I have always had a difficult time running current times campaigns (If I run modern campaigns, it's usually set in the 80s/early 90s). One of the difficulties I have is coming up with scenarios that can't be easily deconstructed by Smartphones.
I would love to be able to run a modern campaign where I don't have to eliminate smartphones. I mean, they don't help with combat...but anywhere else I can't imagine a player not just googling information they need or getting an App for something.
Anybody else have this issue? Anybody solve this issue? Anybody never had a problem with smartphones in their games and want to share their philosophy?
Quote from: KrakaJak;442840I have always had a difficult time running current times campaigns (If I run modern campaigns, it's usually set in the 80s/early 90s). One of the difficulties I have is coming up with scenarios that can't be easily deconstructed by Smartphones.
I would love to be able to run a modern campaign where I don't have to eliminate smartphones. I mean, they don't help with combat...but anywhere else I can't imagine a player not just googling information they need or getting an App for something.
Anybody else have this issue? Anybody solve this issue? Anybody never had a problem with smartphones in their games and want to share their philosophy?
Had a similar problem with comms in
Traveller.
The key is to remember that not all information is either online or easily accessible and that information that is online or easily accessible may be false. You cannot access the blueprints for a building's ventilation system via smartphone if they are not online or behind some heavy security. However, let's say that you can access the ventilation system blueprints online, if the villain is smart enough then those blueprints will be false and lead any people using them into a trap set by the building's security.
Use time against the Players. A smartphone may access the internet for information, but the PCs may not have time enough to do a search before that time runs out on them and they must act.
Comms and smartphones can still have trouble working where a signal cannot get to it. Radio works poorly underground or during a solar flare on certain worlds.
Finally, smartphones can break. They can be dropped or get wet or have a strong electrical current pass through them. Any of these can destroy or severely disable a smartphone. If you want to be wicked, just have the touch screen on a smartphone develop a crack or other deformity - then the PCs may have accessed the needed information, but cannot read it in the garbled state it appears.
Hope those suggestions help....
Quote from: jeff37923;442844The key is to remember that not all information is either online or easily accessible and that information that is online or easily accessible may be false.
That was my first thought... a lot of the info I look up online is out of date or mixed in with crazed ravings, attempts at revisionist fiddling or just not from a reliable source. It takes a lot longer to track down the real experts and they're often not freely accessible.
Finding a Lady Gaga video? That's easy... finding something actually useful outside of basic history and nomenclature... still going to take some doing.
Smartphones are like any other piece of equipment, they are both an asset and a liability.
They can get you general information, and allow instant communication. But the information may be wrong (oh hi wikipedia!) and someone may wish to communicate with you at an inconvenient moment, eg you are sneaking somewhere and your girlfriend calls.
"I put my phone on silent!"
"Oh okay, roll to notice vibration... failed? Okay, interesting, I guess your girlfriend can't get through, guess you're not there when you need her, hope she's not in danger, hmm..."
"What? I have this sudden urge to call her."
"You won't be very sneaky chatting to your girlfriend."
"..."
etc.
And much of the information PCs need is something someone knows but doesn't want to share. Jack Bauer's mobile phone doesn't help him find the bomb before it goes off, that's what torturing suspects is for. Ahem.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;442849someone may wish to communicate with you at an inconvenient moment, eg you are sneaking somewhere and your girlfriend calls.
Reminds me of that scene in 'The Descent' when the girl's alarm goes off.
From my experience with trying to write a simulation of the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft is that problem isn't so much there isn't any information but rather it's not the right kind of information. In short there is a wealth of information but it only goes so deep.
Plus when you do find the information it is usually devoid of context, which is find for when it for a bunch of workers at the same company or organization but often a mystery for those trying to make sense of it after the fact. Sometimes it relies on something that not in the net or written down. Again it OK for the people writing the document because the assumptions are part of their workplace.
In short the players may find a floorplan for a building but it will be missing enough information that it uses for a life and death situation, like a break in, is questionable. But it will give them a starting point to direct further digging. Like questioning employees, breaking into the regional engineer office, or into the local ac/heating or plumbing company that laid out those sections of the building.
Finally for popular sites, the security plans will be designed with the idea that people will know as much as possible about the building. They wouldn't rely on security through obscurity.
Finally I tend rely on more on the challenges poised by human interactions rather than pure physical challengers. Which is one reason why I liked the basic premise of the Traveller Adventure. It didn't matter how easy it was to grab the Howood Amulet from the museum on Leedor on Aramis. Because the true challenge was in unraveling the plot that surrounded the amulet.
This has been a big issue for thriller writers.
I can see no issue with it. I mean compared to a wish spell or having a coder upload the ability to fly an apache helicopter into the PCs head, being able to check the structure of a corporation or track down the architech's plan for a building is small potatoes.
Working out where to get the correct info and what is correct and what is suprious is what research/computor use checks are for. Working as I do in a large multinational with petabytes of information to trawl through and doing that as a matter of course I don't see it as an issue.
So you can block them but I say let the PCs be cool let them get informaton easily and quickly let them hack into the control network for the traffic lights in LA just make it funa nd part of the plot. Most good plots don't come down to information they come down to relationships and people the same as stories really ...
In addition to the many great posts already here, I'd also add trouble with connectivity and speed.
Connectivity can be a pain in outlying areas or even in heavily built up areas. My 3G iPhone, frex, sucks in many areas outside of major urban centers with its awesome AT&T network. The fiance and I are like a commercial sometimes: "I don't have any bars here, dammit." To which she responds, "Hmm, I've got four bars on my Android."
Also, just because smartphones allow access to the internet doesn't mean the information will come up instantly. How many times have you tried to access a site to find a place to eat in an unfamiliar town and just watched that damn little spinny wheel graphic turn and turn and turn and...for five minutes. If time is of the essence, the smartphone might not have the juice to pull your chestnuts outta the fire.
Finally, don't forget about battery life. PCs have been away from home for a few days? Battery's dead, sorry....
It 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.
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;442849They can get you general information, and allow instant communication. But the information may be wrong (..) And much of the information PCs need is something someone knows but doesn't want to share.
I think that's a very important point right here. (1) In a game that takes on some sort of conspiracy dressing, or supernatural masquerade and so on, you'll have access to the information available to the masses, as well as crazy conspiracy theories. Not necessarily "the truth." In that case, a smartphone might provide information overload: so much information that the PCs basically drown in red herrings. Being able to actually recognize relevant information might become the challenge. (2) Many, if not all, mysteries are based on information that is not readily shared, like some secret guarded for some reason (you don't find Da Vinci's code detailed on Wikipedia), or relationships and individual motivations that are privvy to these people, unless they have a blog or something where they basically talk about such things (which could be fun in the forms of electronic handouts in a Cthulhu Now game or something).
Real life secret services and police make use of the internet in a number of ways, but the internet alone doesn't replace talking directly to witnesses, DNA prints found at a crime scene, travelling to Pakistan to actually talk with people who might have contacts with Al Qaeda, and so on, so forth. I think there's a tendency to overstate the power of the internet in terms of information value and tool for investigation. It is useful, for sure, but just like the email didn't replace paper in the work place, the internet will not replace actual field work when it comes to uncovering the truth.
Just generally, if people want to use and abuse the internet, making it more realistic and less like a movie will limit their power. Unless there's some secret blueprint.com you can log into, most buildings' blueprints aren't online, and none of the internal systems possess a map of the building either.
Most government websites that have things like registration info, blueprints, etc. are either badly out of date, incompatible with smartphone browsers, or serve as ad platforms for the organisation.
"I look up the blueprints in the county registrar's office."
"The county registrar hasn't had a budgetary increase since 1978, and has no website."
Quote from: kryyst;442904Google 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.
You are aware that many of the google map images are a few years old? For example, until a few weeks ago, my local gym appeared on google maps as an empty lot - which it was until 4 years ago.
As for hacking 3g/wifi, you run into the same problem that real-world intelligence agencies do: too much information. Of all the webpages being loaded and all the conversations being had on mobile phones, which ones do you listen to? Or as Benoist says,
Quote from: Benoista smartphone might provide information overload: so much information that the PCs basically drown in red herrings.
Which is the problem for real-world intelligence and police agencies. As well, some nasty people are just plain smart. The September 11 guys didn't write any dodgy emails, kept all their transactions small so they wouldn't be noticed, had all their planning meetings in person, and so on.
As an example from one of my espionage games, the PCs knew that a team of Russians had explosives and VX and were planning to use it in their city. But when and where and how? It was all planned by one of the terrorists, and he only told his team the details in the moments before they did anything.
The attack was to be on a train station. In fact his plan was not to simply put the nerve gas around the explosives and detonate it on the train, but to plant the bomb and then spray the walls of the safety exits... so whether or not the bomb was discovered, as thousands of people went through the safety exits they'd receive a dangerous dose of the stuff; and for every poisoned person there'd be ten panicky people rushing to hospitals (the early symptoms of VX poisoning, muscle spams, sweating and nausea, these are also symptoms of fear!) and overwhelming the system and generally being terrorised.
If all the PCs found out was the target, then the PCs might actually cause the train station to be evacuated and thus be the cause of many deaths. If they just followed the explosives, same deal - they prevent the bombs, enable the poison deaths. So they had to be close enough to observe him getting protective suits and a spray system and so on - stuff he bought from an agricultural supply shop.
He wasn't emailing people about it on the internet or phoning people up about it, so they couldn't listen in and figure things out from there. Basically they just had to watch him unobserved the whole time. And they had
other people to watch, too.
As the others have said, if you make your games all about high technology, then sure, high technology will do everything for you. But if you make your games about
people, then... well,
that's where it gets interesting and fun.
BTW, if you're trying to figure out how to run a low-tech modern conspiracy in your RPG that's not able to be broken open by someone with an internet connection, Al Qaida puts out a free web magazine called Inspire with tons of useful tips. Learn from the pros!
In modern espionage, remember that the enemy also has the internet...and probably more time to plan for the coming of agents.
AKA, if my Evil Dudes have warehouse HQ, their pet hacker may have already dumped a bunch of false info on easy to hack sites with an auto-response if anyone taps into those sites.
So you just downloaded the plans of the warehouse...but the plans are wrong and now the Evil Dudes know you are coming.
My general rule for espionage is Think Vicious.
I dunno, I played lots of Call of Chthulu, and the Library! plays the same sort of gamebreaking role. I don't mind that the Library! or the Smartphone! are useful if they fade into the background, but too much of the time they end up as item pr0n.
Right: I found this map (in the libary / on my smartphone) that shows the location of the cultists secret layer!
Wrong: I'll find the secret layer using my Smartphone! 'beep boop beep beep'
Gm: Ok, you discover...
Wronger: But first I bounce my signal off of New York so they can't trace me.
Gm: Ok, you discover....
Wrongerer: And through England, France, and China!
Gm: Fine! You discover...
Wrong^2: Oh mighty GM, how many hours will it take to scramble mine phone thusly?
Gm: ...that the cultists SEEECRET lair....
Nerd: Actualy, it would take a fortnight.
Wrongist: To slow! Tiny lives are at stake! I use my Smartphone! to figure out a faster way! I'm using the touchscreen to push pictures of buttons and not actual buttons themselves does that freeking blow your mind or what?!
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 (http://www.metacafe.com/watch/sy-23635971/weird_al_yankovic_amish_paradise_official_music_video/).
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.
Quote from: jibbajibba;443058Why? 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.
I fully agree with you.
I was just pointing out that GMs should remember the enemy may have the same resources and perhaps more time to use them and thus plan accordingly.
My example was from a Shadowrun game I played in a few years ago. Our PCs ran into a trap set by counterhackers working for the Big Bad, but fortunately at the last minute the PC hacker detected waay too much high tech happening for the warehouse as described and they were able to vamoose before the TPK came down on them.
We got our revenge though, Godfather style. We knew the Big Bad was going to be shaking it a fancy new club and we set up a fake emergency roadblock on his path and blew his car to kingdom come. Nothing says no witnesses like a well planned ambush.
...and we coordinated our attack via cellphones. Freshly bought Stuffer Shack total cheapos and our language was all coded in unrelated street slang of club goers.
One of the best ways to learn what to do about smart phones in RPGs is to go read real accounts of police actions and spies. Neuromancer is dated - you can't run a game using his assumptions about what tech will be like.
One of my favorite cyberpunk scenarios is post ww3 where low earth orbit was filled so much scrap that no one can put up a satellite or shuttle safely anymore. This alone knocks half of all the peoblem tech back down to 1995.
Quote from: RPGPundit;4431801. Technology proved to be a fantastic boon for the type of adventure I wanted to run. [...] 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.
Absolutely. We've noticed this playing Masks of Nyarlathotep, and I'm growing more and more convinced that you can port this campaign to the 21st century and make it even better.
Couple of thoughts:
D20 features "Gather Information". The only thing smartphones really do is reduce the time required to make the check from hours to minutes. (And maybe bump up the DC; eyes on the ground are always going to be better at sussing out some information.)
9 times out of 10, if the players want to look something up I tell them to look it up on their own smartphones. Found something? Great. Didn't? Guess it's not on the 'net. (The exception would be things like prospectuses on fictional companies.)
Thanks for a lot of good advice fellas!
Quote from: Flying MiceReally, 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.
I think this hit my particular nail on the head. I really don't prep much for disseminating information to the players (I don't prep much at all actually :P). Especially the "chaff" you mention.
I not really looking for foils (although I will definitely tinker with some of the ideas above). I was looking for ideas where smartphones remain as effective and useful as they are in real life but also yield interesting results/scenarios. Prepping interesting information beforehand may help with this, not to mention prepping some sporadic NPC communication (i.e. families checking up on them, banks calling, anonymous text messages etc.).
As for some of the foils I've used? Some of my group are pretty tech savvy and are well aware of what hacked Smartphones with custom software are capable of. So here's some interesting foils I came up with for certain scenarios I had with a very smart hardware hacker:
How many garbage, inneffectual and hidden wifi networks are they going to have to sort through to find the one they're trying to hack?
How many terribly written, opinionated blog articles do they have to read on a subject before they find some actual information?
Criminals are probably using cloned Sim cards. Trying to track them with GPS will yield possibly hundreds of results nationwide.
Their Facebook profile is set to private.
Quote from: Koltar;443125Jibba,
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.
I don't even HAVE a cellphone...sellout...;)
Quote from: Koltar;443125Jibba,
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.
Fair enough, but in real life I would expect a group of half a dozen or so comprising of students, housewives and teachers to have at least a couple of smartphones between them. The market penetration is much greater than I think you realise.
For $150 and $25/mo in service, I can get an LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile.
This is an Android device, which is essentially a Java-heavy version of Linux running on a handheld. A simple rooting will give me access to it's command line and thus allow me to run the full suite of Unix tools with a quick internet download, which means a real hacker who knows how to work magic with the command line can get a long way.
However, he first needs access to the server. That means one of two routes: Local, or remote.
Local means he's in pr near the building, and the only way to connect to a local area network via a smartphone is through Wi-Fi, there's no Cat-5 plug on a smartphone, and that's a problem. Any corporate or government office that isn't retarded is gonna be running TKIP WPA2 Enterprise encryption, which is pretty much uncrackable. It's a temporary key system that even the employees don't know because it's all been preconfigured for them by IT. You might be able to get in via smaller satellite offices of your target organization though, who might be using weaker encryption on an under-used machine. Here, you're going to be doing old fashioned legwork, social engineering as the hackers say, that means phishing scams, impersonations, dumpster diving, whatever it takes to get the password. You could also try stealing an employee's corporate issued phone, which is more legwork, not computer magic.
Remote means Internet, which is a crap shoot. It could take weeks of research and social engineering to find an open vulnerability on a target server. The newsmedia makes big deals out of guys like Anonymous, but the truth is most of their work is done with Denial of Service attacks, which are primitive as hell and only serve to bring down web servers. A smart company has that cordoned off from their mission-critical systems, so all it is is a nuisance.
More nasty hacks like the HBGary situation involved careful research of the company's component systems to find the right vulnerability on the right server, and tunnel into the rest of the server from there. That takes time, you might pull it off in a day and a half with a dedicated distributed team like Anonymous, but a lone PC with a cheap smartphone isn't going to just whipping it out and tapping out a few commands and be in in under 10 minutes, like you see in the movies.
And another important thing to remember too is that a smartphone has a fraction the power and speed of a full desktop unit, which is why serious cracks are going to be done on at least a proper laptop. Dictionary cracks are going to take ages on a smartphone device, and the interface and speed of the device is going to make anything more than simple tricks painful and slow.
As for information access, well, that's all over the place. Spend some time in a local cellphone store or Best Buy poking around online. The size of the screen and the reduced performance makes it really, really, really fucking annoying for time-sensitive research. These things are built for casual browsing, and there's a reason so much gets offloaded to dedicated apps put out by websites. It's better now than it was even 5 years ago, but it still will never compete with a full computer or a tablet (which is why I bought an iPad and sold my Nexus One).
Smartphones aren't magic bullets. They're handy devices for consumer level use and occasional minor network management tasks if you have the knowhow to get them rooted and opened up to run the right apps. Otherwise, they're for casual websurfing and checking Facebook status and playing Angry Birds on the bus. It's what they're made for.
Nice post, J Arcane.
Thank you J Arcane!
Would you assume hacking vs. IT defense will continue in its present balance of power as you move forward in tech levels, say into cyberpunk games or into Traveller?
Also, what about those hacker PCs are espionage agents or equivalent training and resources? How much computer firepower exists on the high end and how do the commercial IT defenses stand against them?
Another point to consider is genre emulation vs. realism. In a cinematic, James Bond setting where hackers can hack corporate databases with their smartphones, what kinds of IT defenses would villains bring to bear against them?
The HBGary Federal hack relied on social engineering, which is something drastically under-rated in most hacking systems in games, but which has played an important role in almost every big real hack and online scam I've ever read about.
IIRC, Anon spent most of its technical effort getting into Barr's email, and then just emailed a tech for the password to the rest of the system, which he provided without question.
The most useful thing your smartphone can do to get into a secure system is call someone who knows the password so they can give it to you.
Pseudo is dead on. At the end of the day, the weakest point in any system is people.
The smart hackers are the ones that know social engineering, know how to run a good con, know how to take advantage of trust or people's assumptions about things. As the saying goes, you can get almost anywhere you want with a clipboard and a name on your jacket.
There's lots of technical tools out there on both sides, but they're only as good as the people using it. If they've got a weak password, or can easily be distracted or conned, or they aren't running their updates promptly, it doesn't matter if they're digital Fort Knox.
Basically, think more Burn Notice and less The Net.
Quote from: J Arcane;444656For $150 and $25/mo in service, I can get an LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile.
This is an Android device, which is essentially a Java-heavy version of Linux running on a handheld. A simple rooting will give me access to it's command line and thus allow me to run the full suite of Unix tools with a quick internet download, which means a real hacker who knows how to work magic with the command line can get a long way.
However, he first needs access to the server. That means one of two routes: Local, or remote.
Local means he's in pr near the building, and the only way to connect to a local area network via a smartphone is through Wi-Fi, there's no Cat-5 plug on a smartphone, and that's a problem. Any corporate or government office that isn't retarded is gonna be running TKIP WPA2 Enterprise encryption, which is pretty much uncrackable. It's a temporary key system that even the employees don't know because it's all been preconfigured for them by IT. You might be able to get in via smaller satellite offices of your target organization though, who might be using weaker encryption on an under-used machine. Here, you're going to be doing old fashioned legwork, social engineering as the hackers say, that means phishing scams, impersonations, dumpster diving, whatever it takes to get the password. You could also try stealing an employee's corporate issued phone, which is more legwork, not computer magic.
Remote means Internet, which is a crap shoot. It could take weeks of research and social engineering to find an open vulnerability on a target server. The newsmedia makes big deals out of guys like Anonymous, but the truth is most of their work is done with Denial of Service attacks, which are primitive as hell and only serve to bring down web servers. A smart company has that cordoned off from their mission-critical systems, so all it is is a nuisance.
More nasty hacks like the HBGary situation involved careful research of the company's component systems to find the right vulnerability on the right server, and tunnel into the rest of the server from there. That takes time, you might pull it off in a day and a half with a dedicated distributed team like Anonymous, but a lone PC with a cheap smartphone isn't going to just whipping it out and tapping out a few commands and be in in under 10 minutes, like you see in the movies.
And another important thing to remember too is that a smartphone has a fraction the power and speed of a full desktop unit, which is why serious cracks are going to be done on at least a proper laptop. Dictionary cracks are going to take ages on a smartphone device, and the interface and speed of the device is going to make anything more than simple tricks painful and slow.
As for information access, well, that's all over the place. Spend some time in a local cellphone store or Best Buy poking around online. The size of the screen and the reduced performance makes it really, really, really fucking annoying for time-sensitive research. These things are built for casual browsing, and there's a reason so much gets offloaded to dedicated apps put out by websites. It's better now than it was even 5 years ago, but it still will never compete with a full computer or a tablet (which is why I bought an iPad and sold my Nexus One).
Smartphones aren't magic bullets. They're handy devices for consumer level use and occasional minor network management tasks if you have the knowhow to get them rooted and opened up to run the right apps. Otherwise, they're for casual websurfing and checking Facebook status and playing Angry Birds on the bus. It's what they're made for.
Good post but ... you don't run the hack from your smart phone you run the hack from your server or from the server someplace with no security that you trojaned a couple of months back or even an array of servers that you mashed into some sort of botnet device. You just use the smartphone to access your server and maybe update a couple of scripts to identify the target or whatever.
Quote from: RPGPundit;443180(...) 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.
I also don't own a cell phone and may just be in the same position as you in the country I live in. I can't stand the retarded need for continuous long-distance empty communication and the fact that people expect to be able to contact you everywhere and at any time. (The only way people are guaranteed to contact me is by email, by the way, since my home phone line is also shut off most of the time.)
As for the use of internet (be it on a smartphone or through another device) in modern time scenarios, I don't have a problem with it. Library Use or Internet Use, it basically comes down to the same: research skills and getting access to the information.
And remember, the bad guys can be doing all the same stuff; they could be googling the PCs even as the PCs are googling them.
RPGPundit
Damnit, I won't be the first to name check Burn Notice in this one.
As an inspiration for how to run campaigns when the players have access to all the cool modern toys and skills that are out there, it'd be hard to beat. The characters are always on the phone, on line, and frequently using technology in a variety of creative, innovative ways...
...which doesn't mean they don't send Mr. Fake-Smile-Overactor (at least when he's in disguise) in a fancy suit to talk to a guy about a thing as the central conceit of every.single.episode.
Not a single episode has passed where Sam looks up from the computer as says 'I just googled the bad guy's shell company and hacked their server, so you can just relax Mikey... job's done.'
Not one.
Also: If ever I'm in a game that doesn't include super powers or divine might and a player uses any sort of hand held computer device to hack, on the fly, a manned military vehicle of any sort on the fly I'll probably crush their skull with the force of my hate... as a GM or a player. The number of 'Idiot Demand Plot Holes' that requires would require several posts to enumerate, and frankly I don't have the energy (and also: Dragon Age 2...) to bother.