How do you make downtime interesting in Cyberpunk RED? Downtime is a period between RP sessions where players can heal, repair their stuff, and use their role abilities to fabricate new items.

For characters that don't need to do those things, there are hustle charts, where they roll a d6 and role-specific events happen, stuff like: "Something goes wrong, and you need to lay low - 0eb" or "One of your songs goes viral - 500 eb". Usually the character ends up making a bit of cash, but not too much.

How do you make those hustles interesting?

This is grim:

Renters are twice as likely to spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing than homeowners, according to Statscan data released last year, and the agency has found single-person households broadly to be more likely than other household types to be living in unaffordable or unsuitable housing.

...

The report also found higher rates of “material deprivation” among renters and single-person households. Respondents were identified as materially deprived if they couldn’t afford at least two essentials from a list including unexpected expenses, spending money, small gifts, bills, maintaining a comfortable temperature in their home, transportation and more.

It’s something that’s on Joy Edwards’s mind. The 70-year-old has been living in the same Toronto apartment since the 1980s, when she got divorced. While her rent for a two-bedroom apartment is well below the Toronto average, it eats up 60 per cent of her monthly Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security payments.

Ms. Edwards said she was able to retire by minimizing her expenses and sometimes receiving some food from her church and a local community centre. But with developers expressing interest in her building, she said she worries “all the time” about being asked to leave.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/retirement/article-move-over-millennials-a-third-of-canadas-single-renters-are-seniors/

Canadian banks have a money laundering problem. But it turns out there are worse operators on Canadian soil:

The Canadian subsidiary of China’s biggest bank repeatedly broke the law by failing to review risky clients, report suspicious transactions and respect police production orders despite multiple warnings from FinTRAC about its faulty financial-crime controls, according to the regulator’s findings in confidential documents reviewed by The Globe and Mail.

From the Globe.

Is anyone interested in growing a Cyberpunk RED TTRPG community?

I really appreciate some of the the posts on the CP:R subreddit, and I'd love to build something like that here.

I've got a bit of content (like my Cyberpunk RED cheat sheet for D&D players), and I enjoy putting together session reviews like this one.

Are you playing Cyberpunk RED? Are you into the Interlock meta? Do you want to try and build an active game-based community here?

EDIT: two responses doesn't a community make. I'll keep my RED posts in the main RPG community. :/

lol

Lorne Thurston and Joseph McIntyre were planning to get an up-close look at the Wayne Gretzky statue in downtown Edmonton on Friday, when they realized it had been smeared with what appeared to be – and strongly smelled like – feces.

...

“Disappointing,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been done.”

...

The pair were part of a group of friends who stopped to watch as an employee walked out of Rogers Place and wiped Gretzky’s face with a towel doused in cleaning product.

...

“Why would someone want to do that?” said Taylor, standing with the group of friends at the statue.

“[The statue] might not mean much to some people, but it means something to other people.”

That's the point.

It took just one meeting with Lutnick to reverse his strong stance and start saying:

Mr. Ford insisted Mr. Lutnick somehow wants to “boost up” Canada, despite Mr. Trump’s repeated threats of annexation and tariffs that could cripple Canada’s U.S.-trade-dependent economy.

...

“They aren’t coming into our country to take over, I’ll tell you that,” Mr. Ford said. “I kind of flip this around. What a compliment. We’ll never be a 51st state. Canada’s not for sale. But isn’t it nice that someone thinks we have the greatest country world, and they want access?”

...

The Premier’s comments follow last week’s high-stakes trade drama, in which he backed down from imposing a 25-per-cent surcharge on his province’s electricity exports to the U.S. Mr. Ford’s move prompted a vehement reaction from Mr. Trump, who immediately threatened to double the 25-per-cent duties he was about to impose on Canadian steel and aluminum.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-trump-tariffs-doug-ford-response/

A massive crater on the dark side of the moon apparently has two 2.6km deep canyons leading off. A massive rock hit the moon at 1-2 kilometers per second, creating the huge crater. Extra debris blown off caused the canyons.

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/10870831

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/128002699

If you're a Cyberpunk RED player, please skip this post - it contains spoilers for Tales of the Red: Reaping the Reaper.

I GM'd the Drone Fight scene in Reaping the Reaper (Tales of the Red, p94) last session. Here's my set up and thoughts on the module:

Background

The players are picking up a mcguffin for their Johnson in a container port. The opposition is an evil AI called the Reaper. It is aware of the pickup and attacks the party with a handful of drones. The drones are fragile but very mobile.

The module doesn't state the reason for the scene, but I'm guessing it's to show off the Reaper's green skull symbol.

As written, the scene happens after the players pick up the mcguffin, but I moved it to before. Why? I'm not sure - I think I prefer a reward at the end of a fight.

Setup

For a battlemap I used New Atami Container Port - it's large, and I wanted to be able to have some strategic play from the drones. Here's a free alternative, but it's tiny.

The drones only have 15 or 20 HP, and no SP, so I added another Drone Swarm. For the tokens, I used PeaPu's Cyberpunk vehicles. The three drone swarms only have a melee attack, while the heavy air drone has a ranged attack.

I added a friendly security guard that was taking the crew to the mcguffin. He was mostly there for colour.

Rules Adjustment

I allowed players to hop onto containers with a DV 12 Athletics check. Success got them onto the box at the cost of one movement, failure left them on the ground and cost two movement.

Play

I played the drones carefully: the drones have a MOV of 8, so they used the containers as cover and swung around to try and catch the players when they came out of cover. The lack of range weapons on the drone swarms sucked: they couldn't hit a player and get back under cover.

Halfway through the encounter, I ended up giving the drone swarms a light handgun (2d6 damage, ROF2) to present more of a challenge.

The players were able to mostly stay under cover. One of them screwed up and stayed out of cover, taking a few hits.

Analysis of Play

Good:

• the map was great for the ranged drone: it was able to (mostly) stay under cover and land a couple of shots.

• the mechanics of jumping up onto the boxes was nice - it gave the players a way to extend their vision, while jumping off got them into cover. The combat optimized character essentially got the jumps for free (they could only fail on a critical failure), while the other characters failed once, so that added some nice differentiation.

• the friendly security guard presented some colour

Analysis of Module

• The drones don't have enough HP/SP to challenge the players. If I hadn't buffed them, the scene would have been over in a round or two.
• There isn't a plot reason for this encounter: it presents the Reaper's green skull, and uses some of their HP/SP/ammo, but it doesn't move the story forward. It feels like a D&D attrition fight.
• There's a NetArch in the ranged drone. But with a MOV of 8 it's not clear how a Netrunner would maintain contact.

If I ran it again

The scene needs a reason to exist. I'd give it three reasons:

1. The drones are trying to kill the friendly security guard, since he knows where the mcguffin is. They focus him in the fight. If the friendly dies, then the players face a complication to find the mcguffin.

2. The drones should be a threat. I'd have one drone per PC. When they can't hit the friendly, they fire on the players. I'd make each drone a heavy air drone and give it 7 SP on top of 20 HP. Alternatively, buffing the MOV on the swarm from 8 to 12 could give them enough range for melee attacks.

3. Introduce the Reaper (beyond the green skull): give it some dialog from the drones. Troll the players. The Reaper seems like it would troll its victims.

I'd been planning on the Reaper possessing a couple of cranes in the terminal and using them as an environmental weapon. Something like a single attack on the players per round, with a DV 15 Evasion check to avoid 2d6 damage as the magnetic hook drops on them (players can disable the cranes with an aimed shot on the crane's camera that's 25 meters away). But I got carried away and forgot.

Conclusion

This is a poorly designed encounter: it has no reason to exist, the opposition doesn't challenge the players, and there isn't a player goal beyond kill all the ~~goblins~~ drones.

I didn't put much effort into rewriting this encounter, because I'm coming off of Agents of Desire (also Tales of the Red) which is great and needed no extra GM work. I just assumed this one would be good.

I'm seeing high battery use with version 1.58.2. I've switched to full charging at night to get a better view of usage.

Very accessible dark cyberpunk music. All the tracks I've heard are instrumental. I'm enjoying it a lot so far.

I started using Summit a week or two ago, and I really like it. It's a great Lemmy app. But I notice my phone's battery life has taken a hit since then.

According to battery usage, I've been using Summit slightly more than the Reddit app, but Summit has consumed much more battery.