Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to like it, or pretend to like it, or justify why you don’t like it, or even tell people that you don’t like it.
Totes fine to just dislike it and move on. For me I not only love LD but it actually brought me into trek fandom through the backdoor, and I’m currently watching TNG all the way through.
But I’m not diminished in any way by you not liking it.
Now as for your coworker, I recommend hitting him with a brick being direct and saying “I don’t like it, but you’re free to give me other recommendations you think I’ll enjoy.”
One thing I’ve always wondered, and this is hardly the most unbelievable aspect of the science fiction elements of this show but it’s one of the most pervasive and constant; why don’t we ever hear the native languages of the aliens underneath the sounds of the universal translators? Most, although not all, of them speak by vibrating the air, so where are those sounds disappearing to?
My problem with it is it’s a waste of a ring slot. The odds of this helping you at all are miniscule. Fighting enemies that attack within a range of <=22? This ring doesn’t help you at all.
We’re pretty hyper-specialized to use it, but there are organisms on earth that don’t need it and in fact find oxygen deadly; they are called anaerobic. They still need chemical energy, it’s just not provided by oxygen. (As I was looking this up I discovered there’s even a creature in the animal kingdom that doesn’t breathe oxygen.) Some gases, like carbon monoxide, will actually participate in gas exchange in your lungs and react with your body chemistry, but in a way that rapidly breaks down cell functioning.
So, yes, there are definitely other forms of biochemistry that can process non-oxygenated environments and extract energy from them, just not us, not by a long shot.
As someone else pointed out, nitrogen is non-reactive. Almost any gas would work, as long as it was plentiful enough to maintain the necessary air pressure, and non-reactive. You don’t need nitrogen to live; you just need oxygen. Just, not so much that you get acute oxygen toxicity, which mainly happens with pure oxygen at regular atmospheric pressure for extended periods of time. There are even applications where pure oxygen is administered to people, usually at lower than atmospheric pressure.
Nitrogen is a filler gas. It’s there to take up space and keep the air molecules bouncing around at the appropriate pressure. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say our lungs require a certain pressure because this is where we evolved; that pressure happens to be maintained mostly by nitrogen.)
We aren’t exploring other planets in person yet, but if we were, we’d need to filter out all the bad shit in the air, keep the oxygen, and maintain the normal pressure. If we were lucky enough to encounter an atmosphere with oxygen, a non-reactive filler gas, and no toxins, we might be able to just breathe it; or to breathe it after compressing it to the appropriate pressure. Nitrogen wouldn’t need to be there at all.
The confusing thing about the scuba application is that nitrogen isn’t in the mix because you need the nitrogen. It’s there because it reduces the pressure of toxic gases to a threshhold you can survive.
Normally this is obviously correct, but in this case, we have to consider how tall the characters are. As a DM, I would rule that if any part of the character (their actual person, not including, say, the reach of the sword they’re holding) is within the 30’ circle, or could be if they actively collaborated with the cleric using free actions, then the bless would affect them.
There’s also a few definitions we need to talk about:
if the cleric (we’ll call them Carl) is 30’ in the air, that is understood to mean that if the spell holding them up there fails, they will fall 30’. By the same token, a character 0’ feet in the air can only fall 0’. We can infer that Carl’s feet (or the bottom part of the PC, at any rate) are 30 feet in air.
we consider Carl to be in the center of the 5x5 grid square in the plane A formed 30’ above the flat terrain.
the “allies are 20ft away” part is a bit too fuzzy for this to work (how many allies? which ones? they can’t all occupy the same grid square unless they’re tiny), so we’ll have to make some calls here. Let’s just consider one ally, Alice, who is 20’ away.
We consider Alice to be in the center of her grid square, in the plane T formed by the flat terrain.
When we say Alice is “20ft away” from Carl, we mean that a perpendicular line drawn through the cleric intersects with T at the center of a grid square in A–we’ll call this square C(T) and Carl’s square at current altitude C(A), and the center of C(T) is 20’ from the center of Alice’s square A(T). Visualized as a battle grid you would have C ◻◻◻ A in plane T, with 3 empty squares separating them. On a physical table, Carl would also probably be standing on a little platform or a d6 to indicate altitude.
“Range: 30ft” 30 feet from what? Definitely not Carl’s god, they’re probably not even in the room. Maybe we mean 30ft from Carl’s 3rd chakra, or maybe it’s just 30ft from any part of Carl’s person. That seems easier, let’s go with that one.
Based on some anthropometric data I found very quickly, the average human woman has a vertical reach of about 77 inches or 6’ 5". That’s naked, and she’s probably wearing boots, let’s add another inch for the soles so 6’ 6".
We can give her a little bit more of an advantage as well; the shortest path between Alice and Carl is a straight line following the radius of the sphere, so she could “lean in” a bit with her arm to get closer. She can’t go a full 45 degrees without falling prone though, so this only adds a little. Without a posable figure and a 3d model of the space in front of me I couldn’t tell you how much she could reasonably add by pointing her body and hand at an angle, so let’s just call it 2 more inches and keep measuring vertically.
We’ll call the apex of her fingertips at 80 inches above T a new plane F, and A(F) is the point where she touches that plane with her fingers.
Now we get to actually apply the Pythagorean theorem. It’s a triangle formed by the points (C(A) -> A(A) = 240") as leg 1 and (A(A) -> A(F) = 280") as leg 2. The hypotenuse, then, is 368 inches.
30ft is 360 inches. Is 80 inches of Alice enough to put a fingertip through any part of a 30ft sphere around Carl’s feet?
Yeah, I’m aware that toilet lids are not an airtight system, I’ve seen them. It still does slow down airflow enough for most of the poop to settle instead of spreading to your whole house.
USPS is by far the most reliable and competent delivery service. It’s even more reliable than the trucks Amazon runs. Maybe your area is different, but the amount of late and lost packages I have from the others … sigh.