"Unfortunately, I haven't found many ways to work around this other than to accept that cell phones exist and will be obstacles to isolation. If your campaign has a large rural area nearby, you can still use the excuse that cell phones can't get signals in that area. When dealing with a single PC in a scene, it's easy to find ways to separate the PC from his cell phone (especially when up against an intelligent threat)."
In the Buffyverse, cellphones existed sporadically and unreliably until the last season of Angel. The Hellmouth may very well have been interfering with the signal up until that point.
That's great if you and your players are comfortable with that!
My group consists of four gamers (including myself). I am the only one who doesn't have his cell phone within reach.
I just don't see how you can have a typical modern game without cell phones.
Of course, in the Buffyverse, Sunnydale seems to take a high murder rate and vampire/demon sightings in stride, so it's not too much of a stretch to add "quirky, sporadic cell phone connections" to the list!
The cellphones situation reminds me of a Call of Cthulhu release a few years ago.
Ramsey Cambpels Goatswood was released a few years ago, it was admitted from the get go that one of the scenarios was originally written in 1991. I immediately saw what the editor did not.
There is a murderer in the house. The first thing that he does is cut the phone lines.
The first thing the PCs would do was use their mobiles.
Now it was still possible at that time to use "no signal" as a realistic situation, especially in England at the time, but it would have stretched the suspension of disblief of my players. Essentially it made the game impossible to use because it was absolutley neccessary for the players to believe they were cut off.
Check out "Disconnectia", in Worlds of Cthulhu #3, for my take on how you can use cell phones in a horror game and still keep them scary.
-Darren MacLennan
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there is alittle device you can buy online that jams cell phones in an area. they are banned in the US, but europe seems to think they are allright. just have your bad guy have one of those, radio signals are easy as hell to "limit" in a roleplaying game.
now if you have ghosts and no actual baddies, you can have the site remote from a service tower or something similar... hell my cell phone works half the time and i'll have full bars. the person they try to call can be busy or not available.
but seriously, jammers, someone disrupting the nearby tower [if the antagonist is a governement] or strang phenomina [a powerful entity] are excellent believable ways to limit RF signals.
Remember that there are a lot of studies that show a serious degredation of skills used while on the cell phone (notably driving, but should apply across the board.) Apply a penalty.
You also can't use a cell phone and stay stealthy (nor keep the conversation private.)
Cell phone signals are also easy to intercept, especially by persons who have little regard for the law.
And y'all must have much better service than moi. I lose signal often, and it isn't that big a stretch to have spotty service.
Lastly, a Horror campaign could make it uber-creepy by having cell calls randomly intercepted and answered by otherworldly critters.
Go watch a season or two of STTNG. They were masters at devising situations that stymied the Federation's wonderful technology.
Cell phone signals are also easy to intercept, especially by persons who have little regard for the law.
Actually...
That only really applies to Analog cell phone signals, which are transmitted over the air in a way that is precisely analogous to the way traditional phone signals are transmitted over the wire. Modern cell systems (GSM, cdmaOne, UMTS and the like) use encryption that's fairly unbreakable by brute-force methods.
You can easily jam a modern cell phone, but listening in on a conversation is much, much harder.
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They actually resulted in a rather funny moment in a CP campaign I was running once. The PCs had gone to a derelict oilrig to complete a pick-up. After they got the package, they all got into their boat, and the pilot critically failed his roll. Qeue one sinking boat.
There they are, standing on this oil rig. The sun's going down, it's getting cold. Then they remember they have cells! So they just call an AV cab. One very expensive cabride later, they're back home.
Cellphones can be used for fun in horror games as well. They can go off at inoportune moments. Or they can just sart ringing, and never stop. On the other end there could be some demonic voice, or maybe just static. Then they turn the phone off, and a couple of minutes later it starts ringing again. They hang up on the call, and the phone is still turned off...
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You know, some of the best horror scenario locations are immune to cell phones.
Boats or oil rigs in the middle of the ocean.
Underground parking structures.
Creepy cabins deep in the woods.
Abandoned mine shafts.
Also, I have introduced horror creatures before with the whole flashing lights, arcing electricity, dimensional portal bits. Such conditions are a perfect justification for an electromagnetic pulse that can knock out all kinds of electronic devices from watches to computers to cell phones to cars.
Or what about a creature that can follow you by tracking your cell phone? How about one that sucks you into your own cell phone and torments you an electronic world of its own design? There have been several thriller/horror movies about evil spirits that inhabit computers.
Playing horror in a modern or future game just requires changing your thinking. You can't stick with all the standard horror tropes because they don't always work as technology progresses.
You could always run a game in which the PCs are sent to investigate why the brand new cell phone towers in a certain rual area keep going down, and why the last repair crew never reported back...
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