by iKarith » Friday July 16th, 2021 5:26pm
Was thinking … Board games are often not terribly accessible to the blind collectively because of they're flat, not tactile, pieces easily knocked over, etc. RPGs could be, especially now that you can roll dice on an electronic device (though d6 with pips are sort of accessible, raised dots available in very expensive pairs that are more so…)
That got me thinking: What does a widely accessible game (not to just blind people, but as many people as possible) look like?
People don't generally give deaf players a second thought. They can see and read all the game materials, so why wouldn't they be able to play all the games that already exist? They probably can, and without too much trouble … except I can imagine a group of more than four or five players at a table where anyone might speak up and need the others to hear/see what they're saying could pose a little challenge. No sense excluding these folks from consideration just because the problem tends to solve itself.
Blind folks … At the table, the blind tend to play abstract card games. Most notably, just about every single blind person I know under the age of 80, including those from other countries seems to own an Uno deck. The game is large print out of the box and the each of the cards can be Brailled using two characters that even non-Braille readers can learn (combinations of b, d, g, r, s, w, y, 0-9), and is considered a Braille-learning aid. Board games made with us in mind tend to use pegs or tactile grids pieces lock into such that they can't be easily bumped, dislodged, or knocked over. Most of us can use d6 with pips but (way overpriced) raised pip "tactile" d6s are available (typically in pairs) for those who can't. Other dice would have to be too big to be made tactile, but we can all use an electronic dice dingus.
I think a theater of the mind RPG using d6 would probably be most accessible to the blind. Thing is, you've got to think about the tables and maps in case the GM is the one who's blind. Think Zork for the maps—rooms with exits. (Passages count as rooms, if there's anything significant in them…) And tables … Ideally you need only a few of them to avoid page flipping and they'd be relatively short (a US standard "Braille book page" is 11.5 x 11 inch, containing 40 characters and 25 lines.)
It'd work best if a character sheet was easy to represent in a serialized text-only fashion. Kurgan got introduced to me doing that for our online HQ games. At the table I might've done something with a whiteboard or overhead projector acetate or something, but at the computer it was just a flat text file.
Young players or players with learning disabilities probably would be best served if things like printed character sheets were short and used icons where they made sense. Stuff like that.
I think this is quite doable. It's probably be a fairly light crunch RPG system with some kind of uniquely written example campaign modules with maps that are made to be flowcharted as easily as mapped. I think combat might look like something somewhere between HeroQuest and Dragon Age not because either is most suited to the task, but because I know those two systems and haven't looked at many others. I can't imagine anything quite like this already exists, though all of the pieces probably exist somewhere.
Welcome to thoughts on this one, it's a rather long-term project in the earliest of idea stages, and I'm not even remotely sure what's going to work and what's not until I start kidna—er, finding some playtesters who wouldn't typically play board or RP tabletop games much and infl—er, inviting them to try some ideas that I haven't exactly sorted out even in my own head yet.
<InSpectreRetro> All hail Zargon!!! Morcar only has 1BP.