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

[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.