Developmentally Disabled Character

[born_of_fire]

technarken wrote:

In my experience with people with Downs Syndrome, if you want to emulate the condition in an adventurer just play them like a child's ideal of a hero. In a way, Paladin is perfect for that. Make the nicest guy ever, always enthusiastically willing to use his powers to help people. Maybe use the Chosen One archetype so he has a familiar to serve as a mentor and best friend.

This. I played a character with an int 7 whom I modeled after the handful of people I’ve known in my life with Down’s Syndrome. They are generally the most enthusiastic, happy, friendly and guileless people I’ve ever come across so that is how my cleric was played. He didn’t want to fight, lie, cheat, steal or hurt anyone in any other way; he wanted to be friends with everyone he could, to make sure everyone was happy and had the nice things they wanted, and he approached the world as if everyone shared these goals. Not only was I never accused of mockery or cruelty in the way that I played him even though I made a lot of IC bad decisions with my 7 Int in mind and got the party into all kinds of difficult positions as a result but he is fondly remembered as one of the group’s favourite characters, in fact.

The idea that you can only play characters that mirror your own life experience in some way—no straights playing gays, no males playing females or females playing males, no whites playing non-whites, no able bodied playing handicapped etc. etc.—really rather defeats the purpose of playing a role playing game where the entire point is to pretend to be someone other than who you really are, don’t you think?? Furthermore, there is an entire class that revolves around giving your character a handicap of some sort. Where is the hew and cry against all the horrible people that dare to play a lame oracle? Isn’t that really mean to people with diminished mobility? My father in law is a quadripelegic and I demand that no one ever play an oracle with a lame curse in recognition of and deference to his condition and you are a bad, BAD person for even considering doing so >.> Get over yourselves already.

[Kobold Catgirl]

I think it's pretty obvious that there's a difference between playing a character with a physical disability and a character with a mental disability or mental illness. One just impacts physical ability (which we are traditionally quite comfortable roleplaying around), while the other generally impacts the actual personality.

I'm kind of tired of people acting like this is the same as playing characters of different genders, races, and identities. It's obviously not. A trans character can be played just like every other character—you yourself have acknowledged that a mentally disabled character would traditionally be played differently.

Mind you, you can play a character with Down syndrome just like any other character. Some people with Down syndrome don't have a markedly lower IQ, as I said earlier. So if you want to avoid the risk of portraying a harmful caricature, just play the Down syndrome PC exactly like anyone else. There's your equivalency.

[thejeff]

I might also suggest not announcing you're doing it, especially if the disability isn't visibly obvious. Just play the character.

That makes it less tied to the real world disability and lowers the risk of inadvertently causing problems. If you don't understand the condition well enough to portray it properly, you likely won't even register as doing so. Unless you're doing an overly stereotyped version, but there's no way to do that well.

[Sara Marie]

Removed post. Do not use the r-word.

This is a difficult discussion to have due to a history of marginalization, stigmatization and abuse that has been perpetrated against people with developmental or mental disabilities. Often language that gets used is unintentionally offensive and very hurtful. Definitely not a thread I’m willing to have open when the entire staff is on a holiday break.

[Chris Lambertz]

It seems that the original poster has been given enough feedback to make decisions about their character choices. We removed some posts debating "PC culture" as this is not relevant to the thread, nor does it belong in our Pathfinder RPG Advice subforum. After our review of the thread, this is going to remain locked.