[LYSA]
Welcome to Episode 9 of Behold Her, a monthly podcast that shines a spotlight on women in the world of tabletop RPGs. This episode is all about accessibility friendly gaming. How can we make tabletop RPGs a hobby everyone can enjoy?
We’ll chat with Jess Dempsey of DOTS RPG, makers of braille dice. Then, we’ll interview advocate, actor, and producer Jennifer Kretchmer about why she is passionate about accessibility in gaming. Finally, we’ll hear from Mysty Vander in an audio story about how losing her hearing changed her experience with D&D and what she’s doing about it.
But first, thank you to Kobold Press for sponsoring this episode’s audio story. If you’ve not checked out Kobold Press, I recommend their Warlock booklets for amazing D&D compatible content. Check out the Guide to the Shadow Realm issue especially. It’s got NPCs, adventure hooks, spells, locations, and it features work by some awesome women creators. Kelly Pawlik did design, Meagan Maricle edited, Justine Jones did the cover art. Find digital issues of Warlock on KoboldPress.com.
Jess Dempsey is the Social Media Sorcerer of DOTS RPG. You might know them for their braille polyhedral dice, but DOTS is busy making gaming more accessible in so many more ways, as Jess explains
Hey Jess! Thanks so much for taking some time to chat with me today.
[JESS]
Of course. I’m happy to be here.
[LYSA]
So, we are gonna talk so much about DOTS RPG Project, but first I want to learn a little bit about you. So how did you get into gaming?
[JESS]
Oh, I’ve been into gaming probably since I was a kid. I actually just hit 30 this week. I’ve been doing it since middle school. I think I ended up in D&D in late middle school, early high school, so it’s been a big part of my life for a long time. I got out of playing for quite a while and then about the last two-three years jumped in head-first to 5th Edition again and just rediscovered it and fell in love all over again.
[LYSA]
Do you remember what it was in middle school that made you discover D&D?
[JESS]
There were actually after school programs, like a board game club. There was the kids playing board games and then there was the kids with all their books and all their character sheets and everything out, and that was something I was drawn to immediately as a very avid book reader and very avid book lover. I was like hey, what’s all that?
[LYSA]
Cool. What was your first character?
[JESS]
Oh, I don’t even remember, but I’m about a thousand percent sure it was an elf, because it’s usually some kind of magic user with an elf background.
[LYSA]
(giggles) Then what was it a couple years ago that made you return to the hobby?
[JESS]
I actually found all of the livestreams that are happening nowadays. You know, those started popping up on social media and it was a different world, because back when I was first playing there wasn’t Twitch, there wasn’t livestreams, there wasn’t anything like that, and I saw that there were podcasts everywhere and there were livestreams everywhere so I started watching and decided to pick it up again.
[LYSA]
Really, you hear that so much these days, that people are either coming back to the hobby or first discovering D&D and tabletop RPGs through streams.
[JESS]
It’s awesome. It’s definitely a way to bring the game to more people that may not be aware of it. You know, if they don’t have a local game store near them or if their store doesn’t run events, you can just go on any podcasting site or Twitch and just find a stream instantly. It’s really nice.
[LYSA]
For those listening, what is the DOTS RPG Project?
[JESS]
So, the DOTS RPG Project started out as a way for a friend of mine, Jack Berberette, to help a friend of his named D who was blind. D played many other games, not just D&D but many tabletop RPGs, and Jack found out that in order for D to play… he couldn’t read the books since he was fully blind, so he had people read books to him and then he would memorize the entire, you know, 300 page book for different systems, different games.
[LYSA]
Oh my gosh.
[JESS]
Yeah, it’s a lot. You know, there’s some things that he would ask his players to look up for him, but for the most part he would just memorize rules, memorize all this kinda stuff, and just wing it. So, Jack started working with him to find a way to make the game more accessible. About five or six months later after they kinda hit the ground running and started working on the braille dice and braille books, I knew Jack through dice collecting groups on Facebook and we started talking about it, and I jumped in to help. I said, you know, this is definitely an initiative that should be out there in the world, because there’s a lot of other people that need this kind of help.
It has grown into dealing with lots of other disabilities as well now. It started out just with the braille, but now we’re working with groups that are handling sign language. They’re starting with D&D 5th Edition, but they’re developing universal sign language that can help facilitate a game. We’re working with people on learning disabilities and things like making dyslexic friendly character sheets and dyslexic friendly texts for different books. So there’s a lot that DOTS has expanded into over the last year, and it’s all to bring more people to the table, making gaming accessible to everyone.
[LYSA]
I think when I first reached out to you I warned you that I really know nothing about accessibility in gaming, and I imagine that’s probably true for a lot of people who are listening right now. Can you help me understand? For people who use sign language, what is a barrier in the game right now that you guys are helping smooth over and make it easier for people to enjoy a game?
[JESS]
Well, with sign language there is… How do I put this? There’s essentially shorthand. You can spell out individual letters of a word, to create a word, or you can use one simple sign as a shorthand to indicate whatever that word may be. Words that are specific to roleplaying games may not have a shorthand already. So, if somebody wants to, let’s say if they want to cast a spell, that spell name is not a name that’s normally found in a regular dictionary, so they’d have to spell that word out, and that is cumbersome. You know, if you think of 5th Edition, some of the long spell names, Leomund’s Tiny Hut, Prestidigitation. You know, spelling that out—
[LYSA]
Oh my god. Prestidigitation! Trying to spell that just normally, oh my god. (laughs)
[JESS]
(laughs) I can’t. No, I can’t. But you know, something like that, it’s cumbersome, it’s a pain to—with Prestidigitation, remember how to spell it, number one, and to spell out each individual letter of that word, it makes it very hard to have that gameplay happen organically and naturally. If you need to sit there and spell out every individual thing that you wanna do, one turn can take five minutes just to relay what you’re trying to do.
[LYSA]
These are things that, when the game is just naturally accessible to you, you kinda take for granted, you don’t really think about how others experience it.
[JESS]
Yeah. It was definitely something that was an eye-opener to me, because myself, I’m fully sighted, fully hearing, I don’t have any disabilities, and even just what I started with, with things for the visually impaired and the blind, you don’t really think about it until it’s in front of you. I’ve got shelves upon shelves of books and RPG books and everything, and I took a step back and said wait a minute, somebody that’s blind has zero access to this material. They can’t read this book. They can’t play roleplaying games without somebody reading this book out to them.
Think about how many times you’re playing a game and you have to go reference rules or spells or something like that. That’s not possible for a blind individual to do on their own. So a lot of what I’m trying to do for DOTS is to make it so that individual can do it on their own without having to rely on assistance from someone else.
[LYSA]
Yeah. I mean, you think about it, and honestly it just feels like you have to be a fan on another level to find a hobby, to realize there’s barriers of entry to you, and to overcome those, and… ugh, and then to have to work with somebody else. It’s… I mean, respect.
[JESS]
But that’s exactly the point. That’s exactly the point. It’s something that you as a person that doesn’t have to deal with these difficulties, it’s hard to wrap your brain around it. It’s hard to find a way to put words to what you’re trying to say. It’s like, okay, now that I’ve thought about this I realize that there’s problems and there’s hurdles that these people have to overcome, but you can’t really put yourself in their shoes accurately.
[LYSA]
Yeah, exactly. I feel like I would just give up, but… (laughs) But I guess you don’t always have that luxury living in a world where most people don’t have disabilities and just get to enjoy the world the way that they do. So, I mean you touched on this a little bit, but was accessibility something you were passionate about before you found DOTS?
[JESS]
Honestly no. It was nowhere in my life. It was nothing that I dealt with personally. I don’t have any friends or family members with any type of disability, so it was something that I had never encountered. I knew about it on the surface, and I had a couple of friends that have varying degrees of color blindness, but that was as far as I got. So jumping in and trying to help out just with the social media accounts is really where I started with everything.
The more I got into it, the more that I got into the community, I realized how much there really is out there and how much of these situations the general community is just not aware of because it’s not something that they have to deal with.
[LYSA]
Yeah. What would you say are some of the big things you’ve learned since you’ve taken on this role and gotten more and more involved with the community?
[JESS]
As horrible as it is to say, the biggest thing that I’ve learned is how inaccessible everything is, just as a whole. Like I said, I’m dealing with a lot of different things with DOTS, but our first focus was for the visually impaired. For them to access a book, for them to access, you know, you may even say okay, you can get a PDF of the book and use computer programs like screen readers to read through the PDF and access it that way.
Well, if the person that creates the file in the first place doesn’t format it properly the screen reader can’t even access it. It’s essentially like an image, and the screen reader can’t access the text, or if an area with a stat block is not labeled as a table the screen reader might read it all in one continuous sentence and not realize that it’s separate.
There’s so many little things that I’m learning and we’re learning as a group and as a community as to how to improve things. More often than not there’s something small that can be done that will literally make our break somebody’s experience. Something as simple as, with Adobe programs, there’s an option to rasterize text, and that is essentially turning your text into an image. Now, that protects your font and that protects your styling, but the computer now identifies that as an image instead of text, so a screen reader can’t access it.
That’s something where if the designer, the person that’s doing it, if that’s part of their natural process, to rasterize everything and then make the PDF from there, (laughs) we can’t access that material. So something as little as hey, don’t rasterize it, export it using this menu option and this setting, we’d have an accessible PDF just from the start.
[LYSA]
Oh wow. So, how much of what you all are doing behind the scenes is creating products versus maybe educating creators on how to make things more accessible?
[JESS]
We’re actually doing a little bit of both. The primary product I guess you can say that we’ve created would be the braille dice. The braille book transcriptions we’re also working on, but those will not be for sale. Those are being donated to locations. As far as resources, that’s things that we’re gathering from other members of the community. You know, RPG Research is a great organization out of Washington, and they’ve done a lot of research over the years, and they have a lot of this material that we’re able to learn from and then pass that knowledge on to somebody else that may have not heard of RPG Research.
The same thing goes with Game to Grow. Game to Grow does a lot of work with the autistic community, so they’ve got different bits of information that they’ve learned over the years. So, I don’t have all the answers, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but if I don’t have the answers I can pretty much point you to somebody that will have those answers for you, somebody that has put in the ten-fifteen years of research that I just haven’t yet.
[LYSA]
Yeah. So, you mentioned that you’re just sort of delving into this community, or you have been since you joined this role, so if someone is listening right now and, like me, their mind has just sort of completely opened up to this whole side of gaming that they never really considered before, are there groups that they can join to learn more? At least quietly observe conversations. Where would you recommend their going?
[JESS]
There’s plenty of… There’s so much stuff on social media, of course. Facebook has got groups all over the place, but they’re often tailored to specific things. For instance, there is a Facebook group that I’m in that’s regarding how to teach individuals with disabilities, and some of that information may spill over into the gaming world. As far as if you just wanna look on Twitter, just go look up different accessibility hashtags and see the conversations that are happening around things, because it may not be gaming-related every single time, but it’s very nice to get some insight into how these people live their lives. That’s been the most important thing for trying to figure out what we can do to help improve that.
[LYSA]
Do you have other, just… Hearing the specific examples I think really makes it hit home, like the tiny details that one takes for granted, they make a really big difference in someone else’s life. So, for example, you mentioned character sheets for people with dyslexia. What is it, what parts of character sheets make it sort of difficult for them to use them?
[JESS]
Every version of dyslexia is a little bit different for every person, but in a general sense I can say that dyslexia is where you may mix up different letters or different numbers, and it may make you have a hard time reading certain words. Some people mix up letters that look the same, such as a lower case “b” and a lower case “p.” They’re similar, they’re just flipped. Somebody else may confuse numbers, their numbers might get switched on them.
So, for a game, especially roleplaying games with stats and character sheets and all those numbers, you know, it may be hard for somebody to correctly identify what their numbers are. So, sheets that we have are blocked out in a certain way where all the numbers are separated by different lines so that everything is very clear and it’s not cluttered. There’s a lot of character sheets out there that have great, beautiful designs but may be hard for somebody to read that has trouble with letters and words.
[LYSA]
Wow. Are those character sheets available on your website right now, or is that something coming up?
[JESS]
Yes, they will be. We have some different versions of these character sheets, and most of them are PDFs, and we’re going through and testing the accessibility of the PDF as well before we’re putting them up on the site, but when we do have those finalized they’re going to be up under our Resources area.
[LYSA]
That kind of transitions nicely to my next question. I’m just wondering, what is DOTS working on that people can look forward to soon?
[JESS]
The primary thing that we’re working on is the braille book transcriptions. We’re partnering with different publishers, and those publishers are giving us access to their materials, and we’re taking that with our team of volunteers and transcribing the books and getting them printed in braille. Those books are then going to be donated to local game stores, schools, libraries, pretty much anywhere that hosts tabletop RPGs, so that the blind community can go out to those locations and have access to these books.
We’re also working very closely with D&D Beyond right now on improving overall accessibility with their website. A lot of the new stuff that they have coming out that they’ve mentioned in developer notes, they’ve worked with us before it launches to ensure that a screen reader can access their site correctly. We’re also going through and working backwards to all the material that they’ve put out so far and improving those.
[LYSA]
That’s so wonderful, because it’s such a big tool that so many people use. That’s great.
[JESS]
It really is. It really is. There’s a mention in one of the previous developer notes that Adam Bradford put out, and he talks about how he was so excited to learn that the visually impaired community now had access to D&D books where previously they didn’t, you know, because they couldn’t read the books, they couldn’t read printed books. (laughs) Then we came in and kind of threw him for a loop and said well yeah, you have a website, but the programs that they use can’t access it, so they really can’t access.
[LYSA]
Wow.
[JESS]
We went through and showed him the problem areas. Adam and his team have been great as to, you know, listening to feedback and trying to work through problems. The good thing is that I have a tech background myself and a lot of other people that I’m working with have a tech background, so we’re able to go through and work on the programming side of things and say this may work better, let’s try this. All of it is really experimenting and figuring out how to do things the best way, because everything’s a little bit different, and we have to address each case differently.
[LYSA]
I appreciate so much all of the work you all are putting into it, especially since it seems like it’s not really been done before, and so you are kind of figuring out how to make it work for people.
[JESS]
Yeah. There have been some organizations that have worked on addressing accessibility in gaming, and unfortunately they haven’t always gotten the best response from the community. You know, I’ve been lucky. For some reason I was in the right place at the right time, and DOTS is something that resonated with the community, both the disabled community and the gaming community, and we’ve gotten waves and waves of support from different members of the community throughout the year. Other organizations haven’t been as lucky, and their efforts have just kind of fallen short. Without support it’s very hard to get these things done.
[LYSA]
Was there anything else about DOTS or about your experience in gaming in general as a woman, as this is Behold Her, that I didn’t ask you about that you did want to share?
[JESS]
Well, I can say that I’ve found the industry to be—and this is the gaming industry—I’ve found all members of the industry to be a lot more welcoming than I thought it would be. You know, you hear all of these bad stories about how females get discriminated against in the industry, and anybody who’s pretty much not a cis white male is not given preferential treatment I should say, but I’m extremely thankful because I haven’t had to experience any of that.
I’ve been met with welcome and open arms pretty much anywhere I go, and I think the reason for that is because of what I’m doing. It doesn’t become “here’s a woman in the industry working on this,” the focus is the work that’s being done. I know a lot of it—you know, a lot of what happens in DOTS, it’s not my face front in that, so people may not know that there’s a female behind it, running it, but the good thing is that doesn’t really matter. That’s not really important.
But when I do put my face out there and when I do, you know… just recently I did a panel at PAX East. I was met with such appreciation for everything that’s been done, and it’s very heartwarming every time that happens.
[LYSA]
I’m so glad to hear that the community and also the industry has been welcoming. It’s always good to hear those positive stories, too. So, Jess, thank you so much for everything that you’re doing, for educating me and the Behold Her listeners, and also just the gaming community at large, about how we can do better and how we can look at our hobby in different ways. If people want to learn more about you or follow what you’re doing, follow what DOTS is doing, how can they do that?
[JESS]
Well, I personally am very active on Twitter, we’re @dotsrpg, and we’re also @dotsrpg on Facebook and Instagram, and to keep it nice and easy, dotsrpg.com. Pretty much anywhere that you look for us you will find me and I am here to answer any and all questions that people may have.
[LYSA]
Thank you again, Jess. This was such a wonderful, thought-provoking conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with Behold Her.
[JESS]
Thank you for having me.
[LYSA]
Jennifer Kretchmer is a television producer, actor, and a member of 50/50 by 2020 where she advocates for disability equity in Hollywood. You might also recognize Jennifer from her D&D shows Heroes of the Veil and Monsters and Fables.
Hi Jen! Thanks so much for joining me for Behold Her!
[JENNIFER]
Thank you so much for having me.
[LYSA]
So to start us off, why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you got introduced to tabletop games.
[JENNIFER]
Yeah. So, when I was about probably 14 my brother tried to get me into 2nd Edition, and I wasn’t quite there, I wasn’t quite grasping what D&D was about, so I didn’t really dive in yet, but my senior year of high school I had a group of friends that were really interested in getting a game going, but nobody had books, so I went to my brother and I confiscated his books—which are still sitting on my bookshelf—and we started playing, and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve been in a weekly game for nearly 20 years now.
[LYSA]
Wow. So when you started that game back in the day, were you a player or, because you had the books, were you the dungeon master?
[JENNIFER]
No, I was a player. I was very much a player. The first time I DMed was probably three years in or so, and I’ve told this story before, but I had the ultimate DM story which is I prepared for months and months and months and I had a visitors’ guide to the town and all this stuff, and we were doing a rotating DM thing. I had songs for every temple. I was so prepared! No one told me that the group was gonna blow up the two towns prior.
[LYSA]
(laughs)
[JENNIFER]
So, they come in and they ask to meet with the town council, and lo and behold that was the one thing I had not prepared for. (chuckles, exasperated) So, immediately I was on my toes and realized what DMing required in terms of flexibility and ability to change with the players’ notions, and the story and just go with it.
[LYSA]
What did you do?
[JENNIFER]
That time, because I was brand new, I took a moment out of the game. First I gave the excuse that they were at a spa that was three days away from town but it would take them a week to get back, and when someone pointed out that didn’t make sense I then went out of character and said I really had no idea this was coming and I’m not prepared for it, so they’ll be there next week.
[LYSA]
I think that’s a fair thing to do.
[JENNIFER]
Yeah, and now I would be much more comfortable rolling with that obviously, but at the time that was what I needed to do to figure it out, and I think it’s okay as a DM to acknowledge where you aren’t prepared with your players if it’s something glaring and to learn as you go. I think that’s an important thing. We were talking before we got started today that I am learning so much, all the time, from every DM I play with, and it blows me away every game I play, watching and observing new tactics and storytelling tools. I think you always have to keep learning when you’re playing and DMing.
[LYSA]
I think so. I think that people get really worried comparing themselves to other, let’s say like, big name or famous dungeon masters out there, but truly everyone really brings their own sort of unique perspective, unique style to the game, which is one thing that makes tabletop RPGs in general and Dungeons & Dragons specifically really special.
[JENNIFER]
Yeah, absolutely. Your game is your game. It’s not anybody else’s game. You can draw on the things that work well with other DMs, but at its core there are things that your players and you as a DM are going to value in your game that are unique to that particular alchemy of people and that alchemy of characters and that setting and those monsters, and trying to be someone else is not going to give you what you want from the game, because you’re gonna be focused the whole time on trying to approach things the way that person would approach it instead of really just diving in and finding your own style and your own rhythm and what you enjoy in that form of storytelling.
[LYSA]
I totally agree. I feel like the more I play Dungeons & Dragons, it’s learning to express myself and value my own perspective that I bring, but then like you mentioned, every dungeon master that I play with, every other player that I play with, they bring things that I really admire and I learn from and I start to absorb that and sort of evolve my own style, so really it’s sort of an avenue for growth in that way.
[JENNIFER]
Absolutely.
[LYSA]
So you’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a couple decades now. I’m wondering, over those decades, what has it meant to you to be a woman in this hobby?
[JENNIFER]
When I started playing I did not know any other women that played, and I don’t think I played D&D with another woman until I was in college or towards the end of college, so there was always a sense of needing to represent the entire gender. It’s that carrying the weight of the entire gender on your shoulders, and needing to be the best at it, and learn all the rules, and learn all of the loopholes, and know the mechanics. So I think there was a weird pressure in that way, but also it was this… it’s a special thing that I did.
But it was amazing when I started playing with other women because suddenly there was just this solidarity and this sense of belonging, because it was lonely to be the only one, to go into the shop and see a bunch of guys and get raised eyebrows when I wanted to play or when I wanted to talk about D&D, so starting to play with women was really fantastic because it just felt like I belonged.
Now, to watch the way the hobby has changed in terms of women being vocal—because I don’t think it was ever that women didn’t play, I don’t think that’s the case. Women were working on 1st Edition. Women were working at TSR. We’ve been involved from the very beginning, and this hobby, I think the perception of it really discouraged women from coming forward. I think everyone was discouraged from coming forward, but I think in particular women were very much discouraged from coming forward.
And now, some of the most vocal advocates for the game, people that stand up and really shout from the rooftops how much they love tabletop roleplay and what it’s done for their lives, and who are pushing the hobby forward, are women, and that’s just spectacular to see.
[LYSA]
I totally agree. D&D 5e is exploding, and I have no doubt in my mind that a big part of that is women and other folks who are marginalized from the hobby really embracing it and being visible, and like you said, vocal.
[JENNIFER]
Absolutely. Yeah, and I think D&D gives people an opportunity to try on skins, you know, for lack of a better term.
[LYSA]
Ooh, I like that, yeah, thinking of it that way.
[JENNIFER]
You put on the characters, and it gives people an opportunity to explore identities that they might be curious about or want to experiment with or genders they feel that they may not be able to express in their day-to-day lives. I think there’s an incredible sense of opportunity in a world where anything is possible that isn’t necessarily true when you’re walking around in a world that does marginalize people.
[LYSA]
I think a lot of people would relate to that perspective of the game. I want to steer the conversation towards the theme of this episode which is accessibility in gaming. So why is this a topic that is important to you?
[JENNIFER]
Accessibility is important to me. I do a lot of work in terms of accessibility for the disabled community. I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome myself, but I’ve also studied disability academically. I’m involved with Jill Soloway’s 50/50 by 2020 initiative which is part of the Time’s Up movement, but it’s an intersectional approach, so I am on the steering committee for disability trying to improve representation in the media.
I think access to gaming is such an incredible area of opportunity for people to come in… you know, we all love this hobby, and the more people that can play the better the hobby is going to be, the more resources we’re gonna have, the more shiny toys we’re gonna have, but also the more people are going to have that experience that’s so powerful and so incredible and what we love about gaming.
[LYSA]
Yeah, I totally agree. I also feel like… What I loved when I was first introduced to D&D that there were so many different people from different backgrounds who had completely different life stories coming together united by one thing, and even if you’re not focusing on each other’s “actual” backstories, you’re focused on characters and fighting monsters, I still think a little bit of what your life experience is creeps in when you play, and so you learn a lot about the people around the table and you learn different perspectives.
[JENNIFER]
Absolutely. I think one of the things that’s so wonderful about D&D is that diversity is key to success. You need a party that has a rogue, and a wizard, and a barbarian. You need those different skillsets, and I think that translates beautifully to a lot of different types of diversity, and I think disability is something that’s very often overlooked in terms of diversity and representation.
Bringing that life experience—Disabled people have incredible skills that non-disabled people may not be aware of. There are tools you develop, strategies and problem-solving… it’s spectacular. There’s a term in the deaf community called deaf gain which is the things that you gain; you don’t have hearing loss, you have deaf gain, which is the cultural and language gain that you have from the deaf community. It’s a spectacular concept, and I think that’s something that translates beautifully in terms of tabletop gaming.
[LYSA]
So, we’re talking about accessibility in gaming. What would you say are pain points in tabletop RPGs that most gamers probably take for granted?
[JENNIFER]
Things like being able to access the material. Until recently the books were available in print and that was it, so if you were blind there was no access to the material. You were never gonna get current material. You couldn’t get large print, you couldn’t get braille format, you couldn’t get audio book format. Now, with the advent of the internet and things like Beyond, you’re getting things that are accessible by screen reader and you’re getting immediate access. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big improvement.
Things like communication and finding a table to go play at. I helped coordinate the accessibility for DexCon last year, which is a newer convention, and as far as we know we had the first entirely ASL D&D table at a convention.
[LYSA]
Wow~
[JENNIFER]
Yeah! It was really, really exciting. But you know, if you’re deaf and you sign you can’t necessarily just walk into a store and pick up in Adventurer’s League. So those are definitely more obvious types of access issues, but I think you also have to think about things like neurodivergence, ADD, the ability of people to sit at a table for an extended length of time, the ability to calculate numbers. Some people have visuospatial issues. So I think those are all areas where people don’t necessarily have awareness so they can’t necessarily plan to accommodate those things. That’s definitely a spot where I would love to see people start thinking more holistically and asking questions.
In general, when you have improved accessibility it’s an improved experience for everyone. It’s the same way that curb cuts don’t just help people in wheelchairs. They are going to help people who have a stroller or are wheeling a grocery cart. Access ends up being useful for people who are not necessarily the intended recipient of that access.
[LYSA]
That’s so true!
[JENNIFER]
Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. I think one of the simplest ways you can start implementing things in your games is having… building in breaks. Every two hours or so I think is a solid standard break point which allows anyone who has any sort of attention needs or needs to go stim or needs to stand up and stretch or use the restroom. That’s a great way to just start having that built in so people have that space and know it’s there for them, and that also benefits other players too. I found that non-disabled players come back refreshed and ready to get into the game when those points are regularly observed.
[LYSA]
And that’s such an easy thing to implement. Are there any other things that are top-of-mind for you where if someone’s listening to this and they’re like “oh my gosh, I wanna make sure, I wanna make my game more accessible for my players,” what are other little things they could do?
[JENNIFER]
One of the things you can do is start addressing ableist language, which is tricky, because a lot of those terms are very deeply coded into our everyday vernacular. You can find lists of ableist terms, but a lot of words like dumb, crippled, mute, there are a lot of terms regarding intellectual disability that are used… Those terms, start actively removing them from your vocabulary. Don’t use them to describe NPCs.
When we’re on the topic of NPCs, there are tropes that are really easy to avoid. If you don’t want to fall into the horrible disabled trope traps, disfigured villains is a big one, disabled villains. When you are portraying disability, it’s not something that needs to be fixed. Most people aren’t looking for a cure. It is an identity. The same way someone is tall someone is a wheelchair user, and that’s often fine. So changing those narratives away from cure narratives, away from disabled villain narratives, and populating your world with disabled characters.
To me, a world where almost everyone is adventuring, or many people are adventuring, and you have these huge monstrous threats rising out of the ground and tearing down villages all the time, you’re gonna have a much higher number of disabled people, so to me I think about why not have disabled towns. You’re gonna have more people who need that access, so get rid of stairs in your cities. Why not? It’s an interesting way to tweak your world and make it feel a little different.
I also love playing with the idea of what can villains do that players can’t. How can you invert those ableist tropes? So those are all really nice places to start, but the biggest thing is ask. Put it out there at your table. Hey, does anyone have any access needs they want to talk about? Feel free to talk to me privately. Feel free to send me an email or use whatever means of communication you’d like to, but let me know what your access needs are and how I can best improve this experience for you.
[LYSA]
Yeah! In general, dungeon masters, you don’t have to world build all by yourselves. A lot of times players want to be involved in that.
[JENNIFER]
Yeah, but also just in terms of the basic mechanics of your table and your playstyle, talk to your players. Maybe a player needs you to help them know what their character remembers. Maybe someone struggles with taking notes. Maybe someone needs to use maps and minis if you’re playing theater of the mind. It’s asking hey, what can I do to help you, to improve your experience here and give you equal access at my table. Just know my table is here for you.
[LYSA]
This has kind of brought up two questions for me. The first one is are there any third-party 5th Edition or other tabletop RPG games or settings that are doing a good job of representing different sorts of people in their games?
[JENNIFER]
Well, I always talk about Ten Candles. I love Ten Candles, because it’s a wonderful, incredibly open world storytelling mechanism. If you take the format of the game, which is essentially a countdown timer using candles on a table, and distinct scenes, and you world build within that, you can put in any characters you want and not punitively damage characters. There aren’t mechanics for combat the same way that you would have in many other games.
I love Ten Candles for everything, I think it’s a spectacular game, but it does have a very dark theme and it does end in a very dark way, so it needs to be a group that is prepared for that kind of experience and wanting that kind of experience, but I can’t recommend it highly enough. It also changed my dungeon mastering style completely. It blew my mind.
[LYSA]
Oh wow.
[JENNIFER]
Yeah. It took so much of the weight of the narrative off of me as a DM, because I realized the players will tell the story they want to play, and if I lean into that and I let them do that, if I ask them questions – Hey, where did you get your dagger? What does it look like? What does the handle look like? What’s the engraving? Tell me about this thing. – letting the players have that, and have control over those sorts of things when they’re not grand scheme story shifting, they get so invested, because they feel like it’s their story, and that to me… just a single session of that game blew my mind.
[LYSA]
Oh man. I wanna play that right now! (giggles)
[JENNIFER]
I really cannot praise it highly enough. You have to. You will love it. Stephen Dewey is the creator, and it’s Cavalry Games, and I think it’s ten bucks for the PDF, but you can get the softcover for 14 or 15. I have a kit for it. I just pick up the kit and go whenever people want to play.
[LYSA]
Oh wow~
[JENNIFER]
And it’s zero prep! That’s the other thing about it that’s amazing. No prep. It all happens at the table. And it has some great mechanics you can plug into D&D for character building too, which is fantastic.
[LYSA]
So, my other question was where are conversations about accessibility in gaming happening? Are there certain Facebook groups or hashtags? How can people learn more about this subject?
[JENNIFER]
On Twitter, if you follow any of the disability communities… #FilmDis is a great hashtag to follow if you’re interested in media, and #CripTheVote also is another hashtag you can follow. Those both will always lead you to those conversations, but there’s a small circle of us who are working in accessibility in gaming.
You could follow DOTS. They’re making braille dice, which is incredible, and they’re working on getting more sites screen reader friendly, more games accessible for the blind and low vision community, and it’s incredible what they’re doing. There’s also a Facebook group called Fans for Accessible Conventions that’s pretty great. They have a lot of resources and information.
Then there are a number of disabled game designers, @snarkbat is one. Her name is Elsa… I’m totally gonna screw it up. I need to look it up. But there are designers who are designing from a disabled perspective and from a disabled experience, and then there are designers who are taking that experience into account.
You know, I can’t say enough wonderful things about Dungeon Commandr. They’re brilliant. DC is just incredible in terms of making games that are acknowledging so many communities that have been marginalized, and it’s just so powerful and wonderful what they’re doing and the conversations that they’re facilitating. I think that’s also a really great place to go for those kinds of conversations.
[LYSA]
So, was there anything I didn’t ask you about that you wanted to talk about? Anything specific that you are doing to increase accessibility in gaming or any projects that you’re working on coming up?
[JENNIFER]
Yeah. One other thing that I wanted to talk about was creating disabled characters in-game. I touched on it a bit, but one of the things is if you have a character who would like to play a disabled character, finding ways to make that not a punitive situation, so they’re not being punished for playing that character to the fullest. You want to find ways to have assistive devices or to have a guide familiar in the world so that they’re able to play and engage with the world but also maintain their disabled experience. So that’s something.
I think there was a wonderful… Sleepy Spoony has a blog which has a breakdown of a number of different, actually a multitude, of different disabilities and mechanics to play those in-game, some of which have benefits and detrimental effects which really are… I believe they consulted on almost all of them with people in those communities, so that’s a fantastic, fantastic resource to take a look at.
In terms of projects coming up, I have a really cool project that I think will be announced by the time that this airs, but I can’t say anything yet, so if you follow me on Twitter I will be talking about it there. I’ve hinted at it a little bit, but it’s not fully out there yet.
[LYSA]
Ooh, yeah! So where can people follow you on Twitter and the rest of the interwebs?
[JENNIFER]
On the interwebs, I am @dreamwisp on Twitter and I am also @dreamwisp on Instagram. I am dreamwispjen on Twitch, and that is where I play Heroes of the Veil as well, on dndbeyond, and a number of other shows and charity events and all sorts of cool stuff, so it’s a lot of fun.
[LYSA]
Well Jen, this entire conversation has been such a delight and also so educational. You are just a trove of knowledge, and I love listening to you.
[JENNIFER]
Thank you. (laughs) Thank you so much. It’s so much fun to talk to you, and I’m so happy to share this. It’s such a remarkable community of people. You know, we say that the disabled community is the only community—the only club that anyone can join at any time, and one-in-four people will become disabled in their lifetime, so we’ve, in society, created this myth that it’s such a scary thing, and it’s not. It’s just a group of people who are going about their daily life in a slightly different way than what’s considered the standard approach, and I think having an opportunity to talk about that is so extraordinary.
There are so many incredible people, and I think so many of them are drawn to gaming in particular as a hobby, for a lot of reasons, but I would love to see games become more accessible so anyone who wants to go play can and everybody has a seat at the table.
[LYSA]
I hope so too.
Mysty Vander is a D&D enthusiast whose tabletop gaming experience shifted when she started losing her hearing. In this audio story sponsored by Kobold Press, Mysty shares what it was like navigating these changes and how she persevered to ensure her game night evolved with her.
[MYSTY]
“Even as you try to move quietly through the cavern, that pungent stench of the troglodytes cause you to lose your footing suddenly. You slip, you’re choking on air, just searching for a clean breath, but the noise you make causes them to be suddenly aware of your presence as you’re sneaking up 60 feet behind them. Roll for initiative.”
The dungeon master’s call to action was always an exciting one. Every player at the table rushed for their sets of dice and rolled in their trays, on their books or on the tables themselves. The dice clattered against one another. Some players hissed, sucking in their breath with anticipation.
I rolled my aluminum miniature d20 in my hand before tossing it into my tray, looking at my new character’s initiative bonus and calculating it as quickly as possible. Being ever the note-taker, I slipped out my character book from underneath my sheet and began to jot a note of the initiative starting and what was happening.
My DM was a man and there were five other men I was playing with. The game master in particular was a large burly type, his voice deep as he called out for others to give their initiative. As my eyes were downcast in my character journal I heard voices around me, but they sounded as though they were drowning in water. My ears kept astute attention for my name, but when it did not come to pass eventually a player shoved my books gently to garner my attention. They gestured at the DM.
As I turned my eyes to him I could see his lips mouth my name and make out the gargled version of it that I was still attuning to. Is that how my name was always going to sound from now on? As if someone was calling to me in the depths of a pool? “Thirteen,” I called, and quickly muttered an apology following.
We in the game moved on, but my notebook laid forgotten, shoved underneath my sheet. I didn’t want to slow my table down, cause them to wait, or miss when our DM called my name or character again. At the end of the session I pulled it out and attempted to recollect what we had done.
A few weeks later I received my annual hearing test. I failed, with flying colors… or passed, though it took me a few months to feel that to gain my deafness was to pass, to understand that it was only a loss if perceived as such.
“It will get worse,” the audiologist told me, his face straight and voice akin to waves. “Your bones are deteriorating around your eardrum. It’s hard to estimate how long, considering your disorder, that your hearing will last. At this rate, compared to last year, I’d say a decade left before you can’t hear at all.”
I thanked him and left. It took only a few hours before I was enrolling myself in American Sign Language courses and researching what it meant to be hard of hearing, stuck between two worlds and communities, as I made my journey slowly from one side to the other.
Community was always important to me, and on that day I had not realized what my slowly dissipating bones would do to my favorite and most dear community, tabletop gaming, and especially D&D. But I kept attending the local game store’s Adventurer’s League games every week. I never missed a day. With each week, with each call to initiative, I heard those crashing waves around me with growing intensity, and they were unforgiving.
Relentlessly, I grasped on the edge of context, gripping around the air for direction to determine what the proper response was expected of me. I was succeeding but with great sacrifice. My notebooks began to fill up with blank pages or scrawled notes that were illegible as I could not peer down at them as I scribbled across the lines. My head was aching with each low voice that spoke to me, and physically my body was wearing with every game as I struggled to piece together sounds.
“Hey, are you alright?”
“Sorry, it’s been a long weekend, Mysty needs the sleeps,” I would joke, especially when I got the summation of the instance all wrong and would speak horribly out of context.
A player laughed in return. “Yeah, I think you do need the sleep.” To no fault of their own, they were peering past the struggle and exhaustion I was battling at the table just to keep up, my eyes darting from one mouth to the next, and I was letting them. I was refusing to speak up and advocate for myself.
One evening at the store tables were changed up due to numbers of attendees, and the volume of voices was overwhelming… or underwhelming, but meddling together into an indiscernible mass. I was seated with a table of players I barely knew. Their mannerisms and personalities were totally new to me. They played fast, they laughed, and I smiled as if I heard the joke and followed along seamlessly. I was getting good at acting, I realized, good at pretending to keep up.
That night I went home and I cried. I turned on my music as loud as I could bear and I held the speaker to my chest so I could feel the vocalist’s vibrations running through my body since my ears couldn’t do it justice.
My streaming was already stopped due to inaccessibility. My body and mind were so exhausted after one game night a week that I had to begin cancelling others. Even my own podcast I had created was falling by the wayside as I couldn’t keep up with editing it. I cried for the loss of every project related to the tabletop community. I wept for the loss of every joke missed at the table. I felt torn up as I could never hear the silly little accents properly again that my fellow players and game master would use to identify and describe their characters.
But then I stopped. There is a lot of things in life I couldn’t control. I can’t control how easily my bones break, or how small I am, or how much pain I feel every day in every single joint. I can’t control how much I can hear or what my fellow players sound like and how low-frequency of voices they have, and I don’t fault them for it. But I can control how much love and devotion I have to tabletop gaming, and I can control how much effort I put into playing it, and more importantly how much effort I put into ensuring that the hobby is more accessible for others as it was slowly slipping away from me.
I went into the store the week after and I made it clear to myself. I needed a table of players to be permanent. I needed consistency to learn and know their mannerisms and voices well enough to keep up. I needed silence. I requested the smaller, quieter room off to the side of the store for my disability, and the store happily accommodated. We shut the door, and the other voices drifted off.
We spoke one at a time at the table, most of the time – even I couldn’t do that all the time – and I always sat adjacent to the deeper-voice players. I was beginning to understand that not only was this going to make play more accessible for myself but that I also deserved that access.
My often broken and aching body, due to my disorder, Osteogenesis Imperfecta (brittle bone disorder), ached if I sat too long, and my head hurt if I concentrated on speech reading too much. I began to advocate for necessary breaks, and if my table did not want one I would take one. It was needed.
Then I looked around, proverbially, and saw that tabletop gaming in itself was wholly inaccessible for so many disabilities. There were no universal ASL signs, or even regional ones, that were being catalogued or made known for gaming. There is one table of ASL begun to being run at some conventions, but by a hearing person, always. Then I learned there were so many people with physical disabilities who were struggling to play simply because their local game stores were inaccessible, because their groups refused to take breaks or slow down when necessary. All of these circumstances weighed heavy on me as I battled with my own disabilities on and off the table.
But no more, not after that night I cried for my perceived losses. What one sees as a negative can always have a positive side. Other than advocating for myself personally at the table and founding a convention based off of accessibility in gaming, I began to talk about it online. Having the conversation is just as important as doing something about it, but the conversation extends further than myself and my struggles with disabilities at the table, and so my focus quickly became how to empower disabled individuals to lead accessibility in the tabletop roleplaying community.
With that focus I returned to my now permanent gaming table every week with confidence. “Oh sorry, what did you say that was again?” It wasn’t a shame to ask. “Can I sit here please,” gesturing to a chair directly across from the two deepest speakers of the group, and they were all understanding and welcoming and patient when needed.
There are times when I let myself go still, where I’m too tired to find conduits for myself through playing and frustrated that those around me don’t sign. In my head I would be screaming, “if only they could sign to communicate, this game would be so much easier,” but in person I’d be smiling and nodding. But it’s all worth the struggle to play. But it’s even more worth the struggle to improve the game and the community so that play is easier for those who need it to be.
“Hey Mysty, if you ever need us to repeat anything, just let me know, okay? And hey, you should totally teach us some of those D&D-related signs you guys are working on, too.”
It was two years into playing publicly and nearly a year after the night I cried when I was asked that by a fellow player. My chest welled, my breath caught, and I felt myself begin to cry again, this time out of pure elation, because I knew I was finally on the road to an accessible game. It’s not an easy road, nor one that will ever end, and one that we need as many allies for as possible to help pave the way, but it certainly is a satisfying one.
[LYSA]
Find more from Mysty on Twitter @MystyVander. Mysty is also part of a DOTS project called ASL for RPG. You can find more about ASL for RPG at @ASLforRPG.
Thank you Mysty, Jess, and Jennifer for sharing your stories and knowledge with Behold Her. If you want to help Behold Her grow, consider giving us some stars and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Interested in sponsoring the next audio story so we can compensate great content creators? Go to BeholdHerPodcast.com.
The next episode of Behold Her is all about decolonizing Dungeons & Dragons. See you then!