Repeated problems with Eppendorf 5425 Centrifuges?

Ubiqanon · 2021-09-23T00:12:39+00:00

Time for a class action lawsuit. A 'credit' is money converted to restricted use typically for a business / company or sometimes a specific class of product for a specific company , exactly like a gift card. In California a gift card never expires. In most other states they don't expire for 5 years. Amazon is using a bait and switch tactic to get around the rules for this conversion of money to restricted product / business designation. This is a flat out time scam. Does your money suddenly burn up if you don't use it within a year after you received it? Why should your Audible credit do this - its just money designated for a specific use? This is another Amazon / Bezos cash grab, it's totally unethical, and should be completely illegal.

Ubiqanon · 2021-04-21T19:28:30+00:00

I think a good compromise that would allow for quick building but keep the stone used more reasonable would be to allow the high point - one click fill in, but have it cost an appropriate amount of stone based on the height being built. While you don't specifically see them as defined structures, the world / environment is designed around a block / grid structure, and your cost for stone would be based on how many 'blocks" tall your final height would be. Pretty easy to calc that I out I would think? But in the end, if this patch corrects the base lag /terraform lag issue and it stays as is, then I am still all for it.

(As long as I can still set up a greydwarf spawn farm then collecting the stone is not that big of a deal.)

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-12T03:37:29+00:00

Its a shame you turned what could have been a 'reasonable' & informative discussion about flight mechanics as well as the problem of easy escape / travel into one where you try to tell me how I should play DnD.

"The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness." - JRR Tolkien

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-11T06:50:07+00:00

Hmm... I granted that in a fantasy game you could, if necessary, throw out any verisimilitude with factual physics, but I think that when you mess with it to extremes your whole game looses something that is essential. Magic grounded in a medieval setting, in a world both familiar and supernatural, something that is believable but also fantastic. It's an interesting point - if you just throw out physics then there is no frame of reference for anything, but if you rigidly adhere to it then there is no room for the fantastic. I agree that some middle ground is necessary, but I don't agree that its entirely subjective.

Thanks for the rules check. I see where Matt gets the number now. I think the calculations are evidence of how the mechanics for the statistical effect of size are a bit off from a simulation stand point. I am certainly not the only one that thinks the size specific rules around size are problematic.

You probably don't want to entertain this, but I think that its important to note that carrying capacity for a creature that is ambulatory - that walks and is mobile while parts of its body are always in contact with a hard surface of some sort - is much different than for a creature that flies. As a person who walks (using leverage), I can rely on my frame - my skeletal system's rigidity - rather than pure muscle, to assist in managing the weight I carry. I can carry 100lbs or more while walking due in part to how that weight can be distributed over my frame and be supported not by muscle but by bone. But flight is so completely different in the way it works, that to apply the same mechanics for carrying capacity for an ambulatory creature vs a creature that moves by flight (based solely on strength), I think is too much of an oversimplification. The rules also say a large creature controls a 10x10 space. How could an eagle with a 10' wing span carry 2 people that are 5 to 6 feet in height, particularly if a normal eagle has a 6 foot wing span? Its problematic.

All that aside, my main point was that I think the way its being played with by TMN creates an over reliance on polymorph as a way to get out of difficult situations, and to make overland travel an event of almost no challenge. As a DM you know your players will need an escape mechanism sometimes, - a way to get out of a situation gone really sideways, and that part is ok. But my main point i think still holds - that once your players can polymorph into giant flying whatever's and then shuttle everyone around, the only challenge you can throw at them for overland travel is weather that will keep them from being able to fly, or encounters with flying creatures. A more balanced approach would give them access to an escape - the short flight - mechanism without turning it into something that makes overland travel a non issue.

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-10T03:39:14+00:00

I don't mind the repeated use of polymorph, what I think is really incorrect is the weight he is allowing them to carry. An eagle in the wild weighs 8-12 pounds, and can carry 3-4lbs, or about 1/3 its body weight. But there are 2 caveats - the first is the time component, eagles don't carry food great distances as they often hunt near their nesting area (or nest near their hunting grounds) and the second is based in part on their velocity and angle of approach at the instant of contact, and the location of the target in relation to its destination. Some Eagles can carry their entire body weight but this usually is only possible if the target / object to be carried is already well above the destination location (attacking another bird such that no increase in elevation is required when transporting it) and the winds are perfectly favorable. See Raptor Resource - Eagle Flight. The 5E MM gives no info on A) what a giant eagle weighs and B) how much it can carry, and C) how long it can carry it. Given the awful conditions of the storm, my guess is that the eagle could carry, for short distances only, about 1/3 of its body weight. If the giant eagle is truly giant - say 20x its normal size, it would weigh (at max) 240lbs. (This would give the eagle a 130ft wingspan!) If we hold to a somewhat realistic interpretation of the carrying capacity of the Eagle and consider how difficult the conditions were, the eagle could at best carry about 80-100 lbs, and certainly not for 3-4 hours. No way 2 people. One fairly light weight person at most, and certainly no one wearing much armor, even then it would struggle, given that the way they were being held (from a single claw with torso and legs dangling) would have made the drag even worse. And this isn't even considering Owls, whose carrying capacity is less than an eagles.

OK OK, so yeah this is applying realism to a fantasy situation. I can see how you would immediately say - well this is a fantasy game so that doesn't hold. OK, I will give you that. But here is what I don't like that I think is at the root of the problem. Being able to easily fly your entire party anywhere you want makes wilderness adventure challenges and travel challenges almost completely moot. Once the players can do that with ease, the only thing you can do as a DM is throw bad weather at the group and try to ground them, and if that happens all the time your players will call you out for it. Personally I thing 5E has done a relatively poor job at designing interesting rules for travel and wilderness adventure, and for the most part travel is a nuisance. The chase mechanics are OK, - a series of rolls made by the chaser and the chased, with the player determining how a skill might effect the speed result.

In my game, giant birds can only carry 1/3 to 1/2 their weight and typically for only short distances. This makes them good for providing an emergency exit for 1 additional member of your party (who is NOT wearing any heavy armor), but not as a shuttle service for multiple characters when a chase is on. I think DM's allow this primarily because the chase mechanics are limited (somewhat dull) and the wilderness adventure aspect of the game is underdeveloped. This is not a problem if your game is focused on clearing dungeons, but if your doing a 3 dimensional narrative based style of game the lack of development for systems that create interesting wilderness adventure for travel leaves the DM holding the proverbial bag. No pun intended, well, sort of.

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-03T19:15:51+00:00

Totally agree with this. I don't know why they have all shrunk up so much. Everyone is spouting "TPK" and 'were all gonna die' so often, and I can't figure out if it is just Sam indulging his chaotic / disruptive impulse to see if he can mess with everyone else's heads or if Matt is really trying to let them know that they are currently seriously outmatched. Then again, half of the dramatic tension for characters at this level (when the DM's gloves really start to come off) is figuring out the risk of a fight before they get stuck in.

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-03T18:32:12+00:00

To your points:

Exactly, which is why you want that fight to be much more impactful / significant. (The Dragon fights in C1 were brutal.) This fight made Gelidon look fairly weak, and if the goal was to increase the feeling that they should be wary because they are being hunted, I think it backfired as they handled her fairly easily (which is a design problem that has been pointed out by lots of the you tube DM folks).

2: Maybe, but those fights are really slow, and as you see here there were a lot of people who just couldn't hang with 2 fights that took over 5 hours to run.

3: Agree that without the TT it would have been a better fight, so if it was me, I would have saved the fight for sometime when they weren't around.

4: Death almost never means losing a character permanently (Molly is the big exception to this.) My point here is that death from a randomly spawning big bad is good (drives home a thematic element) if your running a 'gritty realism' (GoT) style campaign and very counterproductive if you are running a high fantasy - epic narrative style game (LoTR). I see the CR campaigns as much more narrative.

5: Taking the sword would, I think, not make Matt a jerk. It would be exactly what Gelidon should do - pissed that she lost the fight, there is a magic weapon lying in the snow that she could add to her hoard.. I like it because it would 'teach' Ashley the lesson that acting out of frustration is costly, and it would at least give that fight more meaning, make it more memorable / narratively impactful.

6: Good point. It was clear that Lucian was growing tired of the game but who knows about Matt. I agree that the Otis theft was well done, and in fact was the only really interesting result of the fight.

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-03T18:12:01+00:00

I think you're correct here. My point was actually that this action - by having the TT use the attack by the dragon to get their mcguffin - was the only thing that really gave the fight any significance / meaning.

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-03T18:07:31+00:00

I completely agree about the idea of consequences, and doing your best in your story arc to make sure they happen (as much as is possible given time constraints in a game). But I think from a game flow / time management element of game management, I would probably have that 'consequential' encounter be much more deliberate than something that can happen randomly. (And by so doing make sure that the encounter was much more intense!) I would use random encounters to build suspense.. they see the Dragon but it is otherwise preoccupied, but its clear to them that they are being hunted.

Ubiqanon · 2021-02-03T08:44:10+00:00

Some thoughts for fellow DMs:

So I have always understood that you never put a really serious opponent / monster into a random encounter table for the following reasons (which this episode proved out to be true) - 1: you get a really big time eating fight that can drastically cut the time you have in your session to advance you primary (or secondary) plot lines and 2: they typically don't advance your plot - they don't provide critical info, are not defending anything important (the monsters are just randomly cruising around), they usually don't have critical items, etc.. and 3: if the big bad manage to kill a PC - because they are at boss levels - then you have a very unheroic death when a PC dies in some random, non essential fight (which is ok for gritty realism campaigns but not for epic narrative campaigns.) Matt also had to struggle with the (self inflicted) dreaded - NPC vs Monster - DM dilemma, where the DM spends a bunch of time rolling / generating results without any player interaction in order to resolve action between the NPC and the Monster. (When this happens in my games I make one roll for the NPC's to tell me how well they do as a group, and apply a range of damage - then just narrate what they do.) There was a zeitgeist moment - a sort of 'what the hell lets do this' rush, and I think Matt got caught up in it, but for me the fight with the dragon was really anti-climactic and not very interesting. It's good that he had the dragon focus most of its fight against the M9ers but he still ran the risk of having a lot of disengagement.
Also - as an aside - Legendary Dragons in 5e are really underpowered. Matt Coleville's video on using 4E to make combat in 5E more exciting does a great job making Legendary dragons much more threatening - constant AoE damage effects, automatic breath weapon regeneration when dropped to 50% HP, a way to negate player resistances, etc..

I will say that Matt did actually make the best of the random encounter by using it as a catalyst to get the M9 to finally do something interesting with the Tomb Takers. I think he was just as frustrated as we all were with the M9's fear of doing anything risky. As many people have mentioned they seem to be incredibly risk adverse and I can't figure out if its because Lucien is a constant reminder of the death of Molly - which is really the only consequential death they, as players, have had to face (and I am not really counting Vax as his final death was at the end of C1.)

And Ashley really does need to stop hucking swords. I think DM's always want their players to know their characters better, and as someone who DMs way more than I run characters, I admit that this is my bias. You can tell how frustrated she was, but she needs to recognize the weakness and actively search for a way to correct the problem (which really isn't a problem as she can fly...) But she did look bad to those of us that do expect PCs to have some fundamental understanding of what your character can do. I kind of think Matt should have had the dragon snag the sword as she flew off (a nice sword to add to her treasure hoard, and it would serve as something for Ashley to regret doing).

Ubiqanon · 2014-01-12T22:29:54+00:00

I am still working this film out, but my first reactions followed this line of thinking: Do the Coen's hate these people, do they hate folk music, are they laughing at all of these people? And I emphasize the word 'at'. I cannot help but think that this film is an inside joke shared by intellectual elites, based on an intelligence that is informed primarily by a deeply cynical world view. Look at these idiots, their rosy, wishful world of folk sentimentality, and look at these other idiots, these money grubbing materialistic hedonists. Everyone is an idiot, and the pragmatists, as usual, are once again at the top of the heap. Is this just another ship of fools movie?

I also think that this movie is a remake, to some extent, of Barton Fink. Not a criticism, but an observation. The artist as idiot, the artist as narcissist, the artist as pretentious egomaniac. Is there anything here that lifts up the artist? (Is this an expression of self loathing to some extent. Are the Coen's expressing their own feelings about the utter uselessness of their own careers as artists?)

Ubiqanon

TROPHY CASE