Oppression Aware Podcast, Fairy Tales, and Games

 

This series aims to identify and address ableism in the core content of tabletop role-playing games, including game mechanics and central setting elements. There will be some discussion on the reasons these game elements are a problem. However the focus will be on identifying tools and options for altering games to remove ableism.

While this series focuses on tabletop role-playing games, many of the topics covered are useful for all storytellers.

I want to be clear that this series isn’t about proposing one correct way to address these problems. Both experiences of disability and game play styles vary from person to person. This is about creating options so that each person or group can find the one that works for them.

 

Finished Articles and Projects

Disability Pitfalls in Roleplaying Games and How to Avoid Them w/ Fay Onyx: This video (with accurate subtitles) gives an overview of frequent problems (pitfalls) for disability representation in tabletop roleplaying games. This talk was recorded for the Tabletop Mentorship Program 2021 speaker series and it packs in a lot of useful information and resources.

Sanity Systems: The concept of insanity is a stigmatizing historic concept that has been largely replaced by the more accurate concepts of mental illness and neurodivergence. Tying a core game mechanic to the concept of “insanity,” and its opposite, “sanity,” gives this stigmatizing concept power that reinforces harmful stereotypes. This article focuses on the many options for addressing this problem.

Ridding Your Monsters of Ableism: People create monsters that reflect the fears of their society, including fears about disability. This is a real shame, because a good monster can add a lot to a story, and ableism detracts from that. So let’s have a conversation about ableist monsters and explore our options for ridding our monsters of ableism. This article is on the Mythcreants blog, and is a major expansion of my short, gaming-focused article, Ableist Monsters.

Game Mechanics that Treat Disability as a Limitation: Many of the game mechanics that exist for disabled characters create dynamics that reinforce negative ideas about disability. The most common problems are mechanics that fail to represent important experiences of disability, don’t represent disability accurately, create an incentive for players to engage in stigmatizing play, push players into portraying disabilities that they don’t know anything about, and use derogatory language for disability. This article explains where these game mechanics go wrong and discusses different ways to represent disability respectfully.

Creating a Diverse Cast of Characters: Trying to think about every type of oppression at once can be overwhelming. What I do instead is write out a list of the cast of characters and go through and assess each type of representation individually. This article is the list of questions I ask myself when I’m doing this assessment process.

Ableist Tropes: If you are looking for more discussions of ableism, check out the Ableist Tropes series, which has detailed discussions of ableist storytelling patterns and how to avoid them.

 

In progress Articles

Identifying Unintentionally Disabled Characters: This article is in progress and will be coming out in late spring or early summer of 2021. “Most people understand that it is offensive to mock a character for being disabled, and yet disabled characters are frequently mocked and ridiculed. This happens because many disabled characters are not recognized as disabled, even by their creators, so they are treated offensively.”

Please note that all of the remaining unpublished articles will be expansions of the mini-articles that are currently up in the “Challenges with Game Systems” and “Disabled Player Characters” sections of my “Making RPG Podcasts Accessible” resource document.

• Preventing Disabled Characters from Being Left Behind with Game Job Descriptions.
• Game Mechanics that Erase Disabilities.
• Creating Empowering Accommodations and Assistive Devices.
• Game Mechanics that Lack Options for Disabled Characters.
• Researching Disabilities.