disabilities in RPGs and other fiction

[cellio]

madfilkentist recently pointed me to this article about writing characters with disabilities by Kari Maaren. It's a thoughtful piece, well worth reading. Here's a taste:

So when I see fictional disability, I recognise the tropes. I’ve heard Matt Murdock described as “a blind man whose power is that he can see,” and yeah, that’s a common one. The “blind seer” is a particularly frustrating trope because its purpose is so dazzlingly clear: you want a blind person in your story because that’s so tragic, but you also don’t want the inconvenience of, well, having a blind person in your story. So he’s blind, but it’s okay! He can really see through his magical powers! He’s been compensated for his disability! Yay!

I tweeted a link, and somebody replied there asking for tips on including disabilities in role-playing-game systems without being disrespectful or creating broken player incentives. I said a few things there, but I think my readers are likely to have useful thoughts on this and why should we do it in 140 280-character chunks? So please comment, share useful links, etc. I'm going to share a link to this post.

Game (or other fictional) characters have a variety of traits. We gamers sometimes over-focus on a few stats, but a real, rich character is much more than ratings for strength, intelligence, endurance, dexterity, and so on. That's true whether the extra richness comes from the character's family background, formative experiences in wizard school, handicaps, affinity for fire, compassion for small furry animals, or whatever. So to me, three-dimensional characters depend on the players wanting to play that kind of game. I think these tend to be the same players who are interested in story-based games.

That's not all players. That's ok. You can't, and shouldn't, force richer characters where they're not wanted.

Regardless of game mechanics, players who want to play characters who are disabled in some way -- really play them, I mean, not use them as jokes or sources of offsets for abilities -- will do so. I had a player once who played, well, a vision-challenged character -- a challenge that the player proposed as a logical consequence of the character backstory he'd invented. He wasn't looking for any offsetting benefits.

Now, the game system can help or hinder this, and the person I'm talking with is interested in developing game systems that support disabled characters in a meaningful way. Game systems, like players, come on a spectrum. At one end it's all about optimization; at the other end it's all about good story. At the optimization end, you get players saying things like "I'll take the blindness penalty in order to get extra points for spellcraft". Champions was like this. I never actually played; I went through character creation once and decided it wasn't my style of game. But people did (and I assume do) play, and not all of them are only focused on points optimization, so I'm interested in hearing how they roleplay rich, sometimes-disabled characters in that kind of game system.

At the other, story, end of the spectrum you get games like Dogs in the Vineyard, where characters are nothing but collections of interesting backstory, traits, and growth. I only played a few times and not recently so I might have this wrong, but I don't think there even are stats for things like strength. What you have is things like "I had this formative childhood experience that made me really afraid of guns" (minuses to shooting, panicking under fire, etc), and during the campaign as you have to interact with guns that characteristic might gradually change. You know, just like people often do. Meanwhile, during the game you have other experiences, which might be character-affecting too... There's not a lot of bean-counting, of tit-for-tat -- I took fear of guns, so I'm allowed to be extra-good at riding. It works if the group wants it to work. Dogs has a system (and I'm told there's a broader "Fate" system that uses the same mechanic, if you're not into the setting built into Dogs), but it's not a very pushy system. When we played Dogs, we were mostly telling a collaborative story with occasional dice-rolling.

A story-oriented game system can support character disabilities well. Willing players can support disabilities in any system. What I don't know is how game systems not already at the story-oriented end of the spectrum can facilitate good treatment of character disabilities. Or is this something that is best left out of rules systems and placed in the hands of players?

Thoughts? (If my Twitter correspondent is reading, you can log in using any OpenID credential, create a Dreamwidth account (easy, no spam), or comment anonymously.)

Comments

[siderea]

Lots of thoughts, but just one because I have to scamper off to work: it's damn hard, if not impossible, to respectfully or realistically portray a disability one has no idea what it entails. Most sighted people have no freaking clue how what blind people can or can't do, or how they do the things that they do.

So I think sometimes the blind character who can see anyways is not a product of a desire for pathos, but a desire for a blind character, implemented by somebody who finds they have bit off more than they can chew, and winds up copping out with, "Uh, but I guess they can function like a sighted person".

It is perhaps hypothetically possible to design a gaming system that "supports" playing disabled characters, even to the point of instantiating the disability in game play. But it sure as hell isn't going to be designed by somebody who doesn't have a boatload of what amounts to specalist knowledge about multiple disabilities.

And game systems that merely "support" playing disabled characters, in the sense of allowing them (I have a separate argument that many systems don't) aren't going to lead to realistic play of disabled characters except where the occasional player with that specialist knowledge brings that to their portrayal.

[(Anonymous)]

(hi I'm the Twitter person)

Yes, this is exactly one of my major worries! Disabled experiences are so complex and so individual and so contextual that it's really tough to figure out how to implement them in any mechanically consistent way. I don't even know where to start to gain a better (set of) perspective(s) so that I can even consider some guidelines to approach this topic.

At the same time, though, the concern I raised was that, by not specifically building game systems that honor disabled experiences, I worry that I run the risk of outright erasing disabled people as player characters, as adventurers, as heroes (outside of hand-waving some characters in the worldbuilding and setting, which feels a bit cheap).

[eub]

Mostly just following and nodding, but this seems a particularly good point.

People play racial dynamics around half-orc characters sometimes. But, and I include when I've done it, they don't know much about what they're doing with it. In the setting I've seen it once thought through to the level of Jim Crow laws and 1960s-era struggle (which has limited use for walking in 2010s shoes), but more often there's no worldbuilding, it's just drunk guys being rude in taverns when that moves the plot. And in my character I had no real plan beyond a resentment of slurs, and a risk of making cringeworthy flippant remarks. We all quietly snuck away from the whole racial aspect.

Roleplaying a different person can be a way to learn a little what living their life is like, but I only learn the played experience, as constructed by the mechanics and the people. I could imagine your hypothetical, a highly detailed roleplaying sourcebook about characters who have a particular disability -- I would love to read that, actually -- but it's going to have so much lost in translation. Having a GM who knows the disability and wants to do this work in their game would be another possibility. Lot of work.

[xiphias]

One of the things I'm really liking about the Hairbrained Schemes CRPG version of the SHADOWRUN setting is just how much racism is part of it. One point where you get to read Humanis (human supremacist group) literature makes it clear just how much they've replicated real-world racist tropes: orcs breed so fast that they are taking all our jobs (Hispanics), trolls are violent and scary and therefore are all criminals so it's okay when police overreact to them and kill them for no real reason (Blacks), dwarfs SEEM all right, but they're totally clannish and won't integrate into REAL society and take our jobs by handing them off to each other (Asian immigrant populations), and elves are secretly controlling everything behind the scenes (Jews). In some cases, you get anti-elf racism when CalFree is at war with Tir Targairne (Muslim terrorists, sort of -- I don't know if they've really explored that as much as they could).

It's never a focus of the game, but your conversations with various NPCs, both on your team and outside, makes it clear that it's a part of their lives.

[eub]

What do you think, how useful as a model of our current world is the racism in the setting? Does it bring into gameplay features like humans who aren't conscious of their racial biases? Or just not enough of a focus for that even to be answerable?

(One subtle feature that roleplaying might be good for is numerous small probabilistic biases. Between a 40% chance and a 45% chance, you can't tell which is which out of one roll or ten rolls, but dice gamers know it adds up, and they don't want to learn they were born wielding a Cursed Sword -1.)

[xiphias]

It doesn't show up in mechanics. It's all story and character based, and, since it is a CRPG, doesn't typically affect the player, either -- if the player character's race significantly changed NPC reactions, it would increase development time, since they would have to write extra story paths.

That said, I like your probabilistic bias thing -- if you, as the GM, are presenting them their world, and you just HAPPEN to describe trolls as scarier than maybe you ought to... the GM IS the systemic racism.

[metahacker]

Most gaming systems I can think of treat disabilities like Champions, as a way to get more points. While this helps with game balance, theoretically, it's also rife for abuse, and sends really horrid messages.

As someone (possibly that article? dunno, I followed a fleet of folks doing disability-outreach this year) pointed out, folks who need accomodations have a narrative forced on them: they must be the Brave Hero Who Soldiers On (an inspiration to all!), or they can be the scarred villain; and then magic/tech must *fix* them.

So all of that points to things *not* to do in a game. Very little of it is system-centric; it's about narrative. Somewhere there's a questionaire for coming up with interesting characters that starts with "Where does your character do their laundry?" and goes on in that vein.

It's a good exercise; and answering these questions for a character with a disability would be very revealing. Sure, you took One Arm (-15 points). What does that mean for doing laundry? You can't carry a laundry basket very easily, so maybe you get a cart instead. The safety pins you put on your off-arm sleeve to avoid having people freak out? You have to remove and replace those, and it's annoying, but you like the stylisting effect better than a hollow sleeve.

...and on and on. The key is, of course, that suddenly you have a human there (or elf or smert or whatever): a person, who has this shape, and who leaves an imprint on the world in that shape.

Some of this is going to be hard to imagine if you don't have first- or second-hand experience with that situation, and that's a great excuse to do some primary research. As a reminder, there are an avalanche of YouTube channels that are basically, "so, this is my life, hope you find it interesting", and maybe one of those is helpful. Or Twitter feeds. :)

So I guess the answer, for your correspondent, is the same as being respectful in other parts of life: listening to people's lived experiences, avoiding tokenism, rewarding curiosity and connection, and so forth...

And as for those extra 15 points, well...that's a tough one. If your player only wants to take One Arm to get another level of Telekinesis, figuring that it'll completely eliminate her lack of arm, that's a conversation you could have during character creation; and as a GM you can find ways that it won't. (Of course it's up to the GM to avoid making it a *punishment*, which sends its own bad messages...)

[xiphias]

I can think of a couple things. There have been a few games recently with a "disability is ability" mechanic -- anything which makes a more interesting story gives benefits to characters, and disabilities, both internal and external, typically do that.

Another observation I can make is that ALL physical and psychological disabilities are actually social disabilities. Disability is based on culture, including technological adaptations that help integration into the mainstream. Which means that disability plays out as story hooks -- if the story doesn't involve the disability, it isn't a disability. As far as the points-balance "if I take this disadvantage, it lets me have an advantage that negates the disadvantage ("hey, if my legs don't work, it gives me enough points to fly"), the gamemaster has to invoke the "a disadvantage which isn't a disadvantage isn't a disadvantage" rule.

The important thing, I think, from a game design point of view, is that disadvantages in general, including disability, has to restrict the potential actions of the character, in a way that supports interesting storytelling. Which means that the problem, and solution, can't really be in game mechanics -- it has to be in storytelling and game-running. Any game mechanic which supports storytelling is going to support interesting ways to deal with disability.

So, my point is that I don't know if your suggestion really HAS a solution. I think this can only be handled at the storytelling end of the spectrum. I think it might be possible to create a points-build system which supports storytelling -- I've been working on one, when I remember, for years now (I need to actually run something with it to see if it works).

I guess my point is that a system can only deal with disability in whatever manner it deals with anything else. If a system is tactical, the disadvantage has to show up tactically. If a system is story, the disadvantage has to be story. And in real life, most people, most of the time, live in story, not tactics.

As a side note, but just because I think it's cool: in the DC Heroclix tactical wargame, Oracle was an UPGRADE from Batgirl. If you evolved Batgirl to Oracle, her movement dropped to minimum, and her hand-to-hand combat dropped a lot (although still respectable) -- but she gained an incredibly powerful support ability -- any Bat-family or Birds of Prey character could use count line of sight and range from the point of view of any other Bat-family or Birds of Prey character.

If you're not familiar with the character: in THE KILLING JOKE, the Joker shot Barbara Gordon in the spine, and confined her to a wheelchair. In later stories, she responded to this by focusing on her library and information science abilities, becoming one of the greatest hackers, tacticians, and information brokers in the DC universe. The fact that she was a superhero who couldn't walk, and whose life was fundamentally changed by the loss of her legs, but who responded by refocusing her abilities into becoming even more powerful was a useful thing to fans with disabilities, and I'm annoyed that the New 52 reset her back to Batgirl.