Oppression Aware Podcast, Fairy Tales, and Games

This is a photograph of three twenty sided dice, two purple and one pink, on top of a black and white Dungeons and Dragons character sheet. The photo was taken at a dramatic tilted angle to invoke the excitement of playing a tabletop role-playing game.

This is a list of best practices for gaming in a way that will be the most fun for listeners. These things don’t need to be done perfectly, but I’m hoping that we can all work together to do these as much as possible.

1. Anything you can do to eliminate background sounds is super helpful.
2. Please don’t eat while we are recording the game. If you need a snack, let us know, and we will take a short break.
3. When introducing yourself, in addition to sharing your identities and experience of disability (if you are comfortable sharing), please share one thing that is interesting or unusual about yourself. The goal of this is to give the audience a chance to connect with something that is unique about you.
4. Talk about your character in third person, frequently using their name so that listeners can keep track of who is doing what. In addition, because it is often hard to remember names at first, I’d like us to all to choose a noun to pair with your characters name such as Vanessa the witch, Alexus the accountant, or Jade the bard.
5. If character names have plays on words in them or are hard to pronounce, please spell the name out for the audience. This is particularly important in cases where other participants need some help catching on to what the name is. That “Ah-ha!” moment of realization won’t always translate as easily over a recording.
6. Active listening, enthusiastic responses, and excitement are great, but please don’t talk over other people.
7. I want these games to be accessible to non-gamers, so try to avoid acronyms and abbreviations of any kind, but especially of any gaming terminology.
8. Please also make jokes accessible by explaining references to TV shows, movies, and pop culture when you can. I’ll probably be able to help with this one by not getting a lot of pop culture references. 😉
9. Focus on what the characters are doing and making a good story first. Don’t get bogged down in the rules or trying to figure out what action is most likely to succeed. This is about having fun and creating an awesome story together and failure can be an important part of the fun!