I got the EIBOS one on Amazon. Not sure it is that different from the Sunlu and others that have been mentioned but it works fine for me. I had a very humid house, lile 60%+ in the summer. I had a lot of problems with petg and even pla before I got that box and none after. We just moved and new house is thankfully normal humidity, but I’m still using it

I love the Genesys system because it’s designed specifically to homebrew any genre of setting you want (including custom magic systems), along with multiple official settings.

It is so easy to take NPCs, items, etc, from fantasy to sci-fi to current day, to post apocalyptic, etc. Since the rules and stats are intentionally setting agnostic.

And I absolutely love the narrative dice system.

If OP likes plating a variety of settings it’s worth checking out. Or one of the billion other games out there

I do, I try to do as much creation as I can to exercise those skills, but having some prepared adventures to steal things from makes it a lot easier. Like going to the gym with a professionally made program before learning to write your own programming. And I don’t want stuff so pre-prepared that I don’t ever learn to make my own stuff - I’m not so much just running the pre-made stuff as I am dissecting it, trying to understand it, and taking what I like to plug into my game.

When I have prompt or encounter ideas I write them down in a notebook and flesh them out later, but a lot of the time when I sit down to prep it’s hard to think of things out of thin air. I’m getting a lot better at creating new things and integrating things the more we play.

So yeah, any resources on how to better design stuff is very welcome too. I have watched a lot of the Matthew Colville running the game videos that have helped a lot (especially the “Prep Can Be Literally Easy and Actually Fun” video)

Something like Storycaster looks interesting. I have heard of some other story prompt / plot cards (Fabula and Narata) and I might look into those too… That kind of thing is exactly what I’m looking for. Something that can help me generate ideas to flesh out into encounters or side quests that I can keep in my GM notes and stick in different locations so when the players decide to go into the mountains instead of the forests I have a general idea of what might be there…

That is fantastic. That don’t prep plots makes a lot of sense and is very helpful. I will bookmark these.

Thank you!

This is awesome and I will definitely save this for reference as there are a few 2d6 systems I want to try out, but Hero Kids is even more basic than a 2d6 system, at least as far as I understand them.

Your stat pools are basically just the number of d6 you get to roll, and you just take the higher number. Every successful hit deals 1 damage (health pools are between 1-4, 1 being like a weak minion or a spider egg or something, 4 being a leveled up hero or a boss). So higher stat just means you are basically rolling with more advantage, more chances to get a higher number, but you always only use the highest dice.

So a hero with 3 melee attack would roll 3 d6 and take the highest number, and that is their attack roll. If they are attacking a creature with 1 defense, the GM would roll 1 d6 - if the attackers highest dice is equal to or higher than the defenders dice, the attack hits and the target takes 1 damage. Otherwise nothing happens.

I think the best way to convert something like 5e stat blocks into this would be to just say - is this monster supposed to be easy, medium, or hard - and then just copy a stat block from a hero kids monster that is similar to what you want. There is a pretty good monster compendium for hero kids so for a lot of creatures I can just use those directly.

I’m less concerned about copying stat blocks directly than I am about just having good narrative / story content, like NPCs and locations. Having never read any other RPG content besides Hero Kids (and perusing a D&D Players handbook a bit) I don’t know how much of the adventures are story content that works everywhere vs just “This place has monsters with these stat blocks” that is D&D specific or requires conversion.

I didn’t realize that DnD Beyond had free adventures, so I will definitely check that out, and that will probably give me the information I need on whether or not I’d like to spend money on other 5e adventures.

The Dungeon Alphabet seems great! I will add that to my list to check out.

Fire on the velvet horizon also looks interesting, but maybe a little intense for my current game. Kind of giving me some SCP vibes. Would be fun to run a Fringe-like campaign in a dark fantasy setting with these kinds of creatures. Reminds me of The Tales of Durand series, too, where when certain things happen, the world kind of starts to unravel and unbinds a lot of dark creatures and things.

This looks really great. I have a friend who sketches in a similar style and I always like getting to see what he has sketched since we last hung out.

Good tip - I don’t have a runout sensor installed so I was not aware of this

I need to do that - I haven’t finished fully calibrating everything. I still need to calibrate flow and pressure advance as well. The current settings are pretty good for print quality so I haven’t messed with it much but the last few prints I have noticed some issues with dimensional accuracy that affect tighter tolerances

I use Cura 5.4 and the only changes I made were to the start and end gcode for the machine (per the guild I linked). After that, I did a few prints with my regular profiles, then started cranking up the speed a little at a time. So really the only setting I changed was the print speed and start / end gcode.

The printer handled everything else - honestly it feels a little like magic to me, even though it’s just software. I’m a software engineer so I feel like I should have a better grasp of it, but printer firmware is pretty far outside of the type of work I do. One thing I do know is that Klipper manages acceleration itself and doesn’t use the acceleration gcodes sent from the slicer - those get ignored and Klipper decides how fast to accelerate (this is configurable using moonraker or the config files).

I think the thing that makes the most difference in letting you print at higher speeds is the input shaping. I don’t understand all the inner workings, but it using the processing power on the raspberry pi to compensate for the vibration of the printer, letting you print much faster without getting artifacts in the print that affect quality. Here is some info on that

I’m sure there are a lot of slicer and Klipper configurations that I can do to improve things even more as well

Great little machine! I have one as my first and only printer and I have been loving it. Prints PETG and TPU very well

You download them directly from thr Humble bundle website. They appear to be DRM free.

They are all available in PDF but only some are available in all formats, and the rest are either only PDF and MOBI or PDF and ePUB, if that matters to you

That is my biggest gripe with modern windows. The OS itself is pretty decent, but WHY am I paying at minimum $100 and seeing ads all over the start menu? Even with a vanilla MS sourced USB there are so many bloat apps. It didn’t used to be that way.

I set up a PC for recording in a sound system and got a fresh install of Windows 11 on a custom PC and it was still super bloated with garbage games and a video editor that watermarks footage instead of the perfectly functional basic software they used to have.

I am in the process of repairing and setting up an old macbook with Linux since it stopped getting Apple updates. When I get a new laptop I will likely go with Linux there as well.

I love getting paid to learn new stuff. Favorite part about my job

Good article. I have worked as a dev for over 10 years and have seen a LOT of really complicated spaghetti code that was only maintained by individuals in silos. Some used to joke about “job security” but I would rather my life not be a living nightmare unable to take vacation without keeping my work phone on me at all times because I’m the single person that knows how to fix a mission critical system. I’ve been there. It sucks for new people but it also sucks for the keepers of the tribal knowledge. It’s exhausting.

Training, documenting, refactoring and replacing to eliminate that is good for everyone. If you are a good dev you won’t have to keep tribal knowledge to stay employed.