sbv

I'd like to validate untrusted config JSON submitted to my application against a TypeScript interface. If it's bad, I'd like to serialize a TypeScript object with default values, and suggest it as a pattern.

Last time I looked, TypeScript didn't provide runtime access to types and interfaces, so I'm not clear if that's possible without build-time tomfoolery.

I'd prefer to avoid JSON schemas if I can, but I guess that's an option too.

Are there libraries or new-ish language features that I could use?

Here's how I ran a Cyberpunk RED night market. My goals:

1. Give some stuff for the players to do.
2. Add a few plot hooks, so I have stuff for upcoming sessions.
3. Make a shopping session interesting.

I was going to run the full Salted Legacy one-shot adapted by Sparky_McDibbon, but my world is almost animal free, so having cybernetically enhanced monkeys running around would have been inconsistent. Also, my players don't care if there isn't a direct path to a payoff.

Instead:

1. A Biotechnica Exec NPC that the crew rescued on a previous run was at the Market. He needed to steal some silkworms from Madame Kulp's shop, and offered the crew 400 eddies to do it. Biotechnica wants them, because Madame Kulp has engineered them to do something special. This is a hook for the current session.

2. An NPC who is trying to prevent workers from getting violent at a nearby waste processing facility was seen talking to someone (an exec at the org she's in). This is a clue for an ongoing arc.

3. One of the PCs saw an enemy (a stagehand that ruined his gear), which introduced a new arc.

The crew is pretty violent, so they knocked out a worker at Madame Kulp's shop and searched it, finding nothing. Because Madame Kulp (and her silkworms) are helping set up Night Market Games.

The players made their way to the games. It was a set of three competitions. Each competition is a set of skill checks. A player that loses one competition cannot continue to the next.

1. An insult competition (stolen from a D&D5e resource). The rules were pretty simple:

• NPC rolls a skill, and then insults the PC.
• The PC uses that roll as a DV, choses "an appropriate skill" for an insult and makes an Opposed Skill Check against that value.
• A character wins the competition when they get two consecutive successes, or beats the other by 5 or more.
• The NPC roll was 1d10+1d6+1. That was much too low. In retrospect, it probably should have been 1d10+2d6+1. I was hoping to lose 25% of my PCs during this round, but instead lost 0.

2. Three rounds of the Pepper Challenge. The DVs were too high, and only one of my players thought to ~~cheat~~ use Complementary Skill Checks, so I ended up losing 75% of the crew during this round. I think next time, I'd explicitly ask the players "what are you doing to improve your odds?"

3. Hide and Seek to find the silkworm. The player had to succeed on a DV 12 Stealth to hide a silkworm to sneak away. This was kind of boring, since it's just one check, but 75% of the players had failed out by this point, so that was probably for the best.

Mixed between those, players were able to do some shopping.

How do you run Night Markets or shopping trips? It's generally something I try to avoid, since it can turn into boring grinds that don't contribute to my plot arc, but I enjoyed these sessions.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35289568

Any suggestions on a skill check a player should make to see if they notice being pick pocketed by an NPC?

The Pick Pocket skill (p142) sets the bonuses for a character rolling against a DV while they are trying to steal something, but I'd like the players to feel like they're involved in the event.

I was thinking the player would roll an Opposed Skill Check on Perception, while the pick pocket would roll the Pick Pocket skill. If the player fails by more than 5 they have no idea it happened until they try to use the lost item; less than 5 then they notice a few minutes later.

If the player equals or beats the NPC's roll, then they notice as it's happening and have a chance to intervene.

Any suggestions on how that could work, like alternate skills to Perception or how the encounter could run?

I don't generally agree with calls for candidates to resign, but I'm willing to make an exception in this case:

Conservative candidate Joe Tay was born in Hong Kong but immigrated to Canada. In December, Hong Kong police announced a bounty of HK$1-million – about $184,000 – for information leading to his arrest for allegedly violating a national-security law imposed on the former British colony by China. Mr. Tay runs a YouTube channel, HongKongerStation, that draws attention to continuing civil rights violations in Hong Kong.

In January, Paul Chiang, the Liberal candidate for Markham-Unionville, reportedly told a Chinese-language media conference that people should take Mr. Tay to the People’s Republic of China consulate in Toronto and collect the reward.

“If anyone here can take him to the Chinese Consulate General in Toronto, you can get the million-dollar reward,” Mr. Chiang said, according to Ming Pao, a Chinese-language newspaper.

...

In December last year, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly publicly condemned the Hong Kong bounties on people including Mr. Tay. “Hong Kong authorities are targeting these people for actions that amount to nothing more than the exercise of freedom of speech by standing up for democracy and human rights,” she said at the time.

Marcus Kolga, senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, who also lives in Mr. Chiang’s riding, said if the Liberals fail to remove Mr. Chiang as candidate, they risk becoming complicit in Beijing’s efforts to “intimidate and silence Canadians when it is politically convenient to do so.”

Mr. Kolga said Mr. Chiang as a former police officer and public official has a moral and professional obligation to protect Canadians from transnational repression. “His comments send a chilling message to members of the Hong Kong, Tibetan and Uyghur communities who advocate for human rights, freedom and democracy – many of whom remain extremely vulnerable to PRC repression.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/federal-election/article-conservatives-demand-carney-fire-candidate-who-said-tory-should-be/

Both the Liberals and CPC are proposing tax cuts to the lowest tax bracket:

much of the benefit of this tax cut will go to the best-off: they get the same tax cut as everyone else, on the first $57,375 of their income. As for the poorest-off, they will get no benefit whatever. They don’t earn enough to pay taxes. ... Neither is it likely to have much impact on those in the lowest tax bracket. They don’t have much money to save or invest, for starters.

Coyne goes on to suggest the tax cut is pandering: it won't help our productivity, spur investment, or help those who need it. He suggests that directed cuts would achieve those goals. I suggest increasing taxes on higher brackets to cover the $6-15 billion loss.

I suppose it’s more disappointing coming from Mr. Carney. The book on him was supposed to be that he was the principled egghead, the guy with the central banking pedigree and the PhD in economics who’d arrived, with impeccable timing, just as the crisis did, as if the moment had been made for him, when his dull decency and lack of political savvy would prove advantages rather than drawbacks.

But with each day and each cynical policy proposal, Mr. Carney shows he’s more than willing to play the political game, with the same all-consuming lust for power as any 20-years-in-the-game hack.

Speaking of 20-years-in-the-game hacks, Mr. Poilievre, too, has much to answer for. Calculating and obnoxious he may be, but the book on him was always that, underneath it all, he was a dyed-in-the-wool free-marketer, someone who, for better or worse, really would take a bracing Friedmanite approach to the economy based on prices, competition and incentives, rather than regulations, subsidies and free lunches.

Instead, what do we get from both party leaders? Scrapping the carbon tax, and unfunded tax giveaways. Truly this is an election for the ages, a historic choice between dull but unprincipled and nasty but opportunistic.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canadas-existential-election-has-very-quickly-become-unserious/

I opened Facebook for the first time in months yesterday, and I was surprised at the amount of pro-CPC posts and comments. It's like the opposite of the pro-Carney posts I've seen here.

It seems like we've segmented ourselves by platform.

You know the situation: the players have decided that splitting up is a good idea. Maybe they're on a shopping trip, maybe they're investigating a dungeon/mothership, maybe some of them were arrested.

What's the best way to handle the situation outside of combat? How do you keep it interesting for the players, while moving the story forward?

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. :/