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My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in ou
by hellepardo 8y ago
My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in our group went fully blind. There is a complete lack of good multiplayer computer games for entirely blind players (admittedly that is quite a challenge), but D&D requires only imagination, which all of us still have. Highly recommend if you have friends with vision disabilities.
- ravedave5 8y agoI haven't done anything but one of the quick D&D campaigns with the prebuilt characters but I am REALLY enjoying gloomhaven as an alternative. I know there's some vision required there but it seems similar to D&D.
- ZeikJT 8y agoIt's an alternative if your favorite part about D&D is fighting (if so I'd recommend 4th instead of 5th). The role playing you do in Gloomhaven is non-existent in comparison.
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- mLuby 8y agoLosing one's imagination seems more common than losing one's sight. :(
- pat_space 8y agoThis comment inspires me to work on my art.
- tuesdayrain 8y agoThat sounds like a good thing to me. It would be unfortunate if going blind was more common
- justinjlynn 8y agoThe more common a disability becomes, the less of a disadvantage it becomes - with some lag, of course - the world does tend accommodate for the (visible) average.
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- RugnirViking 8y agoIt is still undoubtably useful, even if thanks to technology we can manage without.
- afarrell 8y agoCan confirm. I have a condition which makes it hard to see in sharp detail more than 8ish meters away. My wife has the same, as do many others in my family to some degree. There is a very robust industry producing adaptive devices for nearsightedness. I've even heard things like contact-lenses-as-a-service advertised on general interest podcasts.
- jsjohnst 8y agoThere’s even this thing where they use lasers to burn away chunks of your eyeballs, because yeah, losing unnecessary weight and all makes you see better. I had it done a few weeks ago and it’s life changing!
- mcv 8y agoFortunately there are plenty of cookie-cutter computer games available for people with impaired imagination.
- newsgremlin 8y agoReading as a replacement to everyday stimuli that we are all too used to like video games and youtube is what I found to help my imagination flourish like I remember it did when I was younger.
- MarsAscendant 8y agoSorry to hear about your friend's misfortune. Are they using their disability during gameplay, and/or in-character?
- c22 8y agoI used to have several blind friends who were very successful in text based MUDs. It's possible finding one with an active userbase is getting harder and harder.
- crooked-v 8y agoThese days, the number of non-pay MUDs with an average of 100+ people on them at a time can be counted on two hands.
- wingerlang 8y agoHow about paid ones?
- neltnerb 8y agohttp://astaria.net/wm_client/webclient.php http://astaria.net/wm_client/webclient.php is still going, but I think it has only a few dozen on average.
- dkersten 8y agoI was thinking about text based games for blind people, but since I don't know any blind people that I can easily ask this, I'll put it here in the hopes that somebody who knows the answer will notice it: Presumably, text based games are played with a screen reader. Would music and sound interfere with the persons ability to play? I was wondering if you could mix text and 3D audio to create a richer environment.
- Moru 8y agoThat is different from person to person. As long as it's not overpowering the voice it should be ok for most. Many preffer to be able to set the reading speed though (2x and 3x not uncommon) and to be able to skip to the important part of the message. Especially important when you can't use visual pattern scanning on text that shows up often. Mabe use the browser to create a textbased game? The tools exists there already and the users are used to use them.
- peter_retief 8y agoMy sons play D&D fanatically, I remember it from years ago. Very impressive you made the effort to include your visually impaired friend. I learn't something thanks
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoMaybe Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes would be an option - I haven't played it, but what I'm reading is that it's a game where one player has to defuse a bomb while the others have to give him instructions. I'm sure that could be converted to braille or some other format that doesn't require vision. Would be a great project to adjust that for the visually impaired.
- dtech 8y agoThe game relies heavily on visual queues for efficient puzzle-solving, so I don't think its very suited.
- danvayn 8y agoI dont think so...the complicated wires, keypad, and maze puzzles in particular seem to be a problem. People can make custom bombs without those puzzles but His blind friend would still need a way to search through the manual at a fairly quick pace.
- ChrisRR 8y agoUnfortunately that wouldn't work. For the person who's reading the instructions, there's a lot of flipping through pages and skimming an entire page for instructions on the particular item. That fast skim reading can't be done with braille.
- rtkwe 8y agoIt can however be done with a well structured document and a screen reader. Worked with a blind guy in college who used screen readers and it was incredibly fast moving through pages.
- Eupolemos 8y agoI was wondering - do you tell your blind friend what he/she rolls or how do you deal with dice?
- aasasd 8y agoTactile dice don't seem too difficult a thing to make: https://www.geeknative.com/53239/braille-dice-d20-style/ https://www.geeknative.com/53239/braille-dice-d20-style/ Plus, you don't even have to use dice—anything that gives a uniformly random outcome is alright. (E.g. local “Choose your adventure”-clone books had dice sides printed on each page.) Now, tracking the character sheet and consulting the rules are probably more of a nuisance to the person.
- hellepardo 8y agoIf we are in the same place, either someone else will roll for him or he'll roll and we'll tell him what he got (and he has little choice but to trust us :)). If we aren't in the same place, he rolls virtually (did you know you can type '/roll 1d20' in Google Hangouts and it rolls?) and gets the result via a screen reader. For a while he was DMing and he would use a screenreader to access his notes plus the rolls. We don't typically use maps or boards, but instead try to do it all with descriptions of places. It does mean that the rooms we enter all tend to be fairly simply shaped, and it's possible that each of us has pictured a slightly different room, but it all works out in the end.
- Rooster61 8y agoI love theater of the mind sessions. Maps have their purpose, but it's so much more fluid and imagination-intensive when your boundaries are visualized by your mind. The game loses something when you tie it down with predrawn environments and grids.
- yourapostasy 8y agoCan you please ask your friend from the blind community's perspective, what their take is on using Minecraft Education Edition as a way to access Minecraft? It is more programmable than Minecraft Jave Edition, and supposedly one can interact with the game completely from within the API. The API [1] looks fairly complete, but I can't tell if it has what a blind game player would want to build from. I just saw a pic-to-Braille conversion bot on Reddit, and your comment made me wonder if something similar could be built for blind Minecraft players. So far, I'm not aware of open source Minecraft-alikes that exposes the game purely through an API, though an open modding API like Minetest's [2] could probably be leveraged. Googling around for this information leads to a lot of dead ends talking about the in-game Blindness effect, and I'm not a domain expert in what blind gamers would want to see, anyways. But it would be really cool to see the blind community add new dimensions to current game genres through game interaction APIs (though managing that and botting using the APIs would be an open problem). [1] https://education.minecraft.net/wp-content/uploads/Code_Connection_API.pdf https://education.minecraft.net/wp-content/uploads/Code_Conn... [2] https://dev.minetest.net/Main_Page https://dev.minetest.net/Main_Page
- hellepardo 8y agoA couple of thoughts on Minecraft, though note I am not familiar with Education Edition: 1. We played Minecraft with the specific intent of making visually appealing buildings. So at some point, when you can't see, that's not going to be fun no matter what you do... 2. Minecraft really doesn't have any accessibility whatsoever. You can scale the UI, but... high contrast mode? If you could even get that working with the base game, it's definitely not going to work with the mods we were playing with. As my friend went blind, it got harder and harder for him to deal with any zombies or anything that was moving, since it took him so long to slowly scan the screen and understand where he was. We considered trying to make mods to make things a little bit easier, but struggled with coming up with any mod that would actually improve things. :) 3. My quick glance at the API suggests that we'd end up with a situation where we were playing the game and he was... programming. That may work for some people, but I think for this group that borders too close on after-hours work...
- mcv 8y agoNo real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game. There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now), Traveller, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (4th edition just released), and GURPS. There's Savage Worlds for fast-paced pulp-style adventures, FATE for absolutely anything you can possibly imagine (including publications for Dresden Files and others). There's FFG's excellent Star Wars games (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny), and dozens if not hundreds of smaller indie games, many of which are completely free. We are truly living in a golden age for roleplaying games. D&D is merely the most visible and best-known one.
- SaulOfTheJungle 8y agoWhat non-D&D game would you suggest to someone who enjoys D&D but would like to explore other systems?
- dpatriarche 8y agoI’d like to recommend checking out Numenera, from Monte Cook Games. It’s kind of a sci-if/fantasy mashup. It takes place on Earth one billion years in the future. Eight great civilizations have appeared and disappeared in that time, leaving the world full of ruins and starnge technology, all of which is inscrutable to the people who live there now. The game materials have high production values, on the same level as the D&D books, and about the same level of complexity of game mechanics. The thing I particularly like about Numenera is its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than killing things. There is still fighting, if you want there to be, but the focus of the game is on going out into the strange world and uncovering it’s weirdness.
- mcv 8y agoThere are way too many options to give a simple answer to that question. If you want to stick close to D&D, Pathfinder and 13th Age are obvious choices. If you prefer something a bit more raw, less polished maybe, deadlier, where survival is a goal in itself and combat may be better avoided, try one of the OSR systems, like DCC, LotFP, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is weird horror and explicitly 18+. If you want the feeling of D&D but with a system that focuses more on the story and the experience than on all the numbers in D&D, then try Dungeon World. A lot of people lauded Dungeon World for recreating the feeling they had when they first played D&D. If you want to get further away from D&D, well, what direction do you want? Fantasy? SF? Cyberpunk? Historical? Martial arts? Horror? Steam punk? Espionage? Military? Old West? TV shows?
- garfieldnate 8y agoTau Station was built to be entirely accessible to blind users: https://blog.taustation.space/blog/making-tau-station-an-accessible-game/ https://blog.taustation.space/blog/making-tau-station-an-acc....