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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • I dunno, I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen!

    I’m still new to GMing, and one thing I encounter a lot is my local family/friends as players can be very passive in the "we gather to be entertained (everyone looks at GM like “now what?”) " kinda way.

    And I’m always freaking out because I can’t offer some incredible satisfying plot like they’d get watching TV shows or whatever. I’m afraid of everything being not good enough lol. My previous coping mechanism was sticking closely to the book…which in this case was 50 Fathoms, a seafaring sandbox fantasy setting.

    …I had to “make things happen to them” , but was REALLY afraid of somehow breaking the world (Morrowind-style lol) if I threw something too “Act 2” at them too fast.

    And their captain seemed content just rolling random encounters while trading goods between ports. LOL

    I think I really need to trust serendipity and stop planning so much. One of my best games was introducing my wife and her brother to Savage Worlds by just walking them into a bar and being goofy.

    They made their characters after League of Legends characters. The bartender was a monkey. They caused some kind of trouble and the monkey threw a flaming ha-pooo-ken at them…oh no, the dice kept exploding! Roll for wound location…“unmentionables.” Oof. They were laughing so hard.



  • It depends on the notes, for me:

    I’ve had an oddly long-running obsession with Tiddlywiki!

    It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s VERY flexible. My favorite part being that by default it’s just a single, portable, HTML file. No special app required besides a browser, no accounts, and you can just sync it like any other file. (Syncthing, Nextcloud, and friends)

    There’s also an app called Tiddloid for Android to make managing and saving a little easier, but they open in any browser.

    I have a Tiddlywiki that I use like one might use Obsidian, where I just stash stuff I’ll want to remember and maybe link between similar ideas.

    And then I’m currently trying to use it to make a solution to sketch out my Savage Worlds RPG campaigns. It gets a little tricky but you can make templates, script buttons, and that kind of thing. If you’re already comfortable with web stuff you’ll probably catch on WAY better than I have.

    You can also host it as a website, or on your server or whatever, to use it like any other wiki. There’s also plugins to use Markdown instead of “wikitext.”

    There’s also an excellent guide to learning it at https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/ . It’s basically an online workbook using Tiddlywiki itself!

    The community is also super helpful. I do wish it had a little more out of the box, but something about a customizable, portable, digital “notebook” that doesn’t require an account or hopefully-supported-in-5-years application is SUPER appealing to me. It’s quite underrated.

    Also just for fun I wanted to share my favorite example someone’s been working on for quite some time now, a heavily customized D&D wiki

    https://intrinsical.github.io/wiki/index.html

    Tiddlywiki can be a bit dense and the documentation is slowly improving, but there’s so much potential!


  • Hey I wanted my RGB sticks okay?! Jk hahaha.

    You’re right! I think…I don’t have a swap partition on this machine. I think I was gonna set up a swap file but that was a bit more involved post-install than I wanted to delve into at the time…

    …but I did get ZRAM working, and that’s pretty amazing! It feels like getting more RAM for free haha.

    It wasn’t the most absolutely necessary upgrade in the world, but I feel like it gives me more room to get away with dumb things and course correct in things like Blender, and might come in handy down the line since I don’t see myself upgrading much for a while.


  • I just now upgraded to 64GB of DDR4 from eBay. But that’s because my Blender projects were getting really big and I’d crashed a few times. Linux is awesome but is really scary how it just hard-freezed or mercilessly thrashes when low on memory. 😬

    …That and I finally get glorious RGB RAM lighting up my case. :D weee!

    For gaming? I haven’t seen that much RAM be usedul yet. And in Blender… likely because I have a crazy amount of undo levels enabled and have Firefox open…a few tabs…maybe more than a few tabs…maybe a lot of tabs…


  • I was once running a Savage Worlds pirate game (50 Fathoms) where one of my more dramatic players found a beached shipwreck and started poking through it. He rolls Notice and gets “snake eyes”, which is a critical failure.

    He looks up at me excitedly. “Ohhh no, WHAT HAPPENS TO ME? This is gonna be BAD! :D” so clearly “Uh you don’t notice anything?” isn’t going to be satisfactory here.

    So I tell him he fails to notice so hard he takes bumps and bruises from banging his head on some supports because of the ship’s awkward angle or something. He wants to try again and fails the roll again. “Okay uh…roll Spirit?”

    Cackling like mad, he rolls and fails again. “What happens? What happens?”

    “Well, you swear you saw SOMETHING in the dark depths of the ship where the sunlight can’t shine through. You’re so unnerved you need to roll on the fear table.”

    The table was captivated at this point, and quite frankly I was caught by surprise that this was generating such a fuss lol.

    He ended up gaining a “superstitious” hinderance and a white streak in his hair from sheer fright. He played it up like crazy too. “G-G-G-G-GHOOOST!!!” It was hilariously unexpected character development and I loved how he welcomed letting things happen to his character.

    …I was just using random tables for the shipwreck, there wasn’t anything special even planned in there. There’s no way I could’ve seen that coming LOL.




  • That’s so cool! Nice work! I feel a certain kinship with anyone who also got tons of 3D printing XP by building, rebuilding, researching, modding, head-scratching, laughing, crying, screaming at an A8 lol.

    This here is mostly fire prevention: Basically an updated stock motherboard, better PSU, an aftermarket MOSFET board for safety, thicker gauge wires with ferrule crimps for all the power cables, the bed is now attached directly to the thicker wires by way of crimp connectors.

    The printing surface is upgraded to carefully cut and polished picture frame float glass. 😂

    Added that sweet fan duct mod, a little Noctua 15mm (because it softened and jammed otherwise LOL), and printed that purple bracket at the library because the plastic decided to literally crumble away.

    Also the adjustable Z-stop was nice but the PLA softened so it’s a bit unpredictable, and the right motor will gently slip until it’s engaged so the gantry needs to be leveled every time…I also can’t guarantee that the Z rods are straight anymore because it requires such a Goldilocks level of tension I probably overdid it lol.

    Oh yeah, I had to replace the main power cable because the one provided just…had a break in it.

    It still works for small jobs though! And it printed all those parts for itself, so that’s kinda the RepRap dream right there right??

    Lol I feel like an amazing machine is in here somewhere if I bothered to research custom boards and stuff. The stock bearings are also terrible. But if I can bother someday I’ll stick Klipper on it maybe.

    It was a crazy, stressful journey…but I learned a ton of electronics stuff, and how to use a multimeter, and engineering stuff! XD

    My Ender3V2’s felt like such a crazy luxury by comparison. 😂