one of the greatest moments that i've witnessed in a TTRPG: "hurry! i'm in fake st 123 and there's a monster locked in the other room! please send help!" "don't worry sir, we're sending a patrol car to your location, in the meantime avoid all contact with the fish monster" "oh thank- wait, how do you know it's a fish monster? I never specified that" "..." *dial tone* now he has two problems to worry about
On the loss of signal front, I'm in the network biz and other than deep underground or inside a steel ship the worst place to get a cell signal is a multi-storey building with a lot of copper wire in the ceiling connecting PCs and phones, especially if the original Cat4 cable was abandoned in place when Cat5e or Cat6 was pulled to replace it. It forms a partial faraday cage that thoroughly blocks communications. The only way to connect is to be able to connect to the wireless network in the building, and building networks are normally protected with a password and maybe a badge with mag-chip as well. Cheers!
@@Rubymagicalgirl88 Basically yeah. I work in a liquor store inside a mall. It's not *incredibly* old (built 1985, one year younger than I am) but in the store's walk-in beer cave, my phone gets NO service whatsoever. Building's exterior is concrete, there's heavy insulation covered by metal sheeting on the walls and ceiling of the walk-in... yeah.
I love the idea that the pc says "I'm going to hack the system" and the GM replies: " sure, you send out a few million phishing emails, role to see how soon somebody falls for it... "
I like subverting the phone entirely in Horror. "911, what is your emergency?" "There is something killing people! Please send cops!" "Are you safe at the moment?" "Yes, I'm hidden." (voice changes) "Where are you hidden, exactly? Is it the closet on the third floor? Should I look for you there?" "Wait... what?" "I'm coming to get you, Susan! MUAHAHA!"
“911, what is your emergency?” “We’ve been robbed, our house is robbed!” “I’ll see what I can do, help is on the wa-“ *disruption* “Hello?” *disruption clears* “…” “Where is Jessica Hyde?”
If the characters google some really specific information like star alignments 9623 years ago, you could always have the website ask "Star alignment checker wants to use your current location", now that could be entirely innocent but it could also have been triggered by some algorithm that cultists have created to warn of snooping investigators.
This reminds me a lot of the episode of The Venture Brothers when the clue was “The house that coke built” and they thought it was Studio 54 because they looked it up on the internet. The riddle was however written in the 19th century and Studio 54 didn’t exist and, it actually was in reference to a coal tycoons mansion. Because coke was a byproduct of coal distillation.
I also enjoyed one of the early Buffy episodes where a demon was released into their network due to being scanned into the computer and that scanning counted the same as reading the book out loud.
I think my favourite ‘cameras are a thing’ moment was in a Star Wars RPG where we managed to pull off a successful raid on an Imperial facility, no losses or even serious injury, and as we were headed back to our getaway ship, the GM asked “So…did anyone think to wear a mask or anything?” To our credit, we all admitted that we hadn’t thought of that. And the chase was on! Loved this episode!
I once played in a Buffy-esque modern campaign. A number of characters got into magic, which required 1) unlikely materials andtime-consuming rituals, and 2) you to have the ritual instructions on your person. To address the second situation, we took pictures of spells on our phones and largely ignored spellbooks afterwards
I ran a Delta Green scenario set in July 2016 and my players used Pokemon Go as a bit of social engineering. They got contacts at the NSA to make the town a hot spot of rare Pokemon and posted it on Reddit. This being the peak of the Pokemon go phase hundreds of people flooded the town giving them more cover to do their investigation. It was amazing
Other episodes of this series... * Pre-writing age adventures that would have been solved with writing * Bronze age adventures that would have been solved with iron age metallurgy * Renaissance adventures that would have been solved with electricity Etc... (LOL) Regardless, thank you for another thought-provoking & inspirational video essay!
This is something I really like about the Dresden system in particular -- exposure to magic tends to break anything more complicated than an old car, so the characters can almost never rely on cell phones or the internet unless they go on a mini-sidequest to talk to someone and get them to do it.
I once had a call of cthulhu campaign centered around a mind altering video that had gone viral online and a large chunk of that adventure was avoiding seeing this video as it started even appearing on bilboards and the news as the virus spread further throughout the city, ultimately leading to its victims trying to hold the PCs down and force them to watch
This is more like bringing the GM's research skill up to date. When you mentioned allowing them to use hacking, I realize the GM needs to learn the limits of what is the typical practice.
im impressed you know some if that stuff about older records! I worked at a research library for a bit over covid, and we used that time to digitize a lot of stuff you would think would be already be there. like records from the 1700s and 1800s. there is a lot of stuff that isnt there just because it takes real man hours to translate physical material to digital. and internet literacy and navigation is definitely a learned skill. knowing what forums or subforms are good or bad for x topic, where to even find them, or what to even search for and whats legit.
I did an internship this summer where I digitized early 20th century medical records. Even with a specialized scanner, it took a *long* time to scan everything properly. Like, a few weeks of work. And even then, the end result was a folder of TIFF files (albeit in order) that someone else had to make searchable. The records weren't even that old, only a century or so, but I still had to be careful not to damage the original.
I helped an archivist over a summer or so a few years ago, and even stuff from say 50 years ago needed to be put into the system. Definitely a lot of specific things related to counties and smaller areas that can be googled out there.
Great video. When I'm running a modern game I just let the players use their personal phones to check the internet. Had a great Mage:Awakening campaign in which the PCs knew the *mundane* stuff about what was going on but still needed their skill rolls to know the *magic* stuff that lead into.
Depends on the year of the campaign. Search engines were allowed to get accurate results pre-2014. But if you're playing in 2022 it's completely fine to let them use their own phones. They're not very likely to find anything useful.
@@SymmetricalDocking Yeah, that's something that few people would have predicted back in the 00's or early 10's --- the modern internet is very, very difficult to get true information from. You can do it, but it really is a special skillset that has to be developed and it can be very time consuming to comb through a mountain of information that is largely false or half-true to figure out what's actually useful and accurate -- and have to figure out what sort of extreme biases may be at play that also can warp the validity of the info. And paywalls... which themselves are no indication of accurate information, really, just that the information is being monetized.
Some very good points there. I've used the DNA after a fight thing in an urban fantasy game a few years ago. The party were breaking into a bank at night to find a relic hidden there only to find a gang of fae working for the Big Bad was also trying to break in at the same time. Much fighting ensued, leading to all bar one of the party taking wounds before the enemy went down. The players thought they'd come up with a plan to make it look like the gang killed each-other due to in-fighting. I later revealed that no-one believed this as not only were some items missing from the vault but there was plenty of forensic evidence that the players hadn't bothered to clear up like blood-stains and shell-casings. This was a problem as one of the PCs had a drawback that meant the FBI had her DNA on file. Oddly the character who didn't get wounded was the one with no blood to leave behind (he was a gargoyle).
The makes sense, Now a days what we know as the internet data base, servers are like over seas like in china or something. A world full world war breaks out the internet as we know it is gone and the data base would have to be decentralized specially if wideband commination gets blocked. I like the dystopian idea of like their being a sever in New York and a server in LA and to share data from one to the other someone in a server truck would have to download from New York drive to LA and Upload, redownload and drive back to New York to upload there.
I love the idea of PCs trying to intercept the mobile server truck to either install or delete something before it arrives. Difficult part is pulling it off without anyone knowing they were ever there.
@@reifuTD dude read about BBS. I imagine this working in a very similar system! and really, as @aegone said up there, that would work very well for Traveller!!!
That is 100% my first cell phone as well. I lost it when I had to use it wedge a door shut to keep a bunch of Mi-Go trapped in the office building while we escaped via car. I miss that phone, but rest easy knowing those Mi-Go have never escaped that building.
@@Zulk_RS If you're running SR 5e and need resources to make prepping easier, let me know. I wrote myself a document that calculates host attributes, spirit attributes and makes balancing the difficulty of character sheets for enemies slightly easier (by tying professionality rating to set attribute and skill points). Love the game, but the rule book is so badly edited and hard to get into ;_;
@@UndeadGirlCyber Thank you for the offer. I actually finished running the game by now. It was a very short one-shot where my one player that agreed to play had to figure out who kidnapped an pop singer and then rescue her from the Eye-Fivers. And I agree, the rules are really hard to get into. I think I had to homebrew some rules in and out just to make sure combat doesn't take forever (No more rolling initiative every turn; consecutive attacks don't give the -1 to dodge; groups of enemies of the same stats just act as a group together)
I'm kind of shocked that You're Next is the only slasher movie I'm aware of where the villains just outright used a cell phone jammer. It's a logical fix that shows the villains have planned ahead.
The first thought I had when it came to your intro was that a lot of people just sort of expect a Google Translate on an ancient language would work flawlessly, when in reality, languages - especially ancient pictographic languages - require additional cultural context to get a full understanding. Many languages even have words and concepts that don't translate clearly. And even if you can, that context may be specific or even completely altered with the passing of centuries. This is why Ancient Egyptian was nigh-indecipherable until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, because so much of it required understanding the context of images created by a culture that no longer exists, which only became possible once we discovered a translation into extant or more well-documented languages. And the kicker of it is, machine translation is _really_ bad at picking up on this, because even the most advanced modern computers lack cultural or linguistic context for things like slang terms or metaphor. Good example being how early machine translation would take a metaphor like "out of sight, out of mind" and turn them into things like "in the place where it is not visible, from the heart". Modern translators are better, but tend to struggle if the languages aren't directly linguistically related (i.e: Spanish to Italian vs. Spanish to Japanese). So the example in the intro could easily see the player getting a translation result like "The white birds of Set who arrive on the birth of Thoth during the Flood" and either having to roll Ancient Egyptian to get a better idea of the context, or waste potentially valuable time to send that to someone who would know what the context of that means.
I love watching Magnum PI but could you imagine how short every episode would have been if Magnum had a cell phone instead of just red Ferrari-ing everywhere.
Magnum on the phone, "Hi, I need to report a crime..." Operator, "I'm sorry, I can't understand you. I can only hear a rustling noise." Magnum, "Darn, foiled, by my luxurious moustache, once more!"
Seth my only complaint for your channel is the fact that I can not stop watching it. I am starting a traveller campaign rn, and this was extremely helpfull. Keep up the good work!
One of the first games I played with my current group was an urban fantasy game where we played as members of an organization dedicated to keeping the supernatural a secret and containing or destroying hostile monsters and mages. Think SCP Foundation, if you’re familiar. One of the most memorable parts of that game was when, during our investigation of a “miracle healer” in a rural town, we had to deal with a group of reporters who’d come to cover that same story. The modern day setting was what made this encounter interesting: we knew that as soon as the event was over, they’d be able to send their recordings back to the station where we wouldn’t be able to stop them being released. But, if anyone caught us trying to sabotage the footage, we risked being recorded ourselves. So we had a ticking clock for the operation while still needing perfect stealth. I’m actually very proud of how we handled it as players. Once we got access to the news vans, we realized that stopping the recording entirely without the camera operators noticing would be extremely difficult. So, inspired by the infamous blurriness of every real life cryptid photo, we just had our hacker turn the resolution on the recording down from 1440p to 140p. The footage was completely unusable, and it was subtle enough that the reporters had no idea until it was too late to do anything about it.
I posted this in another comment, but I want people to see it, so I'm posting it here again: As a GM who has successfully run Intimate Encounters, I have an idea for other GMs (players, look away): in the original scenario, the monster is always looking for victims of the opposite sex, making him kind of heterossexual. This didn't make sense to me, since the creature wasn't even human. So I mixed up the prior victims, making him "kind of" bissexual. Without knowing anything about the scenario, one of my players had decided to have a fat character. So when they figured the bad guy was using a dating app (I also changed it to Tinder, because it's the main one people use in Brazil, or at least where I live), they decided to use him as bate. At first I didn't love the idea, but then they got 1 in the luck roll, and they were in the correct area, and it was soooo much fuuuuuun watching my player try to flirt in a closed motel room with a person he thought was a human serial killer. It was so worth it I would definitely recommend to every GM who runs this adventure!
at my table we are playing a game that takes place in the present and in the city where i live, one thing i have been doing is using information that my players can search the internet in real life to create my creatures and mysteries, being able to find relevant information or not . another thing I did was create some blogs with stories about the world, with photohop handouts of old newspapers, photos of places and such
Oh, sorry Seth, I understand that you prefer that we don't post links, I won't do it again, sorry by the way, great video!!! using modern technology in game is difficult but very interesting, just in our latest adventures my players checked whatsap conversations to find out who suspects were talking to and what, used a video of a girl singing to identify a ghost, in addition to using some of the blogs I created for our campaign with information about the history of the region, Photoshopped handouts of old newspapers and photos of places
@@SSkorkowsky no problems, but it was nothing important, it was the blog link I mentioned in the comment above I thought it was you, because the previous comment was gone too, sorry for assuming, but now I think it's youtube itself by the way, nothing to do with it: your content is great!!!
No worries. I'd have assumed it, too. Sometimes UA-cam flags stuff for me to approve. Other times I never know something got deleted unless someone mentions it.
@@SSkorkowsky anyway, I will avoid links from now on, even if they are broken, it seems, if only to give you less trouble in approving or not a comment!😊 but it's a shame, i was so proud of the journal i made in photoshop, hahahaha anyway, it's always great to have a new video of yours to watch
Here's a great real world example. I had to get a copy of my high school diploma (don't ask me why since I have a college degree, but workplace wanted it). I went to school out of state. Contacted my old high school only to find out that all records had been sent to the local Department of Education which had a storage fire 10 years ago. All records before that time were lost.
Fully agree - There are absolutely some story types and adventures that can't be done with modern or future tech, but there are a whole bunch that can only be done with modern or future tech as well. And, well, that's just true of any tech level for a setting.
There's an "Altered Carbon" play-through on "HyperRPG," that displays using the wireless internet within the confines of a table run. It's more a Cyberpunk type environment, but it does show the players finding information wile avoiding the authorities.
This video will be really useful. I just started a modern day Call of Cthulhu game so I’ll have to navigate the players tech use. One player is a hacker, so I plan to place some obstacles for them. They did just finish a scenario where they didn’t have a signal, but they are government agents and were sealed in a facility with some other characters for security purposes so it made sense to everyone.
This is also why having a time limit in a game/adventure is good... yeah you can go do all the research, fact finding and hacking you want... but in the meantime... things are happening.
As short format videos infect other UA-cam channels, I’m grateful for your continued full length and in depth videos. They never fail to both inform and entertain.
This one is fantastic. This is something I personally struggle with whenever I consider writing a modern day cthulhu scenario, but I always wondered how to deal with tech in an effective way. These methods are not just logical, but very simple and easy to implement
This is good stuff. I've got a group of players that like to play the "I hack it" game with every single thing. That was how my Star Wars game went, anyway. I'm prepping a cyberpunk game soon and I need to make sure "I hack it" isn't going to be the go-to solution for every single obstacle.
i had this exact problem in a cyberpunk 2020 campaign, the player had made a netrunner very well, and usually, even by my unpreparedness, we were very young too, usually they would stop the van near the place, stand guard and the netrunner would run out to solve 90% of the problem there, what I did was create missions in places with low technology, or more analog technology, like forests or slums, I always left something that the netrunner could do, of course, but I put obstacles for him, so way that the group had to physically go somewhere to solve things, that helped a lot, with star wars and the retrofuturism of the technology of their universe is an idea very capable of working too
Hey, let them "hack it", but homebrew random time-frames for accomplishing that. Player: "I hack the military-grade mainframe!" GM: "Okay, roll 3d6 to see how many days it takes you."
Thanks. I ended up removing that disclaimer comment, as the only thing worse than not being 100% clear on the internet is letting the trolls see how annoyed you're getting with their trollishness.
The panicked players during the voice over looked like it took a lot of work to put together for a background joke and I just have to comment to say how great it was. Had me rolling.
One thing to do is to introduce the common annoyances that technology brings. In one Traveller episode I had a tiny legal disclaimer scroll across the screen during a phone call. The players had to do a routine comm check to capture it.
3:20 A good example of this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It went from 1997 to 2003, and throughout those years, mobile phones became more and more common in the US, but much less so in the show.
It is amazing how "turnabout is fair play" is something that both sides of the screen can forget; you have players falling into classic fantasy habits of doing things and augmenting that with modern technology, completely forgetting that they're not the only ones with access to that tech, while GMs keep the basic structure of fantasy plots which then get holes poked through them because they too forget that players can do that as well as the NPCs. I think part of it is that there's so much technology we take for granted that people can forget just how much it can affect things outside of boring, mundane uses. It's something you have to be conscientious about as opposed to fantasy or tech beyond our reach which you can't take for granted because it's not something you interact with on a daily basis, making overlooking such mundane things an easy trap to fall into. And yes, research isn't a quick and easy process, at least not when it's something potentially sensitive or relatively private. Any info that you can find in a couple minutes should at best be at the level of a clue pointing players in the right direction as opposed to a smoking gun. Another note on hacking is that isolated networks are a thing as well. It's not like if you have an internet connection you can access any computer in the world if your skills are "leet" enough. Sometimes you have to be on site where that information is stored to access that system, and the process of both getting on location and finding an access point can be notable challenges even before you start the proper "hacking". As for "calling the cavalry", there's also the issue that if the players try to tell the naked truth in a horror or supernatural plot, they might get dismissed as a prank call as well.
The technology complications are great and all, but they can go overboard quick. I was playing in a "hidden superheroes" game where the DM made life a living hell for doing anything. Everyone has cameras, you can't use any powers or you're caught. Police are called at any suspicious thing. Police helicopters, security cameras, tracking, the works. We literally couldn't do anything without three sessions of trying not to get caught and getting back undercover and trying to cover our tracks. It was soooo tedious. Obviously any DNA left behind would mean we would get immediately disappeared. It made the game completely unplayable. We either had to just say, "screw it" and go loud and just be an out superhero team and extremely public (which would just be a big "haha" to the DM and we didn't want to be player vs DM), or literally say, "Oh well, we have cool powers. Whatever. Let's just go be normal people and not follow any plots because what's the point?"
If you haven't seen the fever dream that is Kung Fury, you're in for a treat. That powerglove-sporting character hacks time so Kung Fury can battle Hitler.
Had the opposite reaction among my party when we switched to Delta Green. The group didn't really consider their cell phones and got surprised when people called 911 on them or when the GPS on their phones gave them away to local authorities.
About using online communities: I ran The Haunting a few years back with the suggested modern day Ghost Hunter Show, you mentioned in your review, but it was a YT-Ghost hunter show, similar to the setup in Viral. The hook was that all these old newspaper reports about the haunted house were becoming the new hot thing on Reddit and 4chan paranormal communities, with the latter giving them a tip, that the house was located in his old hometown, and it always creeped him out. One of the Newspaper reports was an actual clue from the adventure, the others just random soft-news garbage. It was pretty fun, especially when they filmed themselves killing Corbitt and basically Breaking and Entering (made them roll to see how well their recording was) best shot was when the cameraman got hit by the bed attack and filmed himself falling out of the 1st floor window. Anyway, after they uploaded it, there were a lot of videos giving explanations for the practical/digital effects they used. Additionally, some details in their videos changed, meaning someone had edited the video online, adding signs of photoshopping/editing in it to make it look more fake.
All I can think about right now is that time my dad (back when he was in college 20 or so years ago) read through the entirety of the internet in a single day. I’m planning on using that for one of my Industrial Revolution style games
I am glad to see this. I have never been that worried about tech in my games because tech usually exacerbates conflict just as quickly as it solves it.
One of the movies I really do like the depiction of hacking is Hackers. Besides having that 90's asthetic of hacking and little gadgets that helps with it, they do show that reading code and actively hacking take time. Cause unless you have a certain virus for a certain job, macking a brand new one that can be used for whatever you're doing at that moment takes more than a few moments.
the coolest moment I had when running a modern day action setting campaign was when I pit my player against an opponent who assaulted them from afar via a curse that reflected any injury they inflicted on themselves to the cursed targets but at twice the lethality, the reverse was true but the necromancer recieved only half the pain instead. the fight took place in a large crowded mall and their enemy could have been anyone and anywhere in that mall! it was an exhilirating fight where the players had to use all modern conveniences available within the mall to not only survive the onslaught of suicidal attacks, but also locate their assailant. the player's only ability at the time was minor precognition which couldn't help her with finding the enemy, only predict the attack and prepare for it as best as she could! a thing i forgot about were cameras (as mentioned in the video we seem to do that a lot). i had no idea how they were gonna locate the enemy back then, so when my player said she wanted to rush into the security room, i was ecstatic! proud even! after having been attacked a couple times by now when she arrived, she had a rough idea of what cameras to look for. a place where you can drown, burn, and get melted by acid? a kitchen! she looked through all restaurant areas and found the kitchen of a fast food chain she visited earlier before the attack. it turns out the enemy places her curse via making a target consume their blood, so she put her blood on the player's food. a seedy looking chef who had very similar injuries as her. primed with this info, the player rushed to get there, enduring a few more attacks before finally coming face to face with the enemy, where a satisfying one sided fist fight occured as the player berid herself with her curse by consuming the enemy's blood once again! (gross)
When it comes to phone signal, it really does depend on location. Here in Wales, there are plenty of homes where signal is spotty at best; especially near the coast.
Really great video! Having run D&D for most of my life, even though I've always tried not to let technology in modern settings be an issue, I feel that I definitely still fell for some of these pitfalls with technology before, especially when running WoD or Cthulhu. But you've definitely given me really wonderful ideas I hadn't previously though of, so thanks a bunch. Seeing you talk about the enemies/monsters themselves using technology reminded me of the one Call of Cthulhu adventure I think I managed to do it right. I ran an adapted version of The Music of the Spheres (a scenario from the Stars Are Right book). Basically, an astronomical research station picks up radio signals from an outer god (Ghroth), and since they keep recording and playing these alien frequencies down here, the earth is starting to "resonate" and emit a similar "song". Which is bad news - it leads to strange weather, hallucinations, psychosis, zombielike animals and whatnot. In my scenario I made it so that these signals were actually creating interference and getting mixed with regular radio programming broadcast by radio antennas, resulting in the local stations to occasionally have their broadcast cut off into this warped and hellish "music". I created audio recordings for these and played them for my group when they came across these transmissions, using a mix of recordings of regular broadcasts, number stations and those planet songs recorded by NASA. For that entire scenario, as soon as my players figured out the connection of the supernatural events and the radio, they became absolutely terrified and paranoid of anything that could pick up signals at all. We still have a chuckle remembering one particular moment, when the car's radio began playing one of these when they were traveling. Just between us, it wasn't going to do them any harm, it was just for some exposition and flavor. But the way they freaked out was just something else, so much that after noticing that the radio couldn't be turned off (I'm a bully, I admit) they ended up ripping off the entire radio. Fun times!
As a GM who has successfully run Intimate Encounters, I have an idea for other GMs (players, look away): in the original scenario, the monster is always looking for victims of the opposite sex, making him kind of heterossexual. This didn't make sense to me, since the creature wasn't even human. So I mixed up the prior victims, making him "kind of" bissexual. Without knowing anything about the scenario, one of my players had decided to have a fat character. So when they figured the bad guy was using a dating app (I also changed it to Tinder, because it's the main one people use in Brazil, or at least where I live), they decided to use him as bate. At first I didn't love the idea, but then they got 1 in the luck roll, and they were in the correct area, and it was soooo much fuuuuuun watching my player try to flirt in a closed motel room with a person he thought was a human serial killer. It was so worth it I would definitely recommend to every GM who runs this adventure!
I think targeting the opposite gender (or opposite looking, since the monster is not human as you've said) made sense - the monster is applying the tactic, that fits its victims and is most likely to work (and majority of humans is heterosexual). Well, unless it researched its victims beforehand (I don't know the game), then of course it would be/look the gender which would work (as I said, I don't know the game, assumed some sort of shapeshifter or glamour/illusion).
This is a very timely video for me personally. By player request we’re about to move our CoC campaign from the 1930s into the modern day and I’ve been fretting over several of the exact points you cover. Helpful stuff as always!
I'm sure that cults and anti-cult groups would have bots monitoring internet traffic for any comments of interest and tracking them back to their source.
Something I came up with in a scenario was that an enemy's psionic invisibility power only worked when under direct observation by an organic eye and brain... but it couldn't fool a camera, so, security cameras and mobile phone cameras would let you see the bad guy/Zhodani spy/monster when eyeballs couldn't. The phone cam became like the sunglasses in "They Live"; a peephole view of reality while the illusion surrounds you. This could work in a modern day Cthulhu game, or in Traveller, where security cams and robots can see the Zho or Droyne intruder directly, but a human can't, or, the psionic camouflage that allows a person to look like someone else ina real time 3d deep-faker effect, is revealed by the camera's electronic sensors. Now that cell phone is like a candle in a vast darkness, fragile, important, needing to be protected and husbanded as a player resource. Will you run its battery down by using it this way? It's fun to leave clues in visual wavelengths unseen by normal vision. Black light flashlights are obvious, but maybe you can imagine other detection systems that sense in other ways... "What's the tip-off?" "Micro-changes in air density" Like that. Or... using phones to triangulate; they need to share the same special app to do so. Had a scenario where the players took payment in a credit card format. Said cards left a trail of purchases and housing locations and travel, that's why every eight or nine days after arriving somewhere safe and making a purchase off the card, some local wetwork contractor would jump them. Eventually they made the connection, converted all their e-money to cash or goods, and went dark on the grid after that. Another variation of this was finding stolen money in large denomination bills. One player broke the rules and took one as a souvenir, instead of giving all the money away to a fence. That player either gets mugged or ends up losing the bill in a bad gambling decision. The next day that bill hits the local bank, and is scanned, watch programs in bank networks notice the serial number, send alerts to a certain person... and then a WHOLE lot of stuff goes into motion. You can do that with anything that has a serial number, really. One excuse to block a phone at a critical time is, it suddenly decided it's time to update, and hangs... or, you meant to update the phone, to make it more useful, but you botched it, now the memory might be corrupted, or the range reduced, or the power consumption goes heavy, stuff like that. Or your specific network supporting that phone has sudden problems downtown... are the bad guys influential enough to nerf an entire city phone system, just to get you offline? Sometimes, you don't want to be tracked, so you take the battery and sim card out... when do things become desperate or important enough to justify reactivating the phone, when you know they can track it? Maybe the key software item you need is only available on Android and all you own is an iPhone?
This reminded me of a game I ran a while ago (picking one of the hi-tech settings for it, specifically Cyberpunk, exactly because I needed modern tech for the hook to work). In short, a person was kidnapped some 13 years ago, and police never found them or their kidnappers. Now they resurfaced in some highway clinic (where it was discovered, because of a DNA match), and the PCs were hired to find them (This fitting the "What can modern tech give you?"). Sure, they used modern tech to help resolve it (like hacking into the clinic's security system to get that person's current looks from a camera recording), but as you said, bad guys can do that too. In a follow up game, it turned out the corporate bad guy had the PCs tagged all that time (during the original/first adventure) using military espionage drones, where they were, what were they doing, when and where to strike, etc. As for hacking, in said follow up game, the PCs had a netrunner examine some computer files for them. He figured out they were tampered with, but to find out who did that and what was changed, he needed the physical drives the files were obtained from (as the PCs had copies of the files). So the PCs had to get into the place, where the computers were kept, and steal the hard drives. The computer wizard helped, but couldn't do everything for them, and provided a hook for the next thing they had to do.
I keep my COC games set no later than 1970’s , and that was pretty much a one adventure thing. Happily for me my players prefer 1890’s era settings . My fave as well !
I watched a great Korean cop show called Stranger where the villain impersonated the muder victim and deliberately gets caught on a dashcam to confuse and mislead the police.
One example from a Shadowrun style D&D 5e game I was involved. We needed to break into a building. Firstly we case the place, checking if there's onsite tech support. Nope, they contract out their tech support to a third party...fair enough. We check out the third party company, see what kind of uniforms they wear, name tags and the like and get together a 'close enough' approximation of their outfits. Secondly we notice that's more secure floors uses keycards and the area we're heading to requries a guards security level of keycard, so getting it off the plebs isn't enough. So using a high risk trick, my Artificer Kobold creates a device used by real Pen testers, a backpack with a laptop and RFID reader in it and gets into a brief tussle with one of the cards whilst disguised as a vagrant before escaping. So our half-elf hacker goes in, futzes with their system to cause some errors which would require calling tech support whilst redirecting their call to us. We answer, say we'll be there in 30 minutes, pile into the (stolen) van and get changed on the way there. Everything goes smoothly until we're at the room we need to be at, turns out that (thanks to a bungled perception check during the stakeout) the Guards key card can't actually access the room. So my Artificer pops the panel to being working the system to get it open. The DM asks me to hold on a moment and reminds us that... ...Magic exists in this world and because we didn't bother to do was throw up a Detect Magic when we entered the room, Glyph of Warding on the inside of the panel (put there incase people tried exactly what we did) sets off an Alarm spell and we hear the screech of tires as some heavily armed Corpo goons and what looks to be a Corpo Mage get out of their own black van and hurry towards the building... At which point Me and the Half-Orc look at each other, sigh and give the codeword "Bombshell" (shamelessly stolen from one of your videos) over the groups communication system. What was almost the perfect heist has now turned into a run and gun affair...
I think a lot of DMs mistake the tension in horror and mystery scenarios as coming from a lack of information. Truth is, it should be coming from what to do with the information you have available. Besides, you should never be giving them the answer; the fun comes from putting the pieces together, not in succeeding on a check.
I know in the movie Boondock Saints (1999). The characters used cleaning supplies to cover their presence at a bloody crime scene. However they missed a finger that was shot off. Thus leading 1 of the detectives to the identity of the characters. Physical evidence still counts during crimes.
For Viral (which I bought folllowing your review) I made a presentation concerning all sunscriber numbers, patreons, donations and chat-comments/challenges, displaying it during the game and changing slides according to the scenario. Every player was able to see the situation in real time, simulating the characters use of their technology. Took some time preparing, but was working like a treat. There is a lot of potential using the characters technological devices by giving digital handouts on the players devices (mails, messengers, etc.)
This is a great episode, my game is in a modern setting and my players have adapted pretty well. There's a lot of good ideas here. We had a talk about 'meta-gaming', that it's a bad word, but I encourage it to a degree in modern settings. One way I do this is let them actually search for valid information on their phones, but limit this based on how successful their research roll was. This adds a fun little break from the standard roll=answer resolution and gives the players more a immersive experience.
The courthouse I worked at not too long ago was still putting modern records onto microfilm, with only one ancient machine capable of reading it and with one staff member who knew how to use/fix it. So even in the modern day, records are not always easy to access.
A TV show had a great use of technology to being used to solve an old mystery, the characters had not accounted for words changing meanings. So the characters interpreted the clues with the modern meanings which lead them to a completely different area. Another character reminded them the clues were from a different Era and they had to use old world meaning for the words in the clues.
Haha! I assumed this was going to be about VTTs and meeting apps! Us grognards remember when portacomps, wireless networks and heads up display communicators were predicted, but they didn't predict them unified in one device.
On the translation app, a sufficiently ancient language may not translate fully and properly. The app might translate a bunch of words literally and in the order they are in the text which can make more or less sense. The players get some idea about the text without getting the full meaning.
This is incredibly critical to modern gaming. The world adapts. What your players do, you can do. These are not detriments to the stories your table tells, these are enhancements to those stories. Your character exist in a living world that reacts to their actions, and thier digital reality is a reality in which those reactions occur. They can be fired for what they do. They can be reported to the police for what they do. They can be hunted down and never allowed a day of rest for what they do. The camera in their hand is no more and no less powerful than the camera held in the hand of every NPC they come across and do their crimes in front of. Mobile smart phones don't provide a one-way advantage. These devices are also gateways to adventure. They are the fixer without having to travel to the Combat zone to get the job. They are the library at the researchers finger tips, and those library searches can be traced by savvy villains in ways that used to take an inside man at the library to monitor, now it's just an algorithm. Your cultists can see their pursuers coming a mile away because they knew the keywords investigators would use to find them. In fact, your cultists intentionally set up red herrings, dead ends, and deadly traps, for those foolish enough to trust online sources to hunt them down.
I've come across the "I don't like tech/guns in RPGs" gripe before in friends and associates over the years and no matter which way I think about it I've always come to the conclusion that "In RPGs if something creates a problem you can always find a reason it's not a problem". Many of the complaints about phones and computers stem from their easy access to information and I basically fall into the following principle; There are always reasons that you can't just Google the secret information of the universe. Be it because major search engines are all owned by mega corps that are inevitably corrupted by the big bads, or want that sweet sweet secret knowledge and power for themselves, thus forcing the PCs to rely on dark web forums and rumors for "real" info, or if your setting has a supernatural element it could be as simple as the fact that truly supernatural things don't play well with high technology. Phones cut out, video blurs, hard drives have a tendency to corrupt when holding that info, etc. The beauty of this hobby is that it exists primarily in the mind, and our imagination is its only true limiting factor.
Ran into this problem running a d20 Future One shot once along time ago. I was using an old Star Frontier module I'd found online and adapted to for the game. My most tech savvy player was able to recover data from a wiped computer and destroyed the main enemy base by changing the lock codes and overloading the reactor. I also wasn't a particularly skilled or experienced GM back then.
I recently started reading your Valducan series and I gotta say, I see a lot of parallels between your tips in this video and some of the plot points in that series. Very good books btw, I'm loving them.
As a Shadowrun GM I and my players use technology a lot. Shadowrun is rather heist based so the players decker either need to get them blueprints of the target location or they need to hire someone to get what they need. I try to speed that up as much as possible since otherwise if I follow the rules a single player will take up 2 hours real time which isn't fun for anyone else but they need those blueprints unless they want to go in blind. Sometimes they spend more time actually planning their operations then making them but that can be super fun, I rarely see so proud players as when a planned heist work as intended (usually something go wrong though but not always). Shadowrun is even worse the Cyberpunk because here is not just technology, there is magic as well and their blueprints doesn't always list security measures or sometimes cameras have been moved or the security is updated which is a nasty surprise. Another technology based I play is Infinity's edge. It is a bit of an odd game since the players often are playing a game themselves. In my campaign the bad guy was testing his plans to live forever by murdering the players who were alpha testers in the VR pods but they didn't really notice that since the bad guys plans so far worked. The AI however is upset since it noticed that a bunch of stuff popped up in game that is basically cheating for the villain and his investors so they can rule the new virtual world once regular people will get the option to enter it as an afterlife (if they testament all their assets to the company of course). Our villain have lung cancer and will eventually join the game as well so the players need to sabotage his plans from inside after the AI tipped them off what was happening. You don't really need to run campaigns that way, you could run Isekai scenarios like Legend of the rising of the Shield hero as well, but it is a game where the characters have access to information screens, quests and other information through their user interface, it is an odd Indie game but I like it.
I remember this movie called Stay Alive. These friends are playing a cursed video game and how they die in game, the die irl. Bleed over from the game can occur, like a locked door suddenly becomes unlocked because the game character unlocked the door in game.
In Traveller I like the fact that information travels at the speed of jump. This means that any 'internet' is really local to the current system and information from further out is out of date. I assume that worlds might have updates to internet data delivered by XBoat on some regular basis but only if they are in a regularly serviced area. There's a niche here for traders to deliver up to date data/news to out of the way planets.
This is giving a lot to think about, I've been writing a Tales Series/Final Fantasy/ DnD inspired Bayoupunk setting, There is some rule of cool future tech stuff in it. But in my mind the setting is for the most part something like early 00s tech level. This video basically reminded me the local swamp bar/tavern that everybody hangs out at would have a computer in the back with janky early 00s internet, also should give my characters pagers and walkie talkies for long for commutations.
What's Bayoupunk? The quick Google search didn't give me much, I must have rolled poorly on my Library Use skill. ;) (things the term brings to my mind are cults, Voodoo, and the like, thanks to first Gabriel Knight game, but that's just a guess)
@@Dagroth Basically stuff that has to do with swap and river culture, a lot of aesthetic and how people dress is Swamp Rock inspired like with bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Swamp Thing series example, Resident Evil 7 too
My group and I tend to stay out of "Technology Laden" time frames in our games mostly because we are all in IT and would get bogged down in the details of how we would use technology to do something. Never give Engineers a chance to get into the weeds, we've literally stopped mid game to start working the math on trying to trebuchet a PC over a Palisade so we could work out the "chance of success".
Thanks so much for this Seth. I've started traveller and with the setting being so huge and all the tech and trade and everything... Ergh overwhelming. This so handy in ticking off something I've been trying to work out. Especially with all of the 80's modules talking about stealing tapes of data and stuff ahahahha. Ffs also helpful for updating those modules (your notes on cameras on arcturus station are also super valuable - sorry I've got the old one and not yours :( ) Anyway, you're great and thanks for this and so much else.
Really helpful for me Seth, especially as I was wondering whether to start my new mystery campaign in modern day or back in the pre-Net/mobilephone 80s. Your suggestions help me feel more confident now of starting off modern day, which is what I want to do. Loved the anecdote about shooting up the bad guys outside the elevator and then having to hide out in a flophouse. Brilliant video Seth.
Adventures that in a fantasy setting could focus more on information gathering than action will probably need to be more action-oriented once cell phones/the internet is added. It can be good for some groups, I think, since from personal experience, there are some groups that spend *wayyyyy* too much time double checking that every fact is 100% known before they proceed, which can definitely be slow without in-game technology or readily available information
Having the players lose technology and work to get it back can be a lot of fun. I remember this one campaign were the players were up in the mountains alone investigating ghosts when the nearby cell tower stopped working. So the players traipsed across this dangerous mountain range and then restarted the cell tower themselves. It was great because once they got it working again, they could call all the NPCs they met along the way whenever they needed.
Thanks for the video Seth, it really helps with running modern stuff and raises some points i didn't even think about! As someone currently running my first campaign (COC, near-future sci-fi) and basing most of the adventures on 1920s adventures, remembering technology being a thing was a bit shocking (in spite of it literally being one of the main selling points of the campaign in question) but has been more of a blessing than a curse. my favourite moments (mostly brought about by player ingenuity) so far are: -using cameras and a drone to patrol a supermall overnight. the mall was slowly filling with hallucinogenic gas as the night goes on, meaning the PCs start seeing all sorts of funky stuff the more time they spend outside the hermetically sealed camera room. the cameras were part of the original scenario (wrote it myself, kinda proud) and were supposed to be cheap and rundown, with lacking maintenance over several years, and as such not being completely reliable, but when the players brought in a freshly bought Drone, it made an otherwise simple premise into a tense game of matching and comparing static camera footage with what the drone and a person could see, making every bit of screen interference a race to get to the location and get answers, without knowing if it would be an encounter, an enemy, hallucinations or just a camera malfunctions. having one character see something the other does not, be it on or off camera, and not knowing whether it was camera errors, screen glitches or them slowly going insane was a high point of that session, and is still one of my favourite things i've ran. (granted i've ran like four things so take that with a grain of salt.) -searching for answers and finding yet more mysteries. one of my PCs found a strange symbol in their house and researched it online, leading to one of those classic "posted 4 years ago - no answers" threads on some cursed-looking image board website, leading him deeper into the rabbit hole as he has now essentially taken to cyber-stalking the poster in question on a multitude of equally shady sites in an attempt to find the truth. it is the classic "following the steps of our predecessors" but online and i am completely here for it. -range and obstacles. being a military-centric campaign, having less-than-ideal but still fully functional radio equipment was a must, the handheld modules work great but only at short range, the backpack modules are crappy leftovers from wars gone by that always work poorly but over any range. having interference, jamming and various obstacles (hard to radio through a mountain) whilst not making them entirely unreliable has made all methods of communication ten times better, as everything still works, albeit with the added caveat of time and effort spent to get some cold-war leftover to do what you want. can recommend. -surfing under Influence having mythos creatures interrupt or alter how tech works came in handy during Dead Light, as i made every device within a certain radius sort of Crackle and whisper as the creature drew near. it worked as a proximity alarm without really telling direction or speed, meaning the PCs knew they were in danger but had no idea how much time they had or which way to run, really helped amping up the tension for the chase and climax. -THE NUMBERS. soo there might be number codes (Black ops style) transmitting at random interval to the PCs various pieces of equipment after the mall, and it might be a bit cursed? anyways, same PC with the dead thread has now (after some real-life decryption) found that it might be prophetic, but also interspersed with what seems to be complete gibberish. the addition of having some monitor, car radio or public announcement system suddenly crackle and start spouting number sequences that may or may not be relevant has increased paranoia, tension and mystery while cutting down the amount of idea rolls, as the numbers are often (dubiously) helpful or at least help-ish in nature. all in all, once you get used to having tech in your sessions it becomes less of a drag and more of a tool to do just the sort of things you would do anyways, it just gives you and your players more options to do things. i hope to see what other things will happen in the future, as i have no doubts (nor wish for it to be any other way) about my players finding new ways to pleasantly and unpleasantly surprise me. seeing what they can come up with using the tools they have is half the fun!
one of the greatest moments that i've witnessed in a TTRPG:
"hurry! i'm in fake st 123 and there's a monster locked in the other room! please send help!"
"don't worry sir, we're sending a patrol car to your location, in the meantime avoid all contact with the fish monster"
"oh thank- wait, how do you know it's a fish monster? I never specified that"
"..." *dial tone*
now he has two problems to worry about
Nice
Fantastic!
I love it.
Liking and Replying to reference.
On the loss of signal front, I'm in the network biz and other than deep underground or inside a steel ship the worst place to get a cell signal is a multi-storey building with a lot of copper wire in the ceiling connecting PCs and phones, especially if the original Cat4 cable was abandoned in place when Cat5e or Cat6 was pulled to replace it. It forms a partial faraday cage that thoroughly blocks communications. The only way to connect is to be able to connect to the wireless network in the building, and building networks are normally protected with a password and maybe a badge with mag-chip as well. Cheers!
Or shopping malls which I presume have the same issue?
Old shopping malls are the perfect storm of being artificial caves of concrete while also the faraday cage of copper wiring.
My hometown in regional Australia still has issues.
@@Rubymagicalgirl88 Basically yeah. I work in a liquor store inside a mall. It's not *incredibly* old (built 1985, one year younger than I am) but in the store's walk-in beer cave, my phone gets NO service whatsoever. Building's exterior is concrete, there's heavy insulation covered by metal sheeting on the walls and ceiling of the walk-in... yeah.
Hospitals are notoriously bad in my area, to top it off, the WiFi in those places are generally the weakest in terms of speed I have ever seen.
I love the idea that the pc says "I'm going to hack the system" and the GM replies: " sure, you send out a few million phishing emails, role to see how soon somebody falls for it... "
I liked the real life example of dropping all the USBs outside the office and waiting for someone to plug it into their computer. 😂
I like subverting the phone entirely in Horror.
"911, what is your emergency?"
"There is something killing people! Please send cops!"
"Are you safe at the moment?"
"Yes, I'm hidden."
(voice changes) "Where are you hidden, exactly? Is it the closet on the third floor? Should I look for you there?"
"Wait... what?"
"I'm coming to get you, Susan! MUAHAHA!"
that's amazing!
“911, what is your emergency?”
“We’ve been robbed, our house is robbed!”
“I’ll see what I can do, help is on the wa-“
*disruption*
“Hello?”
*disruption clears*
“…”
“Where is Jessica Hyde?”
Have the call be answered in the future. "What are you talking about? that building burned down 25 years ago. Everyone inside were killed"
Have the operator stay on the line with them, dropping clues from the very sketchy forensics.
There was a scene like this in the recent movie Smile, fun little part
Don't forget the sheer joy/danger of the intern running up the producer's credit cards!
"Another round of lobsters!"
@@SSkorkowsky 🤣
@@SSkorkowsky "Who ordered 23 sandwiches from the deli?!"
If the characters google some really specific information like star alignments 9623 years ago, you could always have the website ask "Star alignment checker wants to use your current location", now that could be entirely innocent but it could also have been triggered by some algorithm that cultists have created to warn of snooping investigators.
That’s great.
This reminds me a lot of the episode of The Venture Brothers when the clue was “The house that coke built” and they thought it was Studio 54 because they looked it up on the internet. The riddle was however written in the 19th century and Studio 54 didn’t exist and, it actually was in reference to a coal tycoons mansion. Because coke was a byproduct of coal distillation.
I also enjoyed one of the early Buffy episodes where a demon was released into their network due to being scanned into the computer and that scanning counted the same as reading the book out loud.
i was thinking about if the file is checked by antivirus software as another option to trigger/read a spell
@@twitchew I wonder if transferring the dormant file being moved to the trash folder would count as mispronouncing it all
I love how, on rewatching, you understand why Mike is laughing his ass off during the spy fight 😁
The "after credits" bit was amazing!
I think my favourite ‘cameras are a thing’ moment was in a Star Wars RPG where we managed to pull off a successful raid on an Imperial facility, no losses or even serious injury, and as we were headed back to our getaway ship, the GM asked “So…did anyone think to wear a mask or anything?”
To our credit, we all admitted that we hadn’t thought of that. And the chase was on!
Loved this episode!
I once played in a Buffy-esque modern campaign. A number of characters got into magic, which required 1) unlikely materials andtime-consuming rituals, and 2) you to have the ritual instructions on your person. To address the second situation, we took pictures of spells on our phones and largely ignored spellbooks afterwards
I ran a Delta Green scenario set in July 2016 and my players used Pokemon Go as a bit of social engineering. They got contacts at the NSA to make the town a hot spot of rare Pokemon and posted it on Reddit. This being the peak of the Pokemon go phase hundreds of people flooded the town giving them more cover to do their investigation. It was amazing
"Maybe they burned down a building"
*Harry Dresden vibes intesifies*
Other episodes of this series...
* Pre-writing age adventures that would have been solved with writing
* Bronze age adventures that would have been solved with iron age metallurgy
* Renaissance adventures that would have been solved with electricity
Etc... (LOL)
Regardless, thank you for another thought-provoking & inspirational video essay!
This is something I really like about the Dresden system in particular -- exposure to magic tends to break anything more complicated than an old car, so the characters can almost never rely on cell phones or the internet unless they go on a mini-sidequest to talk to someone and get them to do it.
I once had a call of cthulhu campaign centered around a mind altering video that had gone viral online and a large chunk of that adventure was avoiding seeing this video as it started even appearing on bilboards and the news as the virus spread further throughout the city, ultimately leading to its victims trying to hold the PCs down and force them to watch
This is more like bringing the GM's research skill up to date. When you mentioned allowing them to use hacking, I realize the GM needs to learn the limits of what is the typical practice.
Perhaps a critical hit won't kill a player, but the phone in their chest pocket deflects the blow.
Saving them, destroying their tech.
Why desenpower a player with from a basic stuff like a phone? He can just buy another one
@@luska5522 He can. But he may have to wait 2 hours for the initial updates to finish 😏
@@cadenceclearwater4340 Or wait for the store to open. Hopefully they got the full warranty.
@@spacedinosaur8733 or they could break in 😬
Loss of cat videos entails loss of sanity. Doesn't matter what genre you're playing.
im impressed you know some if that stuff about older records! I worked at a research library for a bit over covid, and we used that time to digitize a lot of stuff you would think would be already be there. like records from the 1700s and 1800s.
there is a lot of stuff that isnt there just because it takes real man hours to translate physical material to digital.
and internet literacy and navigation is definitely a learned skill. knowing what forums or subforms are good or bad for x topic, where to even find them, or what to even search for and whats legit.
I did an internship this summer where I digitized early 20th century medical records. Even with a specialized scanner, it took a *long* time to scan everything properly. Like, a few weeks of work. And even then, the end result was a folder of TIFF files (albeit in order) that someone else had to make searchable. The records weren't even that old, only a century or so, but I still had to be careful not to damage the original.
I helped an archivist over a summer or so a few years ago, and even stuff from say 50 years ago needed to be put into the system. Definitely a lot of specific things related to counties and smaller areas that can be googled out there.
Great video. When I'm running a modern game I just let the players use their personal phones to check the internet. Had a great Mage:Awakening campaign in which the PCs knew the *mundane* stuff about what was going on but still needed their skill rolls to know the *magic* stuff that lead into.
That's how you do it.
Depends on the year of the campaign. Search engines were allowed to get accurate results pre-2014. But if you're playing in 2022 it's completely fine to let them use their own phones. They're not very likely to find anything useful.
@@SymmetricalDocking Yeah, that's something that few people would have predicted back in the 00's or early 10's --- the modern internet is very, very difficult to get true information from. You can do it, but it really is a special skillset that has to be developed and it can be very time consuming to comb through a mountain of information that is largely false or half-true to figure out what's actually useful and accurate -- and have to figure out what sort of extreme biases may be at play that also can warp the validity of the info. And paywalls... which themselves are no indication of accurate information, really, just that the information is being monetized.
This is more or less how I do things for my Vampire: the Masquerade campaign
Some very good points there.
I've used the DNA after a fight thing in an urban fantasy game a few years ago. The party were breaking into a bank at night to find a relic hidden there only to find a gang of fae working for the Big Bad was also trying to break in at the same time. Much fighting ensued, leading to all bar one of the party taking wounds before the enemy went down. The players thought they'd come up with a plan to make it look like the gang killed each-other due to in-fighting. I later revealed that no-one believed this as not only were some items missing from the vault but there was plenty of forensic evidence that the players hadn't bothered to clear up like blood-stains and shell-casings. This was a problem as one of the PCs had a drawback that meant the FBI had her DNA on file. Oddly the character who didn't get wounded was the one with no blood to leave behind (he was a gargoyle).
This is why Mike Pondsmith's "fragmented internet" idea is genius.
The makes sense, Now a days what we know as the internet data base, servers are like over seas like in china or something. A world full world war breaks out the internet as we know it is gone and the data base would have to be decentralized specially if wideband commination gets blocked. I like the dystopian idea of like their being a sever in New York and a server in LA and to share data from one to the other someone in a server truck would have to download from New York drive to LA and Upload, redownload and drive back to New York to upload there.
@@reifuTD That's an entire campaign, right there. Thanks.
This also works really well for traveller. Good shout
I love the idea of PCs trying to intercept the mobile server truck to either install or delete something before it arrives. Difficult part is pulling it off without anyone knowing they were ever there.
@@reifuTD dude read about BBS. I imagine this working in a very similar system! and really, as @aegone said up there, that would work very well for Traveller!!!
That is 100% my first cell phone as well. I lost it when I had to use it wedge a door shut to keep a bunch of Mi-Go trapped in the office building while we escaped via car. I miss that phone, but rest easy knowing those Mi-Go have never escaped that building.
I'm planning to run my very first Shadowrun game after years of running only 5E DnD so this video is really helpful.
Best of luck.
@@SSkorkowsky Thanks man.
@@Zulk_RS If you're running SR 5e and need resources to make prepping easier, let me know. I wrote myself a document that calculates host attributes, spirit attributes and makes balancing the difficulty of character sheets for enemies slightly easier (by tying professionality rating to set attribute and skill points). Love the game, but the rule book is so badly edited and hard to get into ;_;
@@UndeadGirlCyber Thank you for the offer. I actually finished running the game by now. It was a very short one-shot where my one player that agreed to play had to figure out who kidnapped an pop singer and then rescue her from the Eye-Fivers. And I agree, the rules are really hard to get into. I think I had to homebrew some rules in and out just to make sure combat doesn't take forever (No more rolling initiative every turn; consecutive attacks don't give the -1 to dodge; groups of enemies of the same stats just act as a group together)
@@Zulk_RS Aye, alright :) yeh, good idea with the house rules. And the hook sounds very fun! I hope you had a great time.
I'm kind of shocked that You're Next is the only slasher movie I'm aware of where the villains just outright used a cell phone jammer. It's a logical fix that shows the villains have planned ahead.
The first thought I had when it came to your intro was that a lot of people just sort of expect a Google Translate on an ancient language would work flawlessly, when in reality, languages - especially ancient pictographic languages - require additional cultural context to get a full understanding. Many languages even have words and concepts that don't translate clearly. And even if you can, that context may be specific or even completely altered with the passing of centuries. This is why Ancient Egyptian was nigh-indecipherable until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, because so much of it required understanding the context of images created by a culture that no longer exists, which only became possible once we discovered a translation into extant or more well-documented languages.
And the kicker of it is, machine translation is _really_ bad at picking up on this, because even the most advanced modern computers lack cultural or linguistic context for things like slang terms or metaphor. Good example being how early machine translation would take a metaphor like "out of sight, out of mind" and turn them into things like "in the place where it is not visible, from the heart". Modern translators are better, but tend to struggle if the languages aren't directly linguistically related (i.e: Spanish to Italian vs. Spanish to Japanese).
So the example in the intro could easily see the player getting a translation result like "The white birds of Set who arrive on the birth of Thoth during the Flood" and either having to roll Ancient Egyptian to get a better idea of the context, or waste potentially valuable time to send that to someone who would know what the context of that means.
Exactly. The reliability of whatever information that technology yields should always be suspect.
I love watching Magnum PI but could you imagine how short every episode would have been if Magnum had a cell phone instead of just red Ferrari-ing everywhere.
Magnum on the phone, "Hi, I need to report a crime..."
Operator, "I'm sorry, I can't understand you. I can only hear a rustling noise."
Magnum, "Darn, foiled, by my luxurious moustache, once more!"
@@euansmith3699 Yes... the wind blasting through the convertible across the lip bush would probably ruin reception 🤣😂🤣
I'm reminded of MAD magazines parody...Dumbass Magnumb
My upcoming pathfinder 2e game is set in a 'modern' time of Golarion, so having more advice to run technology is always nice.
Seth my only complaint for your channel is the fact that I can not stop watching it. I am starting a traveller campaign rn, and this was extremely helpfull. Keep up the good work!
One of the first games I played with my current group was an urban fantasy game where we played as members of an organization dedicated to keeping the supernatural a secret and containing or destroying hostile monsters and mages. Think SCP Foundation, if you’re familiar. One of the most memorable parts of that game was when, during our investigation of a “miracle healer” in a rural town, we had to deal with a group of reporters who’d come to cover that same story. The modern day setting was what made this encounter interesting: we knew that as soon as the event was over, they’d be able to send their recordings back to the station where we wouldn’t be able to stop them being released. But, if anyone caught us trying to sabotage the footage, we risked being recorded ourselves. So we had a ticking clock for the operation while still needing perfect stealth.
I’m actually very proud of how we handled it as players. Once we got access to the news vans, we realized that stopping the recording entirely without the camera operators noticing would be extremely difficult. So, inspired by the infamous blurriness of every real life cryptid photo, we just had our hacker turn the resolution on the recording down from 1440p to 140p. The footage was completely unusable, and it was subtle enough that the reporters had no idea until it was too late to do anything about it.
I posted this in another comment, but I want people to see it, so I'm posting it here again:
As a GM who has successfully run Intimate Encounters, I have an idea for other GMs (players, look away):
in the original scenario, the monster is always looking for victims of the opposite sex, making him kind of heterossexual. This didn't make sense to me, since the creature wasn't even human. So I mixed up the prior victims, making him "kind of" bissexual. Without knowing anything about the scenario, one of my players had decided to have a fat character. So when they figured the bad guy was using a dating app (I also changed it to Tinder, because it's the main one people use in Brazil, or at least where I live), they decided to use him as bate. At first I didn't love the idea, but then they got 1 in the luck roll, and they were in the correct area, and it was soooo much fuuuuuun watching my player try to flirt in a closed motel room with a person he thought was a human serial killer. It was so worth it I would definitely recommend to every GM who runs this adventure!
Thank you very much. I've got this comment copied and will be sharing it in my eventual review for the adventure.
Lmao i love how at 13:58 you can see all three of the players swearing at the realization of what they just learned
at my table we are playing a game that takes place in the present and in the city where i live, one thing i have been doing is using information that my players can search the internet in real life to create my creatures and mysteries, being able to find relevant information or not . another thing I did was create some blogs with stories about the world, with photohop handouts of old newspapers, photos of places and such
Oh, sorry Seth, I understand that you prefer that we don't post links, I won't do it again, sorry
by the way, great video!!!
using modern technology in game is difficult but very interesting, just in our latest adventures my players checked whatsap conversations to find out who suspects were talking to and what, used a video of a girl singing to identify a ghost, in addition to using some of the blogs I created for our campaign with information about the history of the region, Photoshopped handouts of old newspapers and photos of places
Did some link of yours not post? Cause I didn't delete anything.
@@SSkorkowsky no problems, but it was nothing important, it was the blog link I mentioned in the comment above
I thought it was you, because the previous comment was gone too, sorry for assuming, but now I think it's youtube itself
by the way, nothing to do with it: your content is great!!!
No worries. I'd have assumed it, too. Sometimes UA-cam flags stuff for me to approve. Other times I never know something got deleted unless someone mentions it.
@@SSkorkowsky anyway, I will avoid links from now on, even if they are broken, it seems, if only to give you less trouble in approving or not a comment!😊
but it's a shame, i was so proud of the journal i made in photoshop, hahahaha
anyway, it's always great to have a new video of yours to watch
Here's a great real world example. I had to get a copy of my high school diploma (don't ask me why since I have a college degree, but workplace wanted it). I went to school out of state. Contacted my old high school only to find out that all records had been sent to the local Department of Education which had a storage fire 10 years ago. All records before that time were lost.
Fully agree - There are absolutely some story types and adventures that can't be done with modern or future tech, but there are a whole bunch that can only be done with modern or future tech as well. And, well, that's just true of any tech level for a setting.
use supernatural as a good example of how to reconcile technology with paranormal stuff.
There's an "Altered Carbon" play-through on "HyperRPG," that displays using the wireless internet within the confines of a table run. It's more a Cyberpunk type environment, but it does show the players finding information wile avoiding the authorities.
This video will be really useful. I just started a modern day Call of Cthulhu game so I’ll have to navigate the players tech use. One player is a hacker, so I plan to place some obstacles for them. They did just finish a scenario where they didn’t have a signal, but they are government agents and were sealed in a facility with some other characters for security purposes so it made sense to everyone.
This is also why having a time limit in a game/adventure is good... yeah you can go do all the research, fact finding and hacking you want... but in the meantime... things are happening.
As short format videos infect other UA-cam channels, I’m grateful for your continued full length and in depth videos. They never fail to both inform and entertain.
This one is fantastic. This is something I personally struggle with whenever I consider writing a modern day cthulhu scenario, but I always wondered how to deal with tech in an effective way. These methods are not just logical, but very simple and easy to implement
This is good stuff. I've got a group of players that like to play the "I hack it" game with every single thing. That was how my Star Wars game went, anyway. I'm prepping a cyberpunk game soon and I need to make sure "I hack it" isn't going to be the go-to solution for every single obstacle.
i had this exact problem in a cyberpunk 2020 campaign, the player had made a netrunner very well, and usually, even by my unpreparedness, we were very young too, usually they would stop the van near the place, stand guard and the netrunner would run out to solve 90% of the problem there, what I did was create missions in places with low technology, or more analog technology, like forests or slums, I always left something that the netrunner could do, of course, but I put obstacles for him, so way that the group had to physically go somewhere to solve things, that helped a lot, with star wars and the retrofuturism of the technology of their universe is an idea very capable of working too
Hey, let them "hack it", but homebrew random time-frames for accomplishing that.
Player: "I hack the military-grade mainframe!"
GM: "Okay, roll 3d6 to see how many days it takes you."
A horror movie series "V H S" does a great job making tech insidious. Perfect for CoC modern.
AKCHUALLY!
the sketch at the start is hilarious ;)
no worries seth, most of us got it.
Thanks. I ended up removing that disclaimer comment, as the only thing worse than not being 100% clear on the internet is letting the trolls see how annoyed you're getting with their trollishness.
The panicked players during the voice over looked like it took a lot of work to put together for a background joke and I just have to comment to say how great it was. Had me rolling.
One thing to do is to introduce the common annoyances that technology brings. In one Traveller episode I had a tiny legal disclaimer scroll across the screen during a phone call. The players had to do a routine comm check to capture it.
3:20 A good example of this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It went from 1997 to 2003, and throughout those years, mobile phones became more and more common in the US, but much less so in the show.
It is amazing how "turnabout is fair play" is something that both sides of the screen can forget; you have players falling into classic fantasy habits of doing things and augmenting that with modern technology, completely forgetting that they're not the only ones with access to that tech, while GMs keep the basic structure of fantasy plots which then get holes poked through them because they too forget that players can do that as well as the NPCs. I think part of it is that there's so much technology we take for granted that people can forget just how much it can affect things outside of boring, mundane uses. It's something you have to be conscientious about as opposed to fantasy or tech beyond our reach which you can't take for granted because it's not something you interact with on a daily basis, making overlooking such mundane things an easy trap to fall into. And yes, research isn't a quick and easy process, at least not when it's something potentially sensitive or relatively private. Any info that you can find in a couple minutes should at best be at the level of a clue pointing players in the right direction as opposed to a smoking gun.
Another note on hacking is that isolated networks are a thing as well. It's not like if you have an internet connection you can access any computer in the world if your skills are "leet" enough. Sometimes you have to be on site where that information is stored to access that system, and the process of both getting on location and finding an access point can be notable challenges even before you start the proper "hacking".
As for "calling the cavalry", there's also the issue that if the players try to tell the naked truth in a horror or supernatural plot, they might get dismissed as a prank call as well.
The technology complications are great and all, but they can go overboard quick. I was playing in a "hidden superheroes" game where the DM made life a living hell for doing anything. Everyone has cameras, you can't use any powers or you're caught. Police are called at any suspicious thing. Police helicopters, security cameras, tracking, the works. We literally couldn't do anything without three sessions of trying not to get caught and getting back undercover and trying to cover our tracks. It was soooo tedious. Obviously any DNA left behind would mean we would get immediately disappeared. It made the game completely unplayable. We either had to just say, "screw it" and go loud and just be an out superhero team and extremely public (which would just be a big "haha" to the DM and we didn't want to be player vs DM), or literally say, "Oh well, we have cool powers. Whatever. Let's just go be normal people and not follow any plots because what's the point?"
Anyone using a Nintendo Power Glove in their hacking attempt, should get some enormous bonuses, because...yes.
If you haven't seen the fever dream that is Kung Fury, you're in for a treat. That powerglove-sporting character hacks time so Kung Fury can battle Hitler.
@@SSkorkowsky I cannot pretend that I have not seen such a film, and having seen it, my sanity has been reduced significantly. Two thumbs-up! 👍 👍
Had the opposite reaction among my party when we switched to Delta Green. The group didn't really consider their cell phones and got surprised when people called 911 on them or when the GPS on their phones gave them away to local authorities.
About using online communities:
I ran The Haunting a few years back with the suggested modern day Ghost Hunter Show, you mentioned in your review, but it was a YT-Ghost hunter show, similar to the setup in Viral.
The hook was that all these old newspaper reports about the haunted house were becoming the new hot thing on Reddit and 4chan paranormal communities, with the latter giving them a tip, that the house was located in his old hometown, and it always creeped him out. One of the Newspaper reports was an actual clue from the adventure, the others just random soft-news garbage.
It was pretty fun, especially when they filmed themselves killing Corbitt and basically Breaking and Entering (made them roll to see how well their recording was) best shot was when the cameraman got hit by the bed attack and filmed himself falling out of the 1st floor window.
Anyway, after they uploaded it, there were a lot of videos giving explanations for the practical/digital effects they used. Additionally, some details in their videos changed, meaning someone had edited the video online, adding signs of photoshopping/editing in it to make it look more fake.
All I can think about right now is that time my dad (back when he was in college 20 or so years ago) read through the entirety of the internet in a single day. I’m planning on using that for one of my Industrial Revolution style games
Tech is why for anything CoC or WoD I always go with 1990s backward for time period.
I am glad to see this. I have never been that worried about tech in my games because tech usually exacerbates conflict just as quickly as it solves it.
Party forgets about the hotel cameras? Guess it's time to blare Electric Eye as the hackers covers for the group!
One of the movies I really do like the depiction of hacking is Hackers. Besides having that 90's asthetic of hacking and little gadgets that helps with it, they do show that reading code and actively hacking take time. Cause unless you have a certain virus for a certain job, macking a brand new one that can be used for whatever you're doing at that moment takes more than a few moments.
I do love the BBEG spying on the party trope though. Always fun
the coolest moment I had when running a modern day action setting campaign was when I pit my player against an opponent who assaulted them from afar via a curse that reflected any injury they inflicted on themselves to the cursed targets but at twice the lethality, the reverse was true but the necromancer recieved only half the pain instead.
the fight took place in a large crowded mall and their enemy could have been anyone and anywhere in that mall!
it was an exhilirating fight where the players had to use all modern conveniences available within the mall to not only survive the onslaught of suicidal attacks, but also locate their assailant.
the player's only ability at the time was minor precognition which couldn't help her with finding the enemy, only predict the attack and prepare for it as best as she could!
a thing i forgot about were cameras (as mentioned in the video we seem to do that a lot). i had no idea how they were gonna locate the enemy back then, so when my player said she wanted to rush into the security room, i was ecstatic! proud even!
after having been attacked a couple times by now when she arrived, she had a rough idea of what cameras to look for. a place where you can drown, burn, and get melted by acid? a kitchen! she looked through all restaurant areas and found the kitchen of a fast food chain she visited earlier before the attack. it turns out the enemy places her curse via making a target consume their blood, so she put her blood on the player's food. a seedy looking chef who had very similar injuries as her. primed with this info, the player rushed to get there, enduring a few more attacks before finally coming face to face with the enemy, where a satisfying one sided fist fight occured as the player berid herself with her curse by consuming the enemy's blood once again! (gross)
When it comes to phone signal, it really does depend on location. Here in Wales, there are plenty of homes where signal is spotty at best; especially near the coast.
Wow, great video! In a lot of ways this is really a "how to integrate 'cell phones' into modern/sci-fi settings" which by itself is an amazing GM tip.
How cool would it be "My character searches UA-cam for a Seth Skorkowsky video on...BONESAW!"
Really great video! Having run D&D for most of my life, even though I've always tried not to let technology in modern settings be an issue, I feel that I definitely still fell for some of these pitfalls with technology before, especially when running WoD or Cthulhu. But you've definitely given me really wonderful ideas I hadn't previously though of, so thanks a bunch.
Seeing you talk about the enemies/monsters themselves using technology reminded me of the one Call of Cthulhu adventure I think I managed to do it right. I ran an adapted version of The Music of the Spheres (a scenario from the Stars Are Right book). Basically, an astronomical research station picks up radio signals from an outer god (Ghroth), and since they keep recording and playing these alien frequencies down here, the earth is starting to "resonate" and emit a similar "song". Which is bad news - it leads to strange weather, hallucinations, psychosis, zombielike animals and whatnot.
In my scenario I made it so that these signals were actually creating interference and getting mixed with regular radio programming broadcast by radio antennas, resulting in the local stations to occasionally have their broadcast cut off into this warped and hellish "music". I created audio recordings for these and played them for my group when they came across these transmissions, using a mix of recordings of regular broadcasts, number stations and those planet songs recorded by NASA.
For that entire scenario, as soon as my players figured out the connection of the supernatural events and the radio, they became absolutely terrified and paranoid of anything that could pick up signals at all. We still have a chuckle remembering one particular moment, when the car's radio began playing one of these when they were traveling. Just between us, it wasn't going to do them any harm, it was just for some exposition and flavor. But the way they freaked out was just something else, so much that after noticing that the radio couldn't be turned off (I'm a bully, I admit) they ended up ripping off the entire radio. Fun times!
As a GM who has successfully run Intimate Encounters, I have an idea for other GMs (players, look away):
in the original scenario, the monster is always looking for victims of the opposite sex, making him kind of heterossexual. This didn't make sense to me, since the creature wasn't even human. So I mixed up the prior victims, making him "kind of" bissexual. Without knowing anything about the scenario, one of my players had decided to have a fat character. So when they figured the bad guy was using a dating app (I also changed it to Tinder, because it's the main one people use in Brazil, or at least where I live), they decided to use him as bate. At first I didn't love the idea, but then they got 1 in the luck roll, and they were in the correct area, and it was soooo much fuuuuuun watching my player try to flirt in a closed motel room with a person he thought was a human serial killer. It was so worth it I would definitely recommend to every GM who runs this adventure!
When I get to reviewing this scenario, I'm going to mention your suggestion. I dig it.
I think targeting the opposite gender (or opposite looking, since the monster is not human as you've said) made sense - the monster is applying the tactic, that fits its victims and is most likely to work (and majority of humans is heterosexual). Well, unless it researched its victims beforehand (I don't know the game), then of course it would be/look the gender which would work (as I said, I don't know the game, assumed some sort of shapeshifter or glamour/illusion).
This is a very timely video for me personally. By player request we’re about to move our CoC campaign from the 1930s into the modern day and I’ve been fretting over several of the exact points you cover. Helpful stuff as always!
I'm sure that cults and anti-cult groups would have bots monitoring internet traffic for any comments of interest and tracking them back to their source.
Impeccable timing, Seth. I am planning on running the same scenario Troy from the GCN ran for you guys in that two-shot this weekend
Best of luck! Hope you all have as much fun as we did.
Something I came up with in a scenario was that an enemy's psionic invisibility power only worked when under direct observation by an organic eye and brain... but it couldn't fool a camera, so, security cameras and mobile phone cameras would let you see the bad guy/Zhodani spy/monster when eyeballs couldn't. The phone cam became like the sunglasses in "They Live"; a peephole view of reality while the illusion surrounds you. This could work in a modern day Cthulhu game, or in Traveller, where security cams and robots can see the Zho or Droyne intruder directly, but a human can't, or, the psionic camouflage that allows a person to look like someone else ina real time 3d deep-faker effect, is revealed by the camera's electronic sensors. Now that cell phone is like a candle in a vast darkness, fragile, important, needing to be protected and husbanded as a player resource. Will you run its battery down by using it this way?
It's fun to leave clues in visual wavelengths unseen by normal vision. Black light flashlights are obvious, but maybe you can imagine other detection systems that sense in other ways... "What's the tip-off?" "Micro-changes in air density" Like that. Or... using phones to triangulate; they need to share the same special app to do so.
Had a scenario where the players took payment in a credit card format. Said cards left a trail of purchases and housing locations and travel, that's why every eight or nine days after arriving somewhere safe and making a purchase off the card, some local wetwork contractor would jump them. Eventually they made the connection, converted all their e-money to cash or goods, and went dark on the grid after that. Another variation of this was finding stolen money in large denomination bills. One player broke the rules and took one as a souvenir, instead of giving all the money away to a fence. That player either gets mugged or ends up losing the bill in a bad gambling decision. The next day that bill hits the local bank, and is scanned, watch programs in bank networks notice the serial number, send alerts to a certain person... and then a WHOLE lot of stuff goes into motion. You can do that with anything that has a serial number, really.
One excuse to block a phone at a critical time is, it suddenly decided it's time to update, and hangs... or, you meant to update the phone, to make it more useful, but you botched it, now the memory might be corrupted, or the range reduced, or the power consumption goes heavy, stuff like that. Or your specific network supporting that phone has sudden problems downtown... are the bad guys influential enough to nerf an entire city phone system, just to get you offline? Sometimes, you don't want to be tracked, so you take the battery and sim card out... when do things become desperate or important enough to justify reactivating the phone, when you know they can track it? Maybe the key software item you need is only available on Android and all you own is an iPhone?
I came here looking for copper, but I found gold. Thanks for this video.
This reminded me of a game I ran a while ago (picking one of the hi-tech settings for it, specifically Cyberpunk, exactly because I needed modern tech for the hook to work). In short, a person was kidnapped some 13 years ago, and police never found them or their kidnappers. Now they resurfaced in some highway clinic (where it was discovered, because of a DNA match), and the PCs were hired to find them (This fitting the "What can modern tech give you?").
Sure, they used modern tech to help resolve it (like hacking into the clinic's security system to get that person's current looks from a camera recording), but as you said, bad guys can do that too. In a follow up game, it turned out the corporate bad guy had the PCs tagged all that time (during the original/first adventure) using military espionage drones, where they were, what were they doing, when and where to strike, etc.
As for hacking, in said follow up game, the PCs had a netrunner examine some computer files for them. He figured out they were tampered with, but to find out who did that and what was changed, he needed the physical drives the files were obtained from (as the PCs had copies of the files). So the PCs had to get into the place, where the computers were kept, and steal the hard drives. The computer wizard helped, but couldn't do everything for them, and provided a hook for the next thing they had to do.
I keep my COC games set no later than 1970’s , and that was pretty much a one adventure thing. Happily for me my players prefer 1890’s era settings . My fave as well !
Tbh I think technology spoils horror
I watched a great Korean cop show called Stranger where the villain impersonated the muder victim and deliberately gets caught on a dashcam to confuse and mislead the police.
One example from a Shadowrun style D&D 5e game I was involved. We needed to break into a building. Firstly we case the place, checking if there's onsite tech support. Nope, they contract out their tech support to a third party...fair enough. We check out the third party company, see what kind of uniforms they wear, name tags and the like and get together a 'close enough' approximation of their outfits. Secondly we notice that's more secure floors uses keycards and the area we're heading to requries a guards security level of keycard, so getting it off the plebs isn't enough. So using a high risk trick, my Artificer Kobold creates a device used by real Pen testers, a backpack with a laptop and RFID reader in it and gets into a brief tussle with one of the cards whilst disguised as a vagrant before escaping.
So our half-elf hacker goes in, futzes with their system to cause some errors which would require calling tech support whilst redirecting their call to us. We answer, say we'll be there in 30 minutes, pile into the (stolen) van and get changed on the way there. Everything goes smoothly until we're at the room we need to be at, turns out that (thanks to a bungled perception check during the stakeout) the Guards key card can't actually access the room. So my Artificer pops the panel to being working the system to get it open. The DM asks me to hold on a moment and reminds us that...
...Magic exists in this world and because we didn't bother to do was throw up a Detect Magic when we entered the room, Glyph of Warding on the inside of the panel (put there incase people tried exactly what we did) sets off an Alarm spell and we hear the screech of tires as some heavily armed Corpo goons and what looks to be a Corpo Mage get out of their own black van and hurry towards the building...
At which point Me and the Half-Orc look at each other, sigh and give the codeword "Bombshell" (shamelessly stolen from one of your videos) over the groups communication system.
What was almost the perfect heist has now turned into a run and gun affair...
I think a lot of DMs mistake the tension in horror and mystery scenarios as coming from a lack of information. Truth is, it should be coming from what to do with the information you have available. Besides, you should never be giving them the answer; the fun comes from putting the pieces together, not in succeeding on a check.
Signal to noise ratio is a KILLER
I know in the movie Boondock Saints (1999). The characters used cleaning supplies to cover their presence at a bloody crime scene. However they missed a finger that was shot off. Thus leading 1 of the detectives to the identity of the characters.
Physical evidence still counts during crimes.
For Viral (which I bought folllowing your review) I made a presentation concerning all sunscriber numbers, patreons, donations and chat-comments/challenges, displaying it during the game and changing slides according to the scenario. Every player was able to see the situation in real time, simulating the characters use of their technology. Took some time preparing, but was working like a treat. There is a lot of potential using the characters technological devices by giving digital handouts on the players devices (mails, messengers, etc.)
This is a great episode, my game is in a modern setting and my players have adapted pretty well. There's a lot of good ideas here.
We had a talk about 'meta-gaming', that it's a bad word, but I encourage it to a degree in modern settings. One way I do this is let them actually search for valid information on their phones, but limit this based on how successful their research roll was. This adds a fun little break from the standard roll=answer resolution and gives the players more a immersive experience.
The courthouse I worked at not too long ago was still putting modern records onto microfilm, with only one ancient machine capable of reading it and with one staff member who knew how to use/fix it. So even in the modern day, records are not always easy to access.
A TV show had a great use of technology to being used to solve an old mystery, the characters had not accounted for words changing meanings. So the characters interpreted the clues with the modern meanings which lead them to a completely different area. Another character reminded them the clues were from a different Era and they had to use old world meaning for the words in the clues.
Haha! I assumed this was going to be about VTTs and meeting apps! Us grognards remember when portacomps, wireless networks and heads up display communicators were predicted, but they didn't predict them unified in one device.
Excellent vid! - Wonder how much lack of tech integration is due to so many RPGs coming from the 80s, also using pre-cellphone movie and novel plots.
On the translation app, a sufficiently ancient language may not translate fully and properly. The app might translate a bunch of words literally and in the order they are in the text which can make more or less sense. The players get some idea about the text without getting the full meaning.
This video is honestly a godsend
This is incredibly critical to modern gaming. The world adapts. What your players do, you can do. These are not detriments to the stories your table tells, these are enhancements to those stories. Your character exist in a living world that reacts to their actions, and thier digital reality is a reality in which those reactions occur. They can be fired for what they do. They can be reported to the police for what they do. They can be hunted down and never allowed a day of rest for what they do. The camera in their hand is no more and no less powerful than the camera held in the hand of every NPC they come across and do their crimes in front of. Mobile smart phones don't provide a one-way advantage.
These devices are also gateways to adventure.
They are the fixer without having to travel to the Combat zone to get the job. They are the library at the researchers finger tips, and those library searches can be traced by savvy villains in ways that used to take an inside man at the library to monitor, now it's just an algorithm. Your cultists can see their pursuers coming a mile away because they knew the keywords investigators would use to find them. In fact, your cultists intentionally set up red herrings, dead ends, and deadly traps, for those foolish enough to trust online sources to hunt them down.
Damn right, brother.
I've come across the "I don't like tech/guns in RPGs" gripe before in friends and associates over the years and no matter which way I think about it I've always come to the conclusion that "In RPGs if something creates a problem you can always find a reason it's not a problem".
Many of the complaints about phones and computers stem from their easy access to information and I basically fall into the following principle; There are always reasons that you can't just Google the secret information of the universe. Be it because major search engines are all owned by mega corps that are inevitably corrupted by the big bads, or want that sweet sweet secret knowledge and power for themselves, thus forcing the PCs to rely on dark web forums and rumors for "real" info, or if your setting has a supernatural element it could be as simple as the fact that truly supernatural things don't play well with high technology. Phones cut out, video blurs, hard drives have a tendency to corrupt when holding that info, etc.
The beauty of this hobby is that it exists primarily in the mind, and our imagination is its only true limiting factor.
Ran into this problem running a d20 Future One shot once along time ago. I was using an old Star Frontier module I'd found online and adapted to for the game. My most tech savvy player was able to recover data from a wiped computer and destroyed the main enemy base by changing the lock codes and overloading the reactor. I also wasn't a particularly skilled or experienced GM back then.
I recently started reading your Valducan series and I gotta say, I see a lot of parallels between your tips in this video and some of the plot points in that series.
Very good books btw, I'm loving them.
As a Shadowrun GM I and my players use technology a lot. Shadowrun is rather heist based so the players decker either need to get them blueprints of the target location or they need to hire someone to get what they need. I try to speed that up as much as possible since otherwise if I follow the rules a single player will take up 2 hours real time which isn't fun for anyone else but they need those blueprints unless they want to go in blind. Sometimes they spend more time actually planning their operations then making them but that can be super fun, I rarely see so proud players as when a planned heist work as intended (usually something go wrong though but not always).
Shadowrun is even worse the Cyberpunk because here is not just technology, there is magic as well and their blueprints doesn't always list security measures or sometimes cameras have been moved or the security is updated which is a nasty surprise.
Another technology based I play is Infinity's edge. It is a bit of an odd game since the players often are playing a game themselves. In my campaign the bad guy was testing his plans to live forever by murdering the players who were alpha testers in the VR pods but they didn't really notice that since the bad guys plans so far worked. The AI however is upset since it noticed that a bunch of stuff popped up in game that is basically cheating for the villain and his investors so they can rule the new virtual world once regular people will get the option to enter it as an afterlife (if they testament all their assets to the company of course).
Our villain have lung cancer and will eventually join the game as well so the players need to sabotage his plans from inside after the AI tipped them off what was happening.
You don't really need to run campaigns that way, you could run Isekai scenarios like Legend of the rising of the Shield hero as well, but it is a game where the characters have access to information screens, quests and other information through their user interface, it is an odd Indie game but I like it.
I remember this movie called Stay Alive. These friends are playing a cursed video game and how they die in game, the die irl. Bleed over from the game can occur, like a locked door suddenly becomes unlocked because the game character unlocked the door in game.
Thanks for sharing your insight once more, Seth. :)
I love the closing remark, sometimes people will only learn by their own mistakes.
In Traveller I like the fact that information travels at the speed of jump. This means that any 'internet' is really local to the current system and information from further out is out of date. I assume that worlds might have updates to internet data delivered by XBoat on some regular basis but only if they are in a regularly serviced area. There's a niche here for traders to deliver up to date data/news to out of the way planets.
This is giving a lot to think about, I've been writing a Tales Series/Final Fantasy/ DnD inspired Bayoupunk setting, There is some rule of cool future tech stuff in it. But in my mind the setting is for the most part something like early 00s tech level. This video basically reminded me the local swamp bar/tavern that everybody hangs out at would have a computer in the back with janky early 00s internet, also should give my characters pagers and walkie talkies for long for commutations.
What's Bayoupunk? The quick Google search didn't give me much, I must have rolled poorly on my Library Use skill. ;) (things the term brings to my mind are cults, Voodoo, and the like, thanks to first Gabriel Knight game, but that's just a guess)
@@Dagroth Basically stuff that has to do with swap and river culture, a lot of aesthetic and how people dress is Swamp Rock inspired like with bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Swamp Thing series example, Resident Evil 7 too
My group and I tend to stay out of "Technology Laden" time frames in our games mostly because we are all in IT and would get bogged down in the details of how we would use technology to do something. Never give Engineers a chance to get into the weeds, we've literally stopped mid game to start working the math on trying to trebuchet a PC over a Palisade so we could work out the "chance of success".
I’ve been hoping you’d do another round with the Glass Cannon boys. That was fantastic.
I've rejoined them for the Traveller series Voyagers of the Jump. Episode 8 dropped on their UA-cam yesterday.
Thanks so much for this Seth. I've started traveller and with the setting being so huge and all the tech and trade and everything... Ergh overwhelming. This so handy in ticking off something I've been trying to work out. Especially with all of the 80's modules talking about stealing tapes of data and stuff ahahahha. Ffs also helpful for updating those modules (your notes on cameras on arcturus station are also super valuable - sorry I've got the old one and not yours :( )
Anyway, you're great and thanks for this and so much else.
Really helpful for me Seth, especially as I was wondering whether to start my new mystery campaign in modern day or back in the pre-Net/mobilephone 80s. Your suggestions help me feel more confident now of starting off modern day, which is what I want to do. Loved the anecdote about shooting up the bad guys outside the elevator and then having to hide out in a flophouse. Brilliant video Seth.
Adventures that in a fantasy setting could focus more on information gathering than action will probably need to be more action-oriented once cell phones/the internet is added. It can be good for some groups, I think, since from personal experience, there are some groups that spend *wayyyyy* too much time double checking that every fact is 100% known before they proceed, which can definitely be slow without in-game technology or readily available information
Having the players lose technology and work to get it back can be a lot of fun. I remember this one campaign were the players were up in the mountains alone investigating ghosts when the nearby cell tower stopped working. So the players traipsed across this dangerous mountain range and then restarted the cell tower themselves. It was great because once they got it working again, they could call all the NPCs they met along the way whenever they needed.
Thanks for the video Seth, it really helps with running modern stuff and raises some points i didn't even think about!
As someone currently running my first campaign (COC, near-future sci-fi) and basing most of the adventures on 1920s adventures, remembering technology being a thing was a bit shocking (in spite of it literally being one of the main selling points of the campaign in question) but has been more of a blessing than a curse.
my favourite moments (mostly brought about by player ingenuity) so far are:
-using cameras and a drone to patrol a supermall overnight.
the mall was slowly filling with hallucinogenic gas as the night goes on, meaning the PCs start seeing all sorts of funky stuff the more time they spend outside the hermetically sealed camera room.
the cameras were part of the original scenario (wrote it myself, kinda proud) and were supposed to be cheap and rundown, with lacking maintenance over several years, and as such not being completely reliable, but when the players brought in a freshly bought Drone, it made an otherwise simple premise into a tense game of matching and comparing static camera footage with what the drone and a person could see, making every bit of screen interference a race to get to the location and get answers, without knowing if it would be an encounter, an enemy, hallucinations or just a camera malfunctions.
having one character see something the other does not, be it on or off camera, and not knowing whether it was camera errors, screen glitches or them slowly going insane was a high point of that session, and is still one of my favourite things i've ran.
(granted i've ran like four things so take that with a grain of salt.)
-searching for answers and finding yet more mysteries.
one of my PCs found a strange symbol in their house and researched it online, leading to one of those classic "posted 4 years ago - no answers" threads on some cursed-looking image board website, leading him deeper into the rabbit hole as he has now essentially taken to cyber-stalking the poster in question on a multitude of equally shady sites in an attempt to find the truth. it is the classic "following the steps of our predecessors" but online and i am completely here for it.
-range and obstacles.
being a military-centric campaign, having less-than-ideal but still fully functional radio equipment was a must, the handheld modules work great but only at short range, the backpack modules are crappy leftovers from wars gone by that always work poorly but over any range. having interference, jamming and various obstacles (hard to radio through a mountain) whilst not making them entirely unreliable has made all methods of communication ten times better, as everything still works, albeit with the added caveat of time and effort spent to get some cold-war leftover to do what you want. can recommend.
-surfing under Influence
having mythos creatures interrupt or alter how tech works came in handy during Dead Light, as i made every device within a certain radius sort of Crackle and whisper as the creature drew near. it worked as a proximity alarm without really telling direction or speed, meaning the PCs knew they were in danger but had no idea how much time they had or which way to run, really helped amping up the tension for the chase and climax.
-THE NUMBERS.
soo there might be number codes (Black ops style) transmitting at random interval to the PCs various pieces of equipment after the mall, and it might be a bit cursed?
anyways, same PC with the dead thread has now (after some real-life decryption) found that it might be prophetic, but also interspersed with what seems to be complete gibberish. the addition of having some monitor, car radio or public announcement system suddenly crackle and start spouting number sequences that may or may not be relevant has increased paranoia, tension and mystery while cutting down the amount of idea rolls, as the numbers are often (dubiously) helpful or at least help-ish in nature.
all in all, once you get used to having tech in your sessions it becomes less of a drag and more of a tool to do just the sort of things you would do anyways, it just gives you and your players more options to do things. i hope to see what other things will happen in the future, as i have no doubts (nor wish for it to be any other way) about my players finding new ways to pleasantly and unpleasantly surprise me.
seeing what they can come up with using the tools they have is half the fun!