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

[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.