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Again, I'm fine if people want to talk about the mechanical difficulties in handling blindness or deafness specifcially. My own first post in this thread talks about just that But it's not OK to try to silence someone by arguing that they're immoral for criticizing Paizo on this, or alluding that they're the "real ableist" because someone has a blind friend that dislikes Daredevil. Disability is not a monolith, and those who would like to play disabled characters while remaining optimized are not wrong to have that desire, and any acommodations that make that possible without disrupting the game as a whole are worth discussing.
I have reread Captain Morgan's original post which you seem to keep referring to. It is respectfully written and brings up a worry that me and many others share. Your constant denigration of it as them somehow claiming something about "real ableists" is both baseless and a wholly unnecessary roughening of the discourse. You say that "disability is not a monolith", yet you insistently refuse to engage with the issue brought up by Captain Morgan in their anecdote, which, from my experience, is based on a viewpoint that many disabled people share.
Your principal thesis seems to be that adding "disabled" characters with, in effect, no mechanical drawbacks is value-neutral for all able-bodied people and either neutral or positive for all disabled people. But this is not true. Denigrating Captain Morgan's friend's opinion is not going to make it invalid. People like them would be negatively affected by any ruling of the sort you suggest. But you seem to happily ignore this.
Some thoughts.
Using a wheel chair for mobility on planet earth is not an experience that needs to be replicated exactly on golarion because using a wheel chair is an application of technology to increase physical accessibility to spaces constructed by people for other people to use. It is ableist when we know that some people require wheel chairs for mobility in spaces we build for public usage, and then don’t build buildings to accommodate that technology.
Are dungeons spaces built for public usage? Not usually. Usually creators of dungeons build them explicitly to deny accessibility to a public audience and over coming the challenges of a dungeon is fun because the party uses the resources they have to prove that they are more capable than the dungeon’s designer, or controlling force, anticipated. “Disability” is not an static isolated identity. It is a condition that only exists in relationship to others (or sometimes a past self) and what the expectations are for what abilities a person is expected to have within the spaces of those relationships.
Expecting creatures, Cultures and nations of Golarion which fetishize power, authority and control to embrace politics of egalitarianism and equal access is narratively limiting of the stories people can tell and does nothing to make the game more accessible to all.
All characters have hard limits on what they can and can’t do in a RPG, and the capacity to grow in power and ability, to extreme and super heroic levels, is a built-in mechanical assumption of Pathfinder 2nd edition, evidenced by decisions like adding level to all trained or higher proficiencies. The question becomes what base abilities are necessary to begin this journey?
Yes, player characters who will go on to become Heroes require some abilities that can be pitted against the abilities of antagonizing forces with a decent chance of success. Otherwise these become stories of divine intervention. But is there an exclusive body type for what that looks like? Is it necessary to limit all playable characters to having exactly 2 arms and legs? No more, no less as a starting point? 2 eyes with 20/20 vision and a standard depth of color field vision? Or could we instead make assumptions about requirements for starting player mobility, perceptive capacity, and ability to manipulate the environment that are less about specific body parts functioning in exactly X ways, and let players have more control over describing these abilities themselves, so long as they conform to definable power levels in game. (Which is what PF2 does when it decides flight is an ability limited by level)
Also, it is important to point out that the game took some steps in this direction already with the language describing perception and how it is used. It isn't being hyper critical of PF2 or an attack on the developers to suggest that doing more to standardize this language in the future would help accomplish developer stated goals.
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Using a wheel chair for mobility on planet earth is not an experience that needs to be replicated exactly on golarion because using a wheel chair is an application of technology to increase physical accessibility to spaces constructed by people for other people to use.
If we are advocating for the ability to create characters that are “just like us” then why do we allow characters to be built that are gay, straight, bi, trans, deaf, etc but not someone who doesn’t have use of their legs?
Are dungeons spaces built for public usage? Not usually. Usually creators of dungeons build them explicitly to deny accessibility to a public audience and over coming the challenges of a dungeon is fun because the party uses the resources they have to prove that they are more capable than the dungeon’s designer, or controlling force, anticipated.
There is no difficulty in using a conveniently placed staircase in a dungeon. Someone who has full use of their legs has not overcome any challenge. A set of stairs is no more difficult to traverse then a ramp unless the dungeon designer is very specifically concerned about disabled heroes. So given there is no actual IG reason to use stairs vs a ramp, why does the RL author default to stairs? How is that not ableist?
Expecting creatures, Cultures and nations of Golarion which fetishize power, authority and control to embrace politics of egalitarianism and equal access is narratively limiting of the stories people can tell and does nothing to make the game more accessible to all.
Golarion routinely has equality towards people based on their gender, sexuality and ethnicity unless they specifically want to highlight how awful a particular society is. That is 100% unrealistic. I know of no society IRL that has perfect equality on all these issues. So why aren’t we putting as many disabilities as possible under that same umbrella in the name of fun for the RL people who play the game?
It’s easy to use the claim of realism to dismiss the need to be as inclusive as possible. If your going to advocate for people who don’t have full use of their eyes or full use of their ears, it seems arbitrary to then invoke realism when a different disability is raised.
Now I’m not saying you are being arbitrary. Perhaps you have better reasons then the ones you’ve outlined so far. But the points I’ve addressed do seem to be getting applied arbitrarily to me.
Using a wheel chair for mobility on planet earth is not an experience that needs to be replicated exactly on golarion because using a wheel chair is an application of technology to increase physical accessibility to spaces constructed by people for other people to use.If we are advocating for the ability to create characters that are “just like us” then why do we allow characters to be built that are gay, straight, bi, trans, deaf, etc but not someone who doesn’t have use of their legs?
Are dungeons spaces built for public usage? Not usually. Usually creators of dungeons build them explicitly to deny accessibility to a public audience and over coming the challenges of a dungeon is fun because the party uses the resources they have to prove that they are more capable than the dungeon’s designer, or controlling force, anticipated.There is no difficulty in using a conveniently placed staircase in a dungeon. Someone who has full use of their legs has not overcome any challenge. A set of stairs is no more difficult to traverse then a ramp unless the dungeon designer is very specifically concerned about disabled heroes. So given there is no actual IG reason to use stairs vs a ramp, why does the RL author default to stairs? How is that not ableist?
Expecting creatures, Cultures and nations of Golarion which fetishize power, authority and control to embrace politics of egalitarianism and equal access is narratively limiting of the stories people can tell and does nothing to make the game more accessible to all.Golarion routinely has equality towards people based on their gender, sexuality and ethnicity unless they specifically want to highlight how awful a particular society is. That is 100% unrealistic. I know of no society IRL that has perfect equality on all these issues. So why aren’t we putting as many disabilities as possible under that same umbrella in the name of fun for the RL people who play the game?
It’s easy to use the...
My point about the wheel chair wasn’t to suggest that having characters with different kinds of abilities and limitations with mobility shouldn’t be able to be adventurers, simply that wheel chairs specifically don’t need to be the method that adventurers use to gain mobility access in Golarion. It is relatively low levels of magic that allow for floating disks, transforming limbs, gaining the strength of an ant.
Because the technologies of Golarion are so different, i’d Have no problem as a GM allowing for a player character who has restricted mobility but wants to create a narrative explanation for how they will move around in an environment that will often times be challenging and hostile. If they wanted to come up with a cantrip like ability with its own level balanced limits and abilities that could even scale with level, that sounds cool and interesting to me, and not trivializing, because Golarion is a world where this kind of magic is common.
I’d also be fine running a campaign built around the idea that a flight of stairs could be a real challenge that requires party cooperation and problem solving, but I’d want to make sure that was the game that everyone wanted to play. Choosing what kinds of encounters and environmental hazards are appropriate for an individual table should always be a collective process.
Maybe there should be a consideration to move away from stride and step as the action words for movement. Maybe there are more accurate and accessible ways to differentiate kinds of movement? Maybe stride and step can stay specific action but other kinds of movement can have actions too and the differences between them can be defined by key words that affect what provokes reactions, etc.
My goal wasn’t to say your concerns were invalid, just to point out that being differently abled, in relationship to mobility, in Golarion, wouldn’t require earth based technologies. No one on earth is disabled because they use a wheel chair. A wheel chair is an Earth based response to having different mobility limits.
In regards to movement and the ableism of language, I do recognize that that would be an actual structural change that might be difficult to implement. While the rules for perception and observation are already in place. They just require consistent usage.
If we’re willing to accept magic items to overcome a disability, we don’t need to avoid using sight. Simply provide a low level magic item that grants sight to blind people. No need to errata spells or any other parts of the game, and blind characters can play just as easily as other characters.
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If we’re willing to accept magic items to overcome a disability, we don’t need to avoid using sight. Simply provide a low level magic item that grants sight to blind people. No need to errata spells or any other parts of the game, and blind characters can play just as easily as other characters.
Taking the Jordi approach would be pretty straightforward, though if said item is cheap enough it would start being carried by everyone to bypass getting blinded in a fight, which if nothing else has balance concerns.
I'm also not sure if it satisfies all parties involved. Helmic might argue that needing to spend money on a particular item would be playing from a disadvantage, which would be something they want to avoid. And other folks might feel it is offensively trivializing their disability. Or someone might argue that simply "curing" Blindess is not really playing a blind character anymore.
That being said, it seems like a good solution to apply at a specific table... By having a conversation between players and GM as the CRB suggests.
If we’re willing to accept magic items to overcome a disability, we don’t need to avoid using sight. Simply provide a low level magic item that grants sight to blind people. No need to errata spells or any other parts of the game, and blind characters can play just as easily as other characters.Taking the Jordi approach would be pretty straightforward, though if said item is cheap enough it would start being carried by everyone to bypass getting blinded in a fight, which if nothing else has balance concerns.
I'm also not sure if it satisfies all parties involved. Helmic might argue that needing to spend money on a particular item would be playing from a disadvantage, which would be something they want to avoid. And other folks might feel it is offensively trivializing their disability. Or someone might argue that simply "curing" Blindess is not really playing a blind character anymore.
That being said, it seems like a good solution to apply at a specific table... By having a conversation between players and GM as the CRB suggests.
Talking about the specifics of how differently-abled characters will be handled at the table is something that should be done table by table and does not need codification in the rules.
If the entire group feels good and included about one option or another, great. Perhaps a future supplement about optional rules for making gaming more accessible for all would be a great book to make, I'm guessing that would come in the form of a 3rd party product, because I am not sure that the company has the staff with the background in accessibility rhetoric or not, but if they do, great! Until that point, much of the specifics of integrating characters with unexpected limits or abilities is mostly a subject for homebrew discussion.
But there is a difference between how characters utilize specific in game options, and what is explicitly excluded by the way the rules are written, which is more the point of this thread.
The more the game relies on open and accessible language, like using terms "observed" instead of "seen," the less any of this becomes an issue. When issues specifically related to a particular sense come up in a rule or game option, they should be specified in that rule or game option. This is why I accept that calling the movement action stride might not have been the best choice, but at this time it is pretty codified and would be difficult to change. Maybe next time it will be a consideration. The assumed sight thing on the other hand is in an awkward half-codified space, and it would be my preference, and more in line with the principles of accessible design, to favor proceeding forward with a preference for the actual rules language of perception, rather than the undefined and unnecessary language of sight, and what applies as common sense about what people can see specifically, rather than what can be considered to be observed.
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Just to be clear, I wasn’t actually advocating for wheelchair ramps in dungeons. I was interested in exploring what people thought who appear to be advocating for a wider spectrum of abled heroes (apologies if I give any offence in the language I use).
Yeah the multitude of different views on what would be an appropriate response to disabilities leads me to believe paizo was in right in making it explicitly an in group discussion.
So I can actually relate to the topic at hand. I was born different to most people (on a statistical level). This difference has had a profound effect on my life and will continue to have an effect on my life and the life of my family until I die (barring any radical advances in technology. Here’s hoping!).
If someone who didn’t have the condition I have voluntarily chose to play a character with the condition, I would politely tell them I find it offensive and ask them to not do so. If they refused I’d probably tell them in colourful language about what I thought of their actions. If someone who did have the same condition voluntarily chose to play a character with the condition and was doing it for respectful reasons and not taking the piss, I would respect their choice and excuse myself from the game. It is not something I wish to explore in a game of make believe and someone else doing so would completely remove my enjoyment from the game.
If people want a wide spectrum of characters to be possible, that’s fine. But definitely include guidance in a GMing book about the possible reactions and making sure to be as inclusive as possible in a respectful way keeping the experiences and attitudes of the people at your table in mind.
I don’t think rewriting the CRB is necessary. But that is only my opinion based on my own experiences.
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I am quite nearly deaf myself. Yet I look down on other players who wish to play deaf characters, not because my ego and pride are so inflated that it somehow offends my oh so delicate sensabilities (it does not), but because it creates all sorts of problematic fun-ruining scenarios within the game. So much so, that whenever someone brings up the notion of playing blind or deaf characters, I'm extremely skeptical that they aren't just trolling.