Roleplaying characters with Physical Disabilities

[FlightofIcarus]

As someone who has Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy and is an avid roleplayer, I was wondering how other people felt about this topic.

Basically, what do you think of using disability as a character element?

I only tried it once, didn't get to see it through though. The GM lost interest with that RP and it died.

[Brovo]

FlightofIcarus said
As someone who has Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy and is an avid roleplayer, I was wondering how other people felt about this topic.

Basically, what do you think of using disability as a character element?

I only tried it once, didn't get to see it through though. The GM lost interest with that RP and it died.

It can work depending on the style of the RP and the severity of the disability. All I can recommend about it is to do one's own research about it and pick something appropriate for the setting. For example: An adventurer in a fantasy setting who can't use his legs, whilst perhaps either amusing or interesting, is not going to facilitate adventuring all that well unless they have something to make up for the disability.

That being said, I've done it before, and it's intriguing. Especially if you take away or dull a sensory input, it suddenly changes every single line you have to write from that character. (For instance: I played a mute character once, someone who was born with badly damaged and infected vocal cords which had to be removed to save their life. That character then had to go about the RP using a notepad, sign language, and hand signals to communicate. Even that change was significant enough to throw me for a loop multiple times writing their lines: Because you can't yell to a person who is about to be backstabbed, so all you can do is watch it happen. In horror. Sheer, unbridled horror, or think outside of the box and try to save their life.)

[TheEvanCat]

I've had dudes get their legs blown off (and blinded, in another case) by various events. Usually there's a lot of frustration on their part, because these characters are usually patriotic and duty-driven (the society of Precipice Armenia practically demands it) and when they can't do their jobs anymore there's a lot of emotions.

[Kidd]

I'm a firm believer that representation of all kinds is important--even, if not especially, in role play. And it's definitely easier to write into some RPs compared to others, but I believe it's doable no matter the RP with enough determination.The most common ones I see played out in role plays are amputees and the blind.

Unfortunately, it rarely works. Not usually at the fault of the RP itself, however, but at the fault of the player. If you can't empathize with your character well enough, you're not going to be able to play him effectively. If you have it in your head that the disabled can't contribute, you're not going to have much to contribute within the RP either.

[Captain Jordan]

As someone with a hearing loss, I have a particular bias when it comes to seeing characters portrayed with some kind of auditory disability. I have considered writing one before, and I know just how I would do it, but I have never really gotten to the point of wanting to. Probably because for me, RP is an escapist mechanism, and escaping into a character without a disability can be just as much of a refuge as escaping to a fantasy world or science fiction.

That said, I have seen disabled characters played well. One has to be careful not to blatantly offend those who might have those experiences, but it's also important to remember that there is still much discrimination and sometimes even hatred towards disabled persons still in our world. How that translates into the RP world depends on who is writing, and what the setting is, but the most successful characters with disabilities have always been those (for me, anyway) who tell the story of how they cope with an abled society right along with the rest of the RP's events.

It's also important to craft a character with a disability that fits the RP. Certain settings are going to make for poor quality RP if one's character has no way to move about, see, speak, hear/process language, read, or has a different set of social behaviors. In some cases, it may not be realistic to see a certain disability in a public character, those who did live in certain eras of history were shunned or hidden, or even left to die in infancy. If it's a modern day or future setting, the sky may be the limit, but for fantasy or historical settings you should be careful that your character will have ample RP opportunities.

[Ellri]

We've not tried a physical disability in any RP character, but we've seen one used in a fantasy setting that worked well. It was actually more or less what you used as example, Brovo. The character there had severely weakened legs. He wasn't much use on foot, basically requiring aid from others to walk any real distance. Not exactly useful for adventures or combat. Until you reveal the detail that his people were horse-riders. Stick him on a horse, and he was just as good as, if not better than, virtually every other warrior among his people. that character had not only come to terms with the disability, but had in fact conquered it.

For non-modern settings, using disabilities is a perfect opportunity to bring in misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Epileptic? Frequent leeching is clearly a treatment. Partially deaf? Bats hear well. Eat lots of fried bats to cure it. Not quite right in the head? Demonic possession. Cured by trepanning. etc.

[Gat]

I've tried it before with varying success. The most recent was a blind bard in one of brovo's rps. It had both of us thinking differently pretty regularly and while the character was considerable less use in combat than others he still had a place even if as players we had to work on that a fair bit.

[Brovo]

Gat said
I've tried it before with varying success. The most recent was a blind bard in one of brovo's rps. It had both of us thinking differently pretty regularly and while the character was considerable less use in combat than others he still had a place even if as players we had to work on that a fair bit.

He did manage to make an entire ball room erupt into a violent frenzy of carnage and death prior to it all getting buried under rubble. Goooood times...

But yes. Blind bard was hard to GM for honestly. It was enjoyable, but hard.

[gaudi]

Physical (as well as mental) disabilities are challenging, but enjoyable to write, and I am all for these types of characters, which break up the sort of canonical archetype that generally exists. RPs help me practice my own creative writing, and the sort of thinking that has to go behind the altered perspective of a disabled character has forced me to be more fluid and creative than otherwise. What Brovo said sums it up.

Brovo said
it suddenly changes every single line you have to write from that character.

Additionally, physical disability to certain extents (I'm talking about like full-body impairment, displacement, etc) has always been an interesting concept for me to mull over. One of my unused characters has a synthetic body and only retains a human brain and it brings up questions about what constitutes the 'human' or 'soul', etcetera. Neat.

[Brovo]

gaudi said What Brovo said sums it up.

Honestly, the hardest ones I can think of are the ones that hit your sensory inputs. That is: Seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, and tasting. There's also varying degrees of "difficulty" that can be most easily discerned with sensory input deprivation. For instance: Someone who is colour blind merely can't see colours, everything is a shade of grey. It's interesting to write and not too difficult: When someone describes the colour "blue" to you, you don't see blue, you see another shade of grey. The next difficulty step is sight damage of some sort, such as near sightedness that turns everything beyond an arm's length away from you into a blurry mess of indistinguishable blobs, it usually makes you dependent on glasses or other such ornaments in order to see properly.

Finally, you have total blindness. This is basically flicking the switch from "hard" to "borderline impossible" for most stories, though especially action-oriented tales. Everything that has a visible descriptor no longer functions as a description for a blind person. After all, a blind person cannot visually comprehend anything--how bright something is, colours, texture unless they can touch it, and so on. This is made even harder if the character was born blind, because then, well, they literally have no memories of sights at all to pull from, and so when someone says that something is a big blue ball, they have utterly no frame of reference for what that is beyond the feeling of a ball in their hands.

Since everything in writing is some form of description, to take away a sensory input is to deprive the writer of a significant portion of their ability to produce descriptions. Imagine trying to describe how something looks without being able to use the visible spectrum at all and that's blindness. Both Gat and I learned the hard way that while intriguing it was often more trouble than it was worth.

[Rica]

I actually have a character who's a blind inventor. She learned to identify different parts and how to work with them simply through touch.

She was born blind and her whole goal is to actually create a device to give herself sight and overcome her disability.

Though I've never gotten far enough in any RP where she actually succeeded in her goal.

[gaudi]

Brovo said
Everything that has a visible descriptor no longer functions as a description for a blind person.

Honestly, the sort loose, experimental, but orphic writing that results from being forced to write vastly different perspectives / on 'weird' prompts is why I love RP. Thanks for describing it so well.

[Gwazi Magnum]

It's possible, and other's have basically already covered everything I could say, so to keep it short.

1. It needs to not conflict with the plot/RP. The character is basically unable to take part in what is going on (even with alternate means) it's basically a character that stops the RP outright.

2. It should be a character where the representation is accurate, for example if you make a character with a broken arm he probably isn't going to be a good archer.

3. It shouldn't be a character that simply gains sympathy, everyone has difficulties and troubles. It how you overcome, work around them or live with them that makes them good characters. Not many many hearts or tears you get given to you.

4. It's not your entire character. You are not "Just the blind guy" anymore than someone else isn't "Just the computer guy", "Just the wizard" or "Just the sniper".