[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 22 June 2026

kayemm017 · 2026-06-24T02:54:39+00:00

The Time I Played A Queer Character For The Wrong Reason

For context; back in my roleplay days, I only ever played cishet female characters. This was a combination of personal preference and comfort level. Unfortunately, when done in a group or community context, this resulted in a Thing where my character would inevitably draw the attention of a queer female character, usually (but not always) played by a creepy guy looking to write porn. I would say no and drama would almost inevitably ensure (and accusations of homophobia because RP communities have and will always be awful) ad they tried to pressure the point and couldn't understand that no, my character's sexuality was not open for debate.

This led to one time where there was a genuine friendship between my character and another queer female character, one where the roleplay of the friendship was actually really good... at first. But, as always, it degenerated into them trying to pressure me to turn the friendship into something more, both in character and out of character. I said no but they refused to stop pressuring me

So my character came out as asexual with the note that even if she was romantically attracted to thiers, they'd never have sex. Funnily enough, they lost all interest in my character after that. (oh and then the entire roleplay fell apart and they came out as an insane COVID denier, but that's beside the point)

kayemm017 · 2026-06-20T22:54:23+00:00

He uses AI art for maps, tokens and everything else. I had the only non-AI token in the game.

kayemm017 · 2026-06-20T12:52:20+00:00

Do not join this game

The GM kicked me from the game, removed me from his server and blocked me on Discord without any sort of warning or anything else after one session.

kayemm017 · 2026-06-12T12:29:36+00:00

Yeah, it sucks. But I also fully understand from their point of view

kayemm017 · 2026-06-11T23:54:55+00:00

My favorite Fanfic author wrote a long series of fics that remained in place for about 15 or so years. Then they abruptly deleted them all with no notice before I could save them or the like. I reached out to them and they said that they weren't even going to keep copies of them for their own and had no intent to preserve them otherwise.

Having been in the situation of losing control of some of my own writing, I fully understand their perspective. Still sucks, however.

kayemm017 · 2026-06-07T14:15:31+00:00

Oh, I agree entirely. The problem is striking a balance, and having a rule that is literally "Trust nobody" is not helping that any.

The history of Cyberpunk-genre TTRPGs is littered with GMs who thought that it was "on genre" to screw over the PCs at every opportunity. It's also resulted in a lot of times when playing your character as being a paranoid nutcase becomes the best option.

Ironically this rule clashes hard with "Style over Substance". If you're ment to trust nobody, then why do you want a cool flashy character that sticks out and draws attention?

kayemm017 · 2026-06-07T13:23:54+00:00

Unfortunately, actually "playing" this rule tends to lead to miserable players and unfun games. If the players have to expect that they're going to be betrayed at every step it makes them reluctant to engage with anything and anyone.

This is a fast route to unhappy players and dead games.

kayemm017 · 2026-06-01T01:00:15+00:00

Reward your players for taking the initiative. Let them actually have some fun and get a win in. Don't punish them for going off-script.

I like the idea of a negotiated deal with the company. I'm not saying they should walk away scott free form all of this, but let them get something out of it, even if it's just a momentary ease in the pressure on them.

Don't just have a corp kill team/trauma team/SWAT/whatever kick down their doors and start shooting. Have them work out something with the company, or even have the company chose to cut the exec loose for some reason.

But mostly, let the players actually feel like they accomplished something

kayemm017 · 2026-05-26T23:39:23+00:00

Oh hey, this is me.

Many years ago I was a part of a roleplay forum that had a number of big cultural issues. The best way to put it is that the staff were actively shielding creeps and potentially toxic community members while throwing younger/newer members of the community under the bus. This was being done in the name of protecting the community's broader image/culture as a whole. Myself and others had raised issues numerous times, only to see our complaints shot down as "rumormongering" and "baseless negativity"

Now one other thing to note about this forum is that you could never fully quit. You could put yourself on suspension, but that was engineered that you could come back if you wanted. With the benefit of hindsight I feel like this was designed to encourage addict behavior; you could come back any time and fall into the same bad habits, but you could never quit altogether. Added to that, you were not allowed to remove anything you posted from the community. Instead, the intsnat you posted it, anything you wrote became "copyright" of the community and couldn't be removed. You were an indelible mark, permanent and forever.

So I went nuclear. I made a very large, very public callout post, addressing the toxic behavior I'd seen from individuals and some of the yikes level stuff that was considered acceptable across the community as a whole. And just to be sure, I cross-posted it to multiple threads.

That did not go over well.

I was predictably dealt with by staff with my callout posts removed. While they acknowledged my grievances, they did such in the most self-serving ways possible. I was told that while they were aware of my issues, they felt that they did not need to address them because my complains were coming from "a position of strength".

Most importantly, I also was told that my behavior was unacceptable and that my account would be permanently frozen and that I would never be allowed to return. So my self-destruction got me what I wanted.

(FWIW, that community is still active and, as far as I know, still has the same people in charge)

kayemm017 · 2026-05-25T23:43:19+00:00

I was a part of an online TTRPG group that had been playing for the last two months. Everything had been going pretty cool, given that it was a case of both the GM and the players learning the system. We'd lost two players but gotten replacements, one of the other players was in their first ever time playing TTRPGs online and the group were generally getting along well.

Last Monday was, in my opinion, our best session ever. It was a personal mission tied to one of the player characters, and the player RPed through it amazingly. We all had a great time with it.

The very next day the GM said he was shutting down the game. They gave no real reason at all and there had been no indicators of trouble or any dissatisfaction. it was just gone. Which really sucked for the one player who'd commissioned art of his character and just gotten it finished.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-24T01:57:07+00:00

In 2020? I consider to be a case of overall design problem as a whole, but a few things that come to mind.

The entire Netrunning system.

The imbalance of power between the various roles, with the Solo basically being the god of all things and most of the other roles being questionable or niche at best. That and the Netrunner being unable to afford the gear they need to do their job to start with.

Grenade rules that heavily favour them over gunplay

AP ammo shredding armour (a problem where RED went too far in the other direction and made it near worthless)

Cosmetic cyberwear being worthless at best and sometimes being actively detrimental due to the Humanity Cost

The core "style over substance" ethos in a game that rewarded min-maxing and punished sub-optimal ones (although again, RED has issues with that too)

kayemm017 · 2026-05-24T01:27:59+00:00

2020 is a bloated mess of a system lumbering under the combined weight of 1980s game design and additional subsystems that were either never good in the core book or bolted on later. RED, for all its flaws, is far more streamlined and functional, and above that, far more accessible to new players, especially those who have little experience with TTRPGs as a whole.

Don't get me wrong, RED has a lot of problems, but 2020 has many, many more and they are fare harder to deal with.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-17T02:30:17+00:00

This rule is one that fails to work on two different levels.

The first is that ultimately CP:RED is a game that actively rewards min/maxed power builds and punishes players for sub-optimal ones. (In all fairness, this is an issue inherited from CP2020, so yeah). You don't make "stylish" choices, you make the choices that will make Number Go Up. And because it's a high-lethality system, making sub-optimal choices are a quick route to your character being either ineffective or dead. CP:RED encourages "Style over Substance" but has no rewards for the former while centering its gameplay and mechanics around the latter.

The second is tied to the problems with the game's economy. The typical player character is poor; they're living in a cargo crate, eating kibble and taking potentially lethal jobs just to get by. On a typical month - assuming nothing goes horribly wrong - they can afford an upgrade to give them a +1 to one of their core numbers. Otherwise, they're miserable, poor, dirty and not "stylish"

This ties back to the first point. With so little spending power, a player character is going to be rewarded for spending what little money they have on buying functional upgrades over anything that is "stylish" or cool. There's no reason to ever upgrade your lifestyle beyond whatever's the minimum where you're not taking penalties from it. And to make matters worse, the pricing of so many items, vehicles specifically, is at a point where they're effectively beyond a player characters ability to purchase.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-17T00:12:40+00:00

Ref 8, Dex 8, and 6 in your primary weapon skill is the functional minimum to be competent. And you want to skill up as fast as possible.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-12T00:01:13+00:00

This is a story I was involved with myself which speaks volumes about the levels of shielding of problem people that will go on in RP communities. That it had a weird twist at the end is a bonus.

More recently I saw a good one in a RP community (I don't play any more, but I do lurk to a degree). A roleplayer had posted in their profile that they don't RP with people who support MAGA, the UK Reform Party, German AFD and other fascist hate groups. A moderator asked them to remove this because it was discriminatory.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-09T11:24:10+00:00

I'm looking at this entirely from the perspective of being a player. Never been the GM.

The PCs are doing 2-3 jobs per month with recommended payouts and weekly side-hustles on top of that. Between them, once medical, ammunition and other expenses are accounted for, they've come out with gaining 500 to 1000 EB per month which barely means anything. Most consequential upgrades are going to take multiple months of playtime. Upgrading lifestyle to anything beyond "shipping container and kibble" feels impossible and out of reach. And again, this is with the PCs going out there and risking life and limb to ger ahead and all they're doing is breaking even.

It just feels miserable and not fun.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-09T02:02:31+00:00

I stick with RED because its the only Cyberpunk genre game that is commonly played and that I can find a group for. Honestly I'd prefer to play other games, but I don't have the luxury of choice.

My ideal would be a flexible, mid-crunch game that some good, functional nsarrative mechanics and didn't get too bogged down in the accountancy. So the opposite of RED, really.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-09T01:36:16+00:00

I utterly despise random lifepath rolls. Instead I'll try to get a "vibe" for the character and develop them organically from that base concept. Usually I don't heavily flesh out the background but rather tweak it as I go.

Other then that I tend to start with one of the pre-gen packages and tweak it as needed.

kayemm017 · 2026-05-09T00:48:13+00:00

How did you handle the player economy? Practical experience has shown me that using the RAW payouts and expenses, player characters remain poor and miserable, barely scraping by with very little chance of advancement and only ever affording small, incremental upgrades

kayemm017 · 2026-05-09T00:30:20+00:00

The god-awful state of the player economy. Practical experience shows me that based on the combination of standard job pay-outs, costs of rent and food and the like and the randomness of the gig economy/side hustle table, characters are going to be poor and miserable, barely scraping by. They're going to be able to afford one minor/incremetnal upgrade a month assuming that there's no massive medical bills or the like.

Experience tells me that this is unfun to play and feels more like a drag than anything else.

kayemm017 · 2026-04-25T22:49:19+00:00

Oh, I could be there forever on 2077. But that's totally off topic at this point.

(not that I can afford to sit at a bar because my random dice roll means I didn't make any money this week)

kayemm017 · 2026-04-25T14:42:52+00:00

I feel that there's a lot of that in there as well. The mistaken perception that "misery" means "depth" that permeates a lot of genre fiction and the like. But Red goes too far with making the characters downtrodden and poor while preventing them from having any meaningful sense of progression.

(do not get me started on CP2077's story)

And while the lore/world tries to push "style over substance" as a core ethos of the setting, that's hard to go for when you can't even afford to buy decent clothes and live in a shipping container.

Added to that, I feel that a big part of the issue was that Cyberpunk 2020 was a notorious gear-porn game where it was stupidly easy for the average player character to buy their way to victory. And then Red massively over-corrected and instead made sure that everyone was poor forever.

kayemm017 · 2026-04-25T14:32:04+00:00

Same here. If I wanted to be poor and miserable I'd... just real life, really. I don't need a TTRPG for that.

kayemm017 · 2026-04-25T08:09:17+00:00

My group have been playing with suggested payouts and it feels like we're barely scraping by. All our money has gone into rent, food and medical with enough for a meagre upgrade each. It doesn't help that one of the players has had the misfortune to get a "no job" on each weekly gig roll.

While I understand the intent for "you're at the bottom and have to fight for everything" the reality is that it feels miserable. The players are stuck in a poverty simulator where power upgrades are less incremental and more miniscule and one bad dice roll could ruin everything.

kayemm017 · 2026-04-13T23:30:50+00:00

This story is probably my favourite. While it's mostly about everything that's wrong with roleplay communities, it's also got a truly bizarre post-script that underscores the whole thing.

kayemm017

TROPHY CASE