The early internet era is great for investigation games. You still have to go to libraries, make phonecalls, drive and walk to places and you can also have obscure websites, shady chatrooms and private forums, creepy files, VHS, mysterious email chains, etc.Consider that the next time you run an investigation game. They don't all have to take place in the 20s with old-timey jazz and big band soundtrack just because the handbook said so.
>The early internet era is great-Could stop right there and still be right.
>>96657278Oh look, it's one of the never-game strata-gems thread! The "You don't have to search for information in modern times, because everyone has a smartphone" one!Now pick your phone and use it to sieve through court register of local corporations in search for the bloke you only know by name.I dare you.I double dare you.Fags who insist you can't have search in modern times clearly never had to find anything. And the hours you would spent in analog media are now going to be hours poured into data-mining.You double nigger
/tg/ may find these sites useful https://www.oldavista.com/ and https://wiby.me/. Feel free to add more sites like those.
>>96657546>this pressed about early internetStay mad.
>>96657546>county/state website>search by registered agent on corporations>search court records by name>search property records by namewow that was hard
>>96658482Nta, but you literally can't do that like that - it's against law.So he has a point - you are clueless, like all fags who go with this non-argument.
>>96657546Yeah, the whole 'can't run a mystery with the modern internet' thing is a bit stupid. The sheer quantity of information is what lets you hide data here. If you're relying on pure internet sources, this shit becomes 'he said, she said' real quick, because rather than trying to find any information at all, you're trying to find true and meaningful information. Think of all the AI shit that deceives boomers on the internet. Now think of someone with actual willpower to polish it up to push a particular narrative. Even if we are dealing with pre-AI times, sufficient video and image editing software could get you far in pushing a particular narrative.Making all that worse is that these aren't necessarily the products of a propaganda apparatus; at least not a formal one. People enjoy lying on the internet, and people who've been lied to would much rather push the lie than admit fallibility. tl;dr: People lie, internet is thus full of lies.
>>96657278You can just as well do it with modern internet. What are the players going to do?Google the evidence and murder suspects?The only thing the internet takes away is the occasional trip to the library and even those still have their relevance. There are still thousands of documents, possibly millions that have never been and won't be digitized in the near future. You can even use digital content as a center piece. Countles websites have gone down without a backup, software is regularly vanishing from the net with the only remaining copies hidden away on forgotten hard drives.Heck, with the constant crack down on filesharing, the enshitification of search engines, seo and AI-generated content it's harder to get useful information online than it was twenty years ago.
>>96657546>>96659496My favourite joke is the "Masquerade would be over in internet/smartphone times".Like we don't have fucking /x/
>>96659091>its against the lawLiterally where? >you are clueless, like all fags who go with this non-argument.says the person who didn’t even try before making this dumbass post.
>>96659770What does /x/ "masquerade" for? Need of better mental heatlhcare in many countries?
>>96659743people watch dogshit tv like criminal minds where every episode ends with the detectives googling the killer to find him and think that’s what detective work is
>>96660081The principle of masquerade has changed.In pre-information age you could hide things from general public with censorship and coverups.In >current year you can hide things by drowing the general public in endless stream of bullshit. When disbelief becomes the default even truth can pass by unnoticed.
>>96660135I somehow fail to see how /x/ relates to that. I mean, sure, it's wacko central, but even in this day and age people don't really care for crazies fapping to tulpas.
>>96657546Correct, especially with how enshittified search engines are now. I get regular use out of my very rusty schoolboy German because I get better results looking for the same things on German websites
>>96659496>>96659743I'm going to answer you and not the other guy because he's just looking for attention.You shouldn't run a mystery nowadays because most of the research would be online. How do you play someone sitting on a chair typing and clicking? It's more dynamic if you have the characters on foot and also searching the web just like he would in a library. You can also add hackers, I forgot that. You say mis/dis-information and overabundance are a hindrance, sure, but how does that reflect on the table? Internet was more mysterious back in the times of the Wild West, when you had to take notes, when urban legends were still around as opposed to having everything centralized in a handful of social media.>>96659770I agree. There are plenty of conspiracy theories that have a lot of evidence to them and yet people don't want to believe in them because they're afraid they may be true, which means their whole worldview is a lie and they can't trust the authorities. They'd rather believe what the media tells them. In this masquerade fantasy scenario, if they were to see a video of a vampire or ghost, they'd claim it's a deepfake or that it was "debunked" by experts. There was a "disclosure" about UAP a couple of years ago and nobody gave a fuck. I think it's a psyop myself, that or a scam.
>>96660603>How do you play someone sitting on a chair typing and clicking?You say, 'I would like to research 'X'', 'I would like to find forums/chatrooms/VoIP servers/other public semi-public online resources discussing 'X''. You don't describe the physical act, you describe the more technical methodology, if that. Flourishing language needn't be used on every single action you take.Consider the way a wizard in a fantasy game might do research; from a GM's perspective you describe the fruits of the research, weird stumbling blocks, anciliary practical applications, possible avenues for future research, et cetera. From the player angle, you describe magical principles, testing methods, and arcane gobbledygook for the flavor of it.If you're willing to engage in cyberpunk-style hackerman shenanigans, it can get a lot more kinetic than that: breaking into file structures, finding evidence, then escaping with your track covered so the conspirators don't greet you with a knock on your door. >How does disinformation reflect on the table?Same way it might reflect in the (in-game) flesh. Sense Motive/Scrutiny rolls to attempt to piece together whether this guy is honest or even knows what he's talking about. Lore rolls to try to corroborate statements with external knowledge of the situation. Social rolls to try to apply some lubricant to the information extraction process. The implication that a lie doesn't necessarily imply that the diametric opposite is the truth, further investigation into the topic being required to determine the truth. Have you not had to deal with brainwashed NPC? It's practically the same thing as someone parroting disinformation.
>>96660787That's kind of my point, modern-day research is reduced to saying what you will google and rolling dice (you could, however, have the player deduce how reliable the source is, as opposed to rolling sense motive). It's no good to compare it to a wizard's research because those games aren't centered around investigation.Imagine a game set in the early 2000s, late 90s:> Gotta get a hold of an eldritch tome, so we have to go to the library because it's not on pdf. Maybe the librarian refuses to let me read it so we have to sneak in, persuade him or use force. There's danger of damaging the paper, sneezing because it's dusty, and it's bothersome to carry in case you want to steal it.> If you want to find someone's identity (ID, car plate, etc.), you have to go to the police, some govt department or office, make a few phone calls, get a fax, take pictures and have them developed, store the data somewhere safe, etc. Maybe check his myspace account out and try to decode the meaning of the pics he posts, or watch the videos he posted on early youtube.> Websites? They're really obscure, no one knows who the users are and everything feels cryptic. Gotta bookmark it because otherwise you might forget it. Everyone in the chatroom is assumed to be a criminal so it's dangerous to post your personal information. If you receive a file, most people don't know how to check for malware (there was a major scare with viruses such as trojans). Want to download on Ares? You ended up downloading the file of a cult and it has pics of their latest offering... it takes a while to load and the faces are fairly blurry.> I need to find a certain file or document, but it's the 90s so it's still paperwork. Gotta break into the building somehow and take the document, so as to make physical copies that might get stolen or misplaced> Hackers are rare and mysterious, so you have to find the right one, make sure he's not scamming you and pay him accordingly. ACCESS GRANTED.
>>96661167I feel like you've reduced the counter examples against a information age investigation being low procedural into being infinitely simpler than they actually are. They were relatively broad, top-down examples made on the fly because I'm not writing a full mystery for a 4chan post.You can easily reduce many physical investigations about narrow topics to similarly short descriptions of activities. 'I stakeout the meeting place', 'I comb through the file cabinet', 'I compare the handwriting on the signatures'. et cetera. These ideas and the previous batch might represent a truncated form of a more complex interaction.To go through your examples:Just because the internet exists doesn't mean this sort of information is present on it. You can still do meatspace adventures. You also can have roundabout problems because the eldritch tome works as a computer virus when digitized, or has some unnatural ability that creates more short-term issues for the party looking it up.Information suppression can exist on certain topics, various parties monitoring certain specific search terms; now your simple look up turns into a cat-and-mouse over IP when the conspiracy tries to track you down.You can still absolutely have shady websites on the modern internet. Certain niche topics unknown to the broader public, local events and publications; not even necessarily hidden, but so obscure as to be difficult to engage in the appropriate search terms for.A document can still be in a position such as to not be easily retrievable through internet means. Somethings might not be properly digitized, or in a local network disconnected from the broader world; or maybe firewalled so sufficiently as to effectively be in its own little bubble.'Hackers' might be common, but most of them are script kiddies, half of the remainder are feds, and the last quarter all have their own agenda so you have to convince them that you can compensate them for their time.
