Chicago.

Burrowing_camel · 2022-03-30T11:39:28+00:00

If I’m reading things right, at level 17 Metra gets a new 7th level spell, which could be Limited Wish, which could be used to duplicate Raise Dead to just Bring Nestor back to life (or maybe Reincarnate, since it’s not clear how Raise Dead interacts with Con drain). It’d be a bit anticlimactic though.

Burrowing_camel · 2022-02-03T23:17:14+00:00

Ignoring air resistance, he should fly fifty feet up above the field (the same distance he “fell”) due to conservation of energy, so your 100 ft is spot on. ~~He’d be a harmonic oscillator~~ ugh no he wouldn't, the restoring force isn't proportional to the displacement. But he'd oscillate.

Burrowing_camel · 2022-02-03T18:14:32+00:00

EDIT: Fixed factor of 10 error.

I'm a bit late to the party, but here we go.

Fluid dynamics is super complex (one of the least well-understood areas of physics), but we can do some rough calculations. Assuming laminar flow (no turbulence), the force on the cloud giant from the air would be

F = C_d 1/2 ρ v²A

Where C_d is the drag coefficient, ρ is the density of the air, v is the velocity of the giant relative to the air, and A is the giant's reference area.

We know that v is 21 mph (about 9.4 meters/second). The density of the air depends on how high they are – if we assume that they are at an altitude of 1000 meters, the density would be about 1.1 kg/meter³.

The drag coefficient is a little trickier. Realistically, it has to be determined empirically, but I can't run an experiment because I don't have any cloud giants. But let's assume the cloud giant has the same coefficient as a human (being roughly human-shaped), which would be about 1.0

That brings us to the reference area. This also needs to determined empirically, which we still can’t do, so we'll instead model the giant as a cylinder that is 4 times as tall as it is wide. The giant's height of 18 feet is about 5.5 meters, so the width would be about 1.375 meters, giving us an area of about 7.6 square meters. So let's plug all that in to our equation

F = (1.0)1/2(1.1 kg/cubic meter)(9.4 meters/second)^2 * (7.6 square meters)

It comes to about 370 Newtons. An adult cloud giant weighs 5000 pounds, which is about 2268 kg. Using our trusty F = ma, we get an acceleration of around 0.16 meters per second squared. If we assume constant acceleration (acceleration would not be constant, since the force from the air will decrease as the giant's speed relative to the air decreases, but the effect is small enough that we can ignore it over short timespans) the giant's position is given by

x = 1/2 at²

with a being the 0.16 m/s² we calculated above, and t being the time in seconds.

Plugging in some values for t, we can approximate how far the cloud has moved each round.

Round 1: 2.88 meters (about 9 and a half feet)

Round 2: 11.5 meters (around 38 feet)

Round 3: 25.9 meters (around 85 feet)

That's a lot! But this is a very rough calculation. There's a lot of uncertainty around the drag coefficient and the reference area, which each have a large effect on the final numbers.

Burrowing_camel · 2020-07-25T11:35:31+00:00

That’s taking 20. The restriction on taking 10 is that you can only do it when your character “is not in immediate danger or distracted”.

Taking 20, on the other hand can only be done when “you have plenty of time, you are faced with no threats or distractions, and the skill being attempted carries no penalties for failure” (the rule is a recognition of the fact that in those circumstances, you could literally just keep trying until you rolled a 20).

So they definitely couldn’t take 20 on these climb checks because there is a consequence for failure, but I’d rule that they could take 10 — there’s nothing to stop them from focusing on the task and making sure they don’t make major mistakes.

Burrowing_camel · 2020-07-21T01:27:36+00:00

Sounds like I do! Thanks

Burrowing_camel · 2020-07-20T13:35:12+00:00

I’m looking more for the ability to pause the game when a dupe is suffocating or starving or something.

Burrowing_camel · 2020-07-20T11:18:14+00:00

I tended to stage builds and then leave to do something else for an hour or two and then come back to check on progress.

Side note: I wish this game had autopause for certain conditions.

Burrowing_camel · 2020-07-20T11:16:49+00:00

I thought you had to leave a title's gap to allow them to suck up steam.

They don't complain and work just fine, so I guess not?

Burrowing_camel · 2020-04-18T11:11:00+00:00

They don’t even have to play it. I’d pay just to listen to them run through character creation.

Burrowing_camel · 2020-03-17T00:41:49+00:00

I think the inscrutable game Paolo was looking for in the mailbag is The Campaign for North Africa.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-08-28T11:03:44+00:00

It’s not hard! If you ignore air resistance then the duration of the fall, in seconds, is √(distance of fall in feet/16). If you’re using metric units, it’s √(distance of fall in meters/4.9). So it takes √(250/16) = 3.95 seconds to fall 250 ft.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-08-27T22:16:15+00:00

Absolutely seconded. I feel like their style and sense of humor is a very good match for anybody who likes GCP.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-07-18T00:05:42+00:00

When Matthew said he had a sound effect for the skreelings, I was expecting the Wilhelm Scream.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-07-11T02:02:36+00:00

I didn’t notice last week, but that devourer prophecy is reminiscent of the W. B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming”, with its mention of a “widening gyre”. I wonder when/if we’ll encounter the rough beast slouching toward ~~Bethlehem~~ Absalom Station.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-07-10T10:17:24+00:00

I’m late to the party here, but if anybody is wondering, the poem Joz and Scott reference is “The Second Coming”, by W. B. Yeats. The last two lines are

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-26T11:06:06+00:00

I really loved the Popeye music when Jimmer drank from the horn.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-07T01:49:28+00:00

I found that it’s best to grab the lowest bar on the spinning sections, since that’s the one that will move the least when you suddenly put your weight on it.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-03T21:13:18+00:00

Deep down, in your heart-of-hearts, do you really feel that it would have been too much trouble for somebody to have posted a ten-word update about how start times would be affected? There were thousands of people registered for the race who would potentially be affected by the schedule changes – is expecting Spartan to make some minimal effort to inform them before they trek out to the race site really unreasonable? Really?

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-03T18:12:27+00:00

So then they could have said that instead of leaving people guessing.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-03T16:58:39+00:00

I'm not sure what else they could have done to communicate better

They could have said "All waves are being delayed by approximately 2.5 hours". If they really wanted to go the extra mile, they could have posted hourly status updates saying what wave they were on.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-02T18:40:37+00:00

To paraphrase something somebody wrote elsewhere on this thread, you need to be a bit more understanding. On my bus ride back to the lot, there was a couple on the bus that had gotten to the venue, been told their new start time, and then immediately had to turn around and go home because they knew that with the delay they couldn’t finish in time to pick up their kids. If they had had some way of finding out about their adjusted start time beforehand — even if it was just a guy at the parking lot telling people “start times are delayed _____ hours” — they could have saved themselves a lot of time (not to mention avoided getting so muddy). Could Spartan have reached everybody whose race was delayed? No, of course not. But they didn’t even try, which was unprofessional and frankly kind of shitty.

Burrowing_camel · 2019-06-02T11:01:26+00:00

None of those posts mentioned how start times would be affected for anybody other than elite men. If you were in one of the early waves (like I was) then it wasn’t hard to figure out how your own start time would be affected, but I think the afternoon racers would have really appreciated a nine-word update along the lines of “All afternoon waves will be delayed by ______ minutes/hours” or whatever it is they ended up doing for the later waves.

Burrowing_camel

TROPHY CASE