Fuck the 'Smart phone'.

 In real life - not everyone has one or can afford one.
(I don't have one. I just have a simple Motorola 'razor' cellphone that might be 4 years out of date - I can still text and receive calls tho)

Also they (smartphones) are notorious for 'close, but no cigar' on many info requests and searches.

As saids by anothere poster - there is the possible issue opf batteries dying on it and or a chrge being lost.

What about coverage?  Not every part of the world has a nearby cell tower.

The GM should have a special "Are there any bars?" chart for every player that overdoes the smartphone shit with their character.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;443037Fuck the 'Smart phone'.

 In real life - not everyone has one or can afford one.

Make sure your next avatar pic includes your Amish hat.

Also, Ed, watch your colleagues trying to rap.

QuoteThe GM should have a special "Are there any bars?" chart for every player that overdoes the smartphone shit with their character.

Yeah, God forbid players trying to use resources available to their characters.

Quote from: kryyst;442904It wasn't smart phones specifically but the internet generally and google maps that really unraveled a mid level superhero campaign when one of the superhero's key ability was basically that he could access the internet and networks in general from pretty much anywhere.  Google maps for picking out targets, hacking 3g/wifi to gain information etc...  We'd know pretty much everything there is to know about a building before we entered it.

So either everything suddenly became very - very low tech or everything became so incredibly hardened against tech intrusion that it neutered his characters.  Either way it fizzled the campaign, other reasons killed it entirely but that ended up being a big sore spot for the GM.

This outlines the entire problem with most posts here.

You seem to be saying that your GM plot relies no the PCs not making use of their technology and their skills so smartphones get broken or have no signal or are through other forms of GM fiat removed from the feild of play.

Why? If the PCs are smart and have the skills let them download the plans to the warehouse. Let them hack into the alarm system. Shit if they make the roles and have the nous let them kill the big bad guy by luring him into his primary Data centre tirggering the Halon firesystem then locking all the doors.

You are supposed to be creating a world that at least mirrors the one of the genre you are trying to play in. I have people sitting round me right now that could use their smart phones to hack into a badly defended network. There is a load of stuff on the Darkweb that you would never find on the www and its all there to be mined and accessed if you know what you are doing.

There is a great bit in The Girl that Played with Fire (hmm... maybe the Girl that Kicked the Hornets Nest but you get eh idea) Lisbeth the uberhacker is logged on through a Palm to a smart phone with a wifi link hidden by a cleaner in an air conditioning unit from her cell in prison and she manages to hack into someone home PC using a trojan that she wrote and was modded by one of her online buddies. It's well done drives the novel and fills a bunch of the things you want in your RPGs.

Embrace the technology make it integral to your games treat it like magic

I'm currently running Stars without Number.

That game has a dataslab in it - a kind of personal computer. Although that's on the equipment list all the players just assumed that was something particularly advanced and that they all had smartphones as a matter of course.

I was and am fine with that. The last two worlds have been sophisticated high tech ones. The characters use smart agents to filter newsfeeds for info on their enemies. They call up ship plans for standard layouts for enemy vessels (the enemy may have had refits, but it's a start). They pull up all news on people they run into. They hold meetings in virtual spaces and research anything that needs researching while enjoying a coffee or a meal.

It's not a big deal. It's commonplace in real life and if you can't handle it I wonder how you cope with SF generally. The problem isn't smartphones, the problem is trying to run scenarios designed essentially for low tech fantasy worlds in high tech settings.

The next world has electrical storms which make remote comms very difficult. The smartphones won't work in any remote locations there, but everyone knows that so I expect they'll work around it or do without while on planet. It's a known local problem. There's no bullshit with "oh, suddenly it breaks". If they're somewhere they work then they work. If they're somewhere they don't work due to local atmospheric issues or a lack of local infrastructure then they know that.

Apart from Imperator and Jibbajabba most people on this thread are trying to find ways to stop the characters doing perfectly reasonable things in case it interferes with the GM's plot. Either don't have a GM's plot or have one that a modern ten year old couldn't outthink on their way to school.

Quote from: Koltar;443037Fuck the 'Smart phone'.

 In real life - not everyone has one or can afford one.

No, though they're hardly rare. In any setting with them the odds on player characters not being able to afford them are remote.

Quote from: D-503;443064No, though they're hardly rare. In any setting with them the odds on player characters not being able to afford them are remote.

I can just see the PCs having access to enough military hardware to destroy a battle ship but the GM telling them they can't have a smart phone because their PC can't afford the $40 a month subscription fee


What about a Culture style scifi game where the PCs have neural laces that can tap into the universal knowledge matix and utilise smart AI search engines to ferret out any and all data iat the speed of thought.

Quote from: jibbajibba;443067I can just see the PCs having access to enough military hardware to destroy a battle ship but the GM telling them they can't have a smart phone because their PC can't afford the $40 a month subscription fee


What about a Culture style scifi game where the PCs have neural laces that can tap into the universal knowledge matix and utilise smart AI search engines to ferret out any and all data iat the speed of thought.

A lot of the posts in this thread do sound like they'd be happy with the PCs having micro-black hole generators but not an out of date iPhone.

I'd be fine with that second para, though there is a risk of the tech overwhelming the humanity. An issue with hard sf gaming is keeping people at the forefront of the drama.

Quote from: jibbajibba;443067What about a Culture style scifi game where the PCs have neural laces that can tap into the universal knowledge matix and utilise smart AI search engines to ferret out any and all data iat the speed of thought.

I just map that from what happens now. We have the Internet with all its available data and still people are more interested in LOLcats and who was wearing what dress at an awards show the previous night.

Oh, and porn. Cannot forget porn.

Quote from: D-503;443064No, though they're hardly rare. In any setting with them the odds on player characters not being able to afford them are remote.

Not every modern-day campaign is going to be a well-funded group of gunbunnies with an endless supply of ammoand gear.

An Illuminati investigation campaign or a Lovecraftian thing set in the present day might involve college students, teachers, or even NRA membership housewives as characters. In those cases they would the simplesrt of cell phones.

Heck, just barely 10 years ago or so more people DIDN"T have cellphones than did.  GO back almost 20 years - to around 1992/1993 and there weren't any 'cell phones' for the average person. The equivalent then was a bulky Car phone that often had a carryibng case and when in use it sat between the driver and passenger in the car, the driver usually chose to pull over and park to answer a call or askled the passenger to answer the phone. (I know, a buddy of mine had one of these 'car phones' in 1993)

From the early '90s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGbDruOq6cw&feature=related
Look at the size of those things - also no internet search functions.

A 1989 'cell phone' ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAeBlL1zuko&feature=related

A 1990 Radio Shack cell phone commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=694TX2lQ7Uo&feature=related
The "transportable telephone".




- Ed C.

Hi KrakaJack!

Really, you need to build acces to information in at the start. ASsume the characters can get info, and the research/whateverrolls mean *do the get what they are looking for* rather than *can they find the means to get their info*. In any information rich age, the problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff. In an information poor age, the problem is getting access to the wheat, because nobody would bother storing the chaff. It would be winnowed first.

-clash

Quote from: Koltar;443110Not every modern-day campaign is going to be a well-funded group of gunbunnies with an endless supply of ammoand gear.

An Illuminati investigation campaign or a Lovecraftian thing set in the present day might involve college students, teachers, or even NRA membership housewives as characters. In those cases they would the simplesrt of cell phones.

Heck, just barely 10 years ago or so more people DIDN"T have cellphones than did.  GO back almost 20 years - to around 1992/1993 and there weren't any 'cell phones' for the average person. The equivalent then was a bulky Car phone that often had a carryibng case and when in use it sat between the driver and passenger in the car, the driver usually chose to pull over and park to answer a call or askled the passenger to answer the phone. (I know, a buddy of mine had one of these 'car phones' in 1993)

From the early '90s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGbDruOq6cw&feature=related
Look at the size of those things - also no internet search functions.

A 1989 'cell phone' ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAeBlL1zuko&feature=related

A 1990 Radio Shack cell phone commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=694TX2lQ7Uo&feature=related
The "transportable telephone".




- Ed C.

Ed you live in a dreamworld mate. If you had a party of 5 with a professor 3 students and a barmaid at least 2 of them would have I-Phones or androids.

Over a third of all new phone buys in the US are smart phones. Nearly everyone I know has a smart phone and students are the wost culprits.

The size, shape and penetration of older phones just goes to show how rapidly the market is growing and how great a cultural shift this is. Smartphones are like designer accessories and I woudl have thought you consumer focused American's would welcome that with open arms.

Like has been suggested, have the bad guys plant false information, especially on common sites like Wikipedia (but we know this never happens in real life, right?).

Quote from: jibbajibba;443120....... I woudl have thought you consumer focused American's would welcome that with open arms.

Jibba,

 When I first got a cell phone around 5 or 6 years ago, several of my close friends joked that it was one of the early signs of the oncoming apocalypse.

("Ed got a cellphone? Quick someone check if Jerusalem has a blizzard this week .")


- Ed C.

In my recent CoC one-shot, I set it in the modern day (2011), which is a rarity for me.  What I found was the following:

1. Technology proved to be a fantastic boon for the type of adventure I wanted to run.  Had the same adventure been set in the 1920s, the PCs would have had to travel hundreds of miles to go to the nearest university to obtain information which might or might not be there in the library, and I may have had to really stretch credibility to have some of it that closeby; and then would have had to spend days or weeks slogging through material to try to find information that was useful and sometimes crucial to the investigation.  What having the internet does is basically speed everything up (potentially, see below) so you can get to the actual blowing shit up and people going nuts and world-ending-horror.

2. Even though they had all of the internets at their disposal, it didn't necessarily mean they got everything off the bat, and in many cases didn't end up getting certain things that would have made the PCs' lives much easier, that they could potentially have gotten.  Having Wikipedia at your fingertips doesn't mean anything if you can't think of what to search for.  Thanks to the internet, thee PCs could have, in my adventure for example, spent 2-4 hours doing research on the local area (which in the old days would have taken 2-4 days or weeks) that would have given them all kinds of clues, but they didn't bother to, and thus missed that opportunity completely.

And yes, finally, "i hack the internets with my iphone to take over the enemy's gunship" or something like that doesn't have to work, and probably shouldn't work, even if the character has a 95% in computer operations.
And also, if it does work, that means that the bad guys should be able to do exactly the same to you, maybe even easier.

So yeah, ultimately i have no issue with the smartphone; in a modern game.  In real life, I can't fucking stand cellphones (I seriously think I may be one of the last adults left in the entire country without a cellphone).

RPGPundit

I agree with Jibbajibba. Smartphones are not not an issue for me and are far less intrusive and game breaking than magic is.