Can someone please tell me how to deal with smart phones in a horror/mystery game that is set in the modern day?

Can someone please tell me how to deal with smart phones in a horror/mystery game that is set in the modern day?

It's damn near impossible for me to come up with anything remotely clever or interesting in terms of puzzles or mysteries, since everyone just has a phone.

I can't have any information based puzzles, because people will just google the answer (like trying to find out which drug cures an illness). I can't have any urban legends or mythical creatures, because people just google how to kill them. I can't separate the party, they just call each other's phones and leave them on speaker. Can't do any intrigue, people just record phone calls or take pictures and video of everything/everyone involved. I can't even make vague references or clues to places, because people just pull out their phones and google it until they find something that makes sense ("Hm, this number looks like part of an address, yep, here's the building, let's check the internet and see if our target works there, oh he does. Here's his home address, let's go mystery solved.")

I can't just use the lazy "there's no cell service and your batteries are dead" excuse, and I can't just make every single adventure revolve around a hacker who disables their phones.

You ask your players to play along with the genre conceits because that's the only way horror movies work these days. If you want to come up with an explanation phones don't work, that's fine, but honestly you just need to set the proper level of expectations.

Even Hitchcock understood this. Why don't they call the police during a horror movie? Because it's dull and doesn't make an interesting story. Get your players on board with wanting to have fun, rather than always trying for the most efficient solution that goes against the themes of the genre.

Take the most reliable aspects of the phone and make them useless. Maps lead players into terrible situations. Wikipedia articles have all changed to show incorrect or suitably creepy information. Phone calls to loved ones go through, but players can only hear their loved ones screaming or crying.

Just do the basic horror shit. Don't worry about how, just do it.

>horror/mystery
how about when they google their questions they find a yahoo answers page that tells them to find an infant child and cut out it's eyes

it's a fucking made up story man.

Have them run out of battery at inconvenient points. Adversely have no online information or only bits and pieces that further draw in the party to locations of interest only for things to go awry

>a mysterious symbol in several Wikipedia pages’ images
>last known sighting of X was at location Y
>old forum dedicated to subject X, seems several members are missing or otherwise

None of those things stop mystery and intrigue. You want a mysterious monster that the PCs don't recognize? Make one. Everyone records everything do there's no intrigue? That's not this world, most conversation goes unrecorded and people up to no good speak in code. People researching stuff and finding the solution to a cryptic clue? Since when did internet research ever get that potent; if you can't solve said puzzle by going to the library then you can't solve it by smartphone. I think the problem is is that you think that smartphones are magical wonders, rather than limited tools made by man.

My players like to bitch if I make things "unrealistic."

>Have them run out of battery at inconvenient points.
That only worked once. Now they all carry extra battery packs.

> You want a mysterious monster that the PCs don't recognize? Make one.
I do this. I still sometimes run into the "How has no one ever heard of this before GM? That's unrealistic that no one would have found this animal before."

>Everyone records everything
> That's not this world
My players do.

> People researching stuff and finding the solution to a cryptic clue? Since when did internet research ever get that potent ; if you can't solve said puzzle by going to the library then you can't solve it by smartphone
My problem is that instead of going to the library, doing research, asking NPCs, etc, they just google it and solve it in seconds.

Why talk to the cops if you can google someone's criminal record? Why try to find some important book when you can google it and have any library in the world ship it to you locally?

Then talk to your players about how a horror/mystery game in an urban fantasy setting is inherently unrealistic and they need to get the stick out their ass.

Holy shit quit DMing forever because you’re too fucking stupid to run a game.

it's not *that* uncommon in real life to have questions that you can't seem to answer properly with Google.

if it's anything reasonably obscure, the info just doesn't seem to be out there. the search leads them to an old message forum where somebody else asked the question and it was never answered in a helpful way, or whatever.

also, unreliable / too much information. i mean - for real, right now, try to google / wikipedia "how to kill a vampire". you'll get fifty billion results, but which ones are right? can you believe the story of the retard you found posting on /x/ who swears he killed a werewolf with a voodoo ritual?

also with your "number looks like part of an address" example, i'm wondering what you wanted them to do other than using the internet. were they supposed to drive around ten for six days looking for addresses or were you fine with them doing research and just wanted them to have to physically travel to the library to do it? shit, don't try to force them to stop using their phones, assume they're going to use their phones and build puzzles designed for phone research, then make them roll for how well they do or whatever the shit.

i bet ancient Sumerican neckbeard GMs bitched and moaned about how easy it was for their players to solve every mystery because of the stupid invention of "books".

Being fair, from the thread so far it sounds more like weak willed than stupid, just letting himself get bullied by his players and trying to find alternatives to just talking to them about it.

>assume they're going to use their phones and build puzzles designed for phone research
What do you think I made this thread for?

(The address thing was supposed to be a clue that wasn't usable, but would be able to be combined with future clues to solve the mystery)

... okay, i wrote my post before i saw your reply here , which answers some of my questions. still, i think the other posters are right, Google isn't the magic wand you or your players think it is. it fails sometimes.

don't say "no, you can't use your phones", but compromise. they find some of the answer but not all of it. sometimes criminal records are sealed and not available to the public. sometimes the public records are lies because there was a coverup but if you buy the retired cop a beer he might tell you the truth.

the problem you're complaining about is real and non-trivial, but if your players are committed to you running a horror game they should be able to work with you on your cell phone issues. talk it out. compromise.

Google can’t give you information that isn’t public ally available you fucking moron, and there’s no guarantee any info you pull from the internet is in any way accurate. The internet isn’t fucking magic, and you and your players are all fucking idiots.

>public ally
Case in point on phones not being magic all knowing problem solvers.

This is surface level as fuck. Are they googling "four legged squid face" and just taking the first response at face value? That's like saying you're a programmer because stack overflow exists. Oh man, I know about Investopedia so I can investigate this financial scheme. International intrigue? Better go on wikileaks!

You and your players are bush league.

>
I do this. I still sometimes run into the "How has no one ever heard of this before GM? That's unrealistic that no one would have found this animal before."

If this is urban fantasy, then actually yes, it is completely reasonable, and their objections should be met with a flat "figure it out."

>My players do.
Well them recording everything they observe will do them little good, since solving a mystery involves finding out what happened outside of their observations. In all honesty it should be just a waste of their time to record all their activities.

>My problem is that instead of going to the library, doing research, asking NPCs, etc, they just google it and solve it in seconds.
I don't think you understood my answer. By "if you can't solve said puzzle by going to the library then you can't solve it by smartphone" I mean that if the players cannot solve(ignoring time here) a puzzle by researching it in a public library, then a smart phone will not be able to do so either in any amount of time. If your problem is that they can solve the problem by going to the library, then make more difficult puzzles that can't be solved so easily.

I have a feeling OP has neither the spine nor the intellect to take any of your advice.

How do they know what an illness is? Are they doctors? So many diseases and illnesses have very non-specific symptoms.

If you could just google the answers to every medical problem why do we still have doctors?

Answer: because it requires diagnostic training.

>Millennials

>I can't have any information based puzzles, because people will just google the answer (like trying to find out which drug cures an illness). I can't have any urban legends or mythical creatures, because people just google how to kill them.
As everyone else is saying just make the information they're trying to google obscure or make there be a lot of contradictory information.
>I can't separate the party, they just call each other's phones and leave them on speaker.
Even walkie-talkies made totally splitting the party impossible, you'll have to deal with it. Besides, if something gets the drop on one of them, will his friends be close enough to rescue him in time?
>Can't do any intrigue, people just record phone calls or take pictures and video of everything/everyone involved.
Not sure what you mean by intrigue in a horror/mystery game. Do you mean like diplomacy and backstabbing? Because if you're making a bargain with Gazaret, prince of the fifth circle of hell, he probably won't let you take a selfie.
> I can't even make vague references or clues to places, because people just pull out their phones and google it until they find something that makes sense ("Hm, this number looks like part of an address, yep, here's the building, let's check the internet and see if our target works there, oh he does. Here's his home address, let's go mystery solved.")
The intellectually stimulating part of this example is "what do these numbers mean", which your players solved without a phone. They then used the phone to cut through the boring part of spending hours flipping through phone books.

>If you could just google the answers to every medical problem why do we still have doctors?

You can't buy prescription drugs on the internet (yet)

I will never understand groups where the players feel entitled to bitch and moan about every little detail. I'm genuinely curious how old you guys are, and do you play online or all in the same place?

Sounds more like a Gen Z.

>Can someone please tell me how to deal with smart phones in a horror/mystery game that is set in the modern day?

I think this user provided the best option: The mysterious, horror, paranormal creature can otherwise use the advantages of a mobile/modern phone for it's own uses: whether that's using the information it stores or it's features to scare or confuse it's victims, or even just that RING GIRL move where it can slither n' squirm out of the screen and pop out to start attacking the players.

The easiest option though is you could just make modern phones be a massive fucking liability by having the creature/slasher be able to track the and locate the players via their phones- which is something the government, police, even normal people can do if you have a tracker installed.

We are constantly discovering new species in the wild, not to mention extinct creatures that could have survived to the modern day had things been just a little different. There's tons of shit out there that has never been documented.

The information is related to thing happening/happend right there. No generic monster.

Set it in the 90's. Cell coverage sucks, smart phones are something out of Star Trek, PDA's and Blackberries are for rich business types, and the Matrix is still cool.

>can’t have information
It’s he internet. For every article about how you cure Jamison’s Crotch Rot with a liberal application of Nelvadex, there’s a bunch of conspiracists who will tell you that Nelvadex causes Jamison’s Crotch Rot as well as autism, and has *mercury* in it.
Also there’s clinical trials out of Germany which show that Nelvadex is limited use, and possibly more harm than it’s worth.
Just overload them with information, like the internet actually does - they have to try and sift to try and work out which ones are bollocks and which are true.
In a horrro setting there can be awful things at stake if they fuck up, too.

Same for monsters and urban myths - the whole point of all that shit is that there’s a million retellings.
They’re urban *myths*

Turns out that Vanpires don’t care about garlic, and can cross running water just fine without a coffin - guess that stuff was just added by superstition.
It’s pretty easy to just tweak things and blame it on inaccurate aural histories and memetic mutation of stories

This

I am a forever GM and even during the rough early games I ran people at least appreciated that I was investing my time to make something we enjoyed playing work.

If one of my players just flat said "no that idea is stupid" or something similarly insulting I would tell them to fuck off. I couldn't play with someone who wants you to create a fantasy for them to play in and figure out the "perfect" way to do it by process of elimination. They can go write a fantasy novel if they want to see their vision played out, not shit up other peoples time.