If you want another system that can handle it... Champions could. Disadvantages -- physical limitations, psychological limitations, and the like, are tailor made for such things.
I was going to say something similar but people get tired of me saying "Go play Fantasy HERO!"
It has just about every single bit of crunch that anybody could want in their fantasy RPG.
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I'd be interested to see what you folks think of Critical Role's Liam O'Brien and his portrayal of PTSD with Caleb.
For those who don't know:
Caleb was made to kill his family through his mentor's mind altering magic. He ends up burning his own home down with them inside. Along with his time in a sanitarium, this develops into burning bodies being a trigger for his PTSD.
When Caleb ends up killing humanoids via fire damage, Liam rolls a wisdom save. Upon failure, he is stunned (if I remember correctly) for the remainder of the turn, which is how they portray his dissociation episodes. From what I gather, this was Matt Mercer's idea, but Liam doesn't seem to resist the ruling. I believe that Matt really goes the distance to make sure that he approaches delicate topics with care, but has also been criticized for certain portrayals. Liam also does a decent job just role-playing his PTSD when it comes up in story, so it's not like this is purely mechanical.
With all that said, would this be going too far for you all? And expand if you feel comfortable doing so.
Firstly, Spoilers my dude. Like, huge important spoilers.
Second, All of critical role are professional actors with an audience. That puts them on a very different level from the average player. Making comparisons to them is not fair for a player or a DM
Third, Caleb hasn't had to do that in a long time, and it didn't often come up in the game in general. Taliesin had something similar with Percy, where Percy was deathly afraid of heights and had to role wis save on whenever he would be high up and dangerous. It was something that was homebrewed and wanted by the players.
That's fair. I figured this is an episode 2x07 thing, so it was out there by now, but I've spoiler tagged. Also, I do understand that Critical Role is not the same as every game, but it is still a game of D&D, and thus still allowed to be scrutinized, imo.
Liam also did this at least two other times to my knowledge. The most recent was only 30 episodes ago. But I guess the point is that his PTSD is not something that is brought up mechanically in every single fight, which by the tone of this thread is a good thing. Also, Liam has admitted that he was surprised by Matt's ruling initially. Wanting it after the fact is a little different than asking for it, imo.
I'd be interested to see what you folks think of Critical Role's Liam O'Brien and his portrayal of PTSD with Caleb.
As someone who suffers from some PTSD, with friends who have it worse than I do, I have no problem with it. If we cannot discuss in our art subjects such as mental illness in a respectful way, that would be more offensive to me.
Well as I only know my own disability (autism) the points I have for playing with us are:
Literal Minded: We tend to take things literally and some like me can hardly ever unless we hear tone can tell difference between joking and taking it as actual comments.
Explaining: I personally am really slow at times and things need to be clarified at times so always try to use the bluntest terms you can think of.
Shutting Down: This is kind of individually thing but Autistic people can vary on how they cope with stress so. Some of us have a total freak out some others tend to just stop talking and kinda shell themselves inside. So these are just personal points but I met other people and these can apply to most of us in some shape.
Okay. I am also on the Autism Spectrum, but I agree with those above stating that there should be no mechanics for being on the Spectrum. That is completely a roleplaying element to your character, just like their gender, sexuality, and other characteristics of them.
Though the traits you list are very normal in the general autistic community, there are always outliers. ASD is a spectrum, with many different individual factors that certain people can be more or less adept or likely to do (social interaction, meltdowns and shutdowns, stimming, etc). If you were to make mechanics for being on the Spectrum, you would change the condition from being a broad spectrum to a one-type fits all template. This is not how Autism, ADHD, OCD, and many other mental conditions/disorders work. They are all diverse, and to define that in game would be poorly executed and most likely offensive.
I hope this clears some things up. I don't mean to offend, just explain my point of view.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
I wouldn’t add mechanics for this either. The bulk of these things would be better represented through roleplay. Even IRL, a lot of (if not most) of the symptoms of many mental illnesses don’t mean that someone is any less Intelligent, Wise, or Charismatic.
There's also the fact that many of the things that are hallmarks of certain disorders don't match up with how D&D's ability scores work. People on the Autism Spectrum can be incredibly good at noticing visual changes (i.e. Perception), but not great to awful at reading emotions and body language (i.e. Insight). The only two mechanics you have to be bad or good at something in the base rule of 5e are Proficiency or an increase in a skill. There's no reason why being good with animals would have anything to do with following the tracks of another creature or hearing a twig snap in the woods.
You can't properly model certain parts of different conditions in D&D 5e, and any attempt to do so will end in spreading misconceptions or generalizations about the conditions, and likely end up offending people.
So, yes. I agree with you. Roleplay is key. If you want to play a character with ASD (I have multiple times), research the condition and choose how your character reacts to their environment based on this.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Just putting this out there as another system (aside form the aforementioend one) that offers some more customisation, If you were interested in adding those sort of mechanics you could take a look at Vampire the Masquarade which used a Merit and Flaws system to add extra bits to a character which had positive effects, they are broken down into Physical, Social, Mental and Supernatural and feature things such as: Acute Senses (reduced DC for checks using sight, smell or hearing) and Enchanting Voice (reduce DC for social/charisma checks) to Hard of Hearing (increased DC for hearing checks), Lame (your walking speed is -25%) and Soft Hearted (you have to make willpower/wisdom saves to enter into situation that may cause physical or emotional pain to someone).
So you could adapt those over pretty easily if you wanted that added touch of realism.
EDIT: should add that at character creation in Vampire you get a few points to buy the merits and the flaws are optional to gain extra points if you want them, none of them are compulsory in any way.
First I want to say how pleasantly I'm surprised at how productive and mutually respectful this thread has turned out to be.
Next I want to clarify what I meant when I mentioned both neurotypical and neurodiverse "outliers" represented with INT/WIS/CHR stats in either direction, I wasn't arguing for a mechanical solution to illustrate ASD identity, or any of the neurological, mental health, or diagnosable personality or behavior condition (which again, are all very very different things from a clinical and social standpoint). I can see how that may have been interpreted as advocacy for "make the condition affect the states" but that was not what I was intending.
What I meant was that, if the player wanted a character with a neurodiverse identity, they could use that as a way to interpret some stats and perform it as such in role playing. Yes a lot of intellectual and creative outliers in the world also were ASD or had other conditions diverging from the neurotypical. A lot of others were not. The identity could come into play as the back story behind stats, just as any background factor could.
Just putting this out there as another system (aside form the aforementioend one) that offers some more customisation, If you were interested in adding those sort of mechanics you could take a look at Vampire the Masquarade which used a Merit and Flaws system to add extra bits to a character which had positive effects, they are broken down into Physical, Social, Mental and Supernatural and feature things such as: Acute Senses (reduced DC for checks using sight, smell or hearing) and Enchanting Voice (reduce DC for social/charisma checks) to Hard of Hearing (increased DC for hearing checks), Lame (your walking speed is -25%) and Soft Hearted (you have to make willpower/wisdom saves to enter into situation that may cause physical or emotional pain to someone).
So you could adapt those over pretty easily if you wanted that added touch of realism.
EDIT: should add that at character creation in Vampire you get a few points to buy the merits and the flaws are optional to gain extra points if you want them, none of them are compulsory in any way.
There's a tradition in point buying games well prior to Vampire and the Storyteller system where "disadvantages" could be purchased or bought, giving the player additional points to create advantages in the character in other regards. I never really liked them, because they were easily abused where you'd have certain types of min max players creating characters basically buying into not just dual but multi diagnosis disorders that would create in reality an entirely non functional person so they could have game maxing stats in combat attributes or a particular skill set etc. I know White Wolf Games paid good lip service to diversity in its storyteller system, but when it came to what it called disadvantages it tended to err to problematic pre-existing tropes (hello, Malkavians).
I think broadly, the problem with addressing these spectrums and conditions mechanically is at the end of the day mechanics assign a positive or negative valuation to something (most games call these merits/flaws advantages/disadvantages, boons/curses etc.). I think those who can speak more from these identities IRL seem to rather not be so mechanically impacted in game play. With ASD communities in particular, my understanding is that a lot of the broader social goals to awareness and public education is not so much to perpetuate ASD as "atypical" but rather to broaden what is "typical" especially as ASD becomes more recognized in the human population. To that end it seems like the best handling comes down to "how you role play" rather than a factor in dice rolling.
I have "thoughts" on how Critical Role handles trauma triggers. I'm not entirely against a pro role playing game going that way, but I handle trauma differently in my game. But I think I'll let the thread breathe a bit more and see if it makes sense to introduce. I will say it seems to me Critical Role could make excellent use of some adaptation of the "drawing on bonds" system used in the most recent iterations of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green (the latter being a good reference since it deals with characters more accustomed or likely to encounter violence).
As an extremely ADD person, all of my characters are probably ADD (ADHD without the hyperactivity bit ;). However, I am really weird, because I can easily conectrate on things until I can't, and then I completely zone out. I don't know if there is a way to mechanically portray ADHD, but for roleplay just come up with thousands of extremely different ideas fr any given problem. That should do the trick...
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“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Alternatively, you could use the flaws / inspiration system. You can choose any flaws you like for your character. So you could take a difficulty interacting in social situations as a flaw and use that to gain inspiration. You can then spend the inspiration to get advantage on anything you think is appropriate.
Fascinating topic! As a player with both mental and physical disabilities, I have often wondered, "what if I made....a CHARACTER with some of the challenges that I face in life?" but....I would want to tweak that character's mechanics myself, and if Dungeons and Dragons made arrangements for such characters to be made in their mechanics, I don't think I'd be as comfortable as deciding to do it myself. I would also hate for neurotypical persons to make a disabled character as a "joke" because the mechanics offered that option, albeit with the best of intentions.
But, as far as how to do it? I would say, give your character traits you'd recognize as familiar to your own experience as a disabled person (or someone close to you who is disabled, if you want to play such a character in a mindful, respectful way--now that would be cool!). This may not come out in stat blocks, but adv/dis.adv in various checks to do with certain skills. Consider the land speed of a merperson, 10 ft, vs. their swim speed of 30; their physical differences come out in another area than "low charisma".
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I was going to say something similar but people get tired of me saying "Go play Fantasy HERO!"
It has just about every single bit of crunch that anybody could want in their fantasy RPG.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Oof. I would be extremely hesitant to add anything like Autism into a game.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
I'd be interested to see what you folks think of Critical Role's Liam O'Brien and his portrayal of PTSD with Caleb.
For those who don't know:
Caleb was made to kill his family through his mentor's mind altering magic. He ends up burning his own home down with them inside. Along with his time in a sanitarium, this develops into burning bodies being a trigger for his PTSD.
When Caleb ends up killing humanoids via fire damage, Liam rolls a wisdom save. Upon failure, he is stunned (if I remember correctly) for the remainder of the turn, which is how they portray his dissociation episodes. From what I gather, this was Matt Mercer's idea, but Liam doesn't seem to resist the ruling. I believe that Matt really goes the distance to make sure that he approaches delicate topics with care, but has also been criticized for certain portrayals. Liam also does a decent job just role-playing his PTSD when it comes up in story, so it's not like this is purely mechanical.
With all that said, would this be going too far for you all? And expand if you feel comfortable doing so.
PS: Thank you guys for keeping it civil.
Firstly, Spoilers my dude. Like, huge important spoilers.
Second, All of critical role are professional actors with an audience. That puts them on a very different level from the average player. Making comparisons to them is not fair for a player or a DM
Third, Caleb hasn't had to do that in a long time, and it didn't often come up in the game in general. Taliesin had something similar with Percy, where Percy was deathly afraid of heights and had to role wis save on whenever he would be high up and dangerous. It was something that was homebrewed and wanted by the players.
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"Play the game however you want to play the game. After all, your fun doesn't threaten my fun."
I have zero problem with it. But then, I am not easily offended by such things so... I am probably not the right person to judge it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
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That's fair. I figured this is an episode 2x07 thing, so it was out there by now, but I've spoiler tagged. Also, I do understand that Critical Role is not the same as every game, but it is still a game of D&D, and thus still allowed to be scrutinized, imo.
As someone who suffers from some PTSD, with friends who have it worse than I do, I have no problem with it. If we cannot discuss in our art subjects such as mental illness in a respectful way, that would be more offensive to me.
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Okay. I am also on the Autism Spectrum, but I agree with those above stating that there should be no mechanics for being on the Spectrum. That is completely a roleplaying element to your character, just like their gender, sexuality, and other characteristics of them.
Though the traits you list are very normal in the general autistic community, there are always outliers. ASD is a spectrum, with many different individual factors that certain people can be more or less adept or likely to do (social interaction, meltdowns and shutdowns, stimming, etc). If you were to make mechanics for being on the Spectrum, you would change the condition from being a broad spectrum to a one-type fits all template. This is not how Autism, ADHD, OCD, and many other mental conditions/disorders work. They are all diverse, and to define that in game would be poorly executed and most likely offensive.
I hope this clears some things up. I don't mean to offend, just explain my point of view.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
There's also the fact that many of the things that are hallmarks of certain disorders don't match up with how D&D's ability scores work. People on the Autism Spectrum can be incredibly good at noticing visual changes (i.e. Perception), but not great to awful at reading emotions and body language (i.e. Insight). The only two mechanics you have to be bad or good at something in the base rule of 5e are Proficiency or an increase in a skill. There's no reason why being good with animals would have anything to do with following the tracks of another creature or hearing a twig snap in the woods.
You can't properly model certain parts of different conditions in D&D 5e, and any attempt to do so will end in spreading misconceptions or generalizations about the conditions, and likely end up offending people.
So, yes. I agree with you. Roleplay is key. If you want to play a character with ASD (I have multiple times), research the condition and choose how your character reacts to their environment based on this.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
There's also advantage and disadvantage.
Yeah, but you don't choose to have advantage in skills upon character creation unless there's a very specific race/class feature that gives you that.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Just putting this out there as another system (aside form the aforementioend one) that offers some more customisation, If you were interested in adding those sort of mechanics you could take a look at Vampire the Masquarade which used a Merit and Flaws system to add extra bits to a character which had positive effects, they are broken down into Physical, Social, Mental and Supernatural and feature things such as: Acute Senses (reduced DC for checks using sight, smell or hearing) and Enchanting Voice (reduce DC for social/charisma checks) to Hard of Hearing (increased DC for hearing checks), Lame (your walking speed is -25%) and Soft Hearted (you have to make willpower/wisdom saves to enter into situation that may cause physical or emotional pain to someone).
So you could adapt those over pretty easily if you wanted that added touch of realism.
EDIT: should add that at character creation in Vampire you get a few points to buy the merits and the flaws are optional to gain extra points if you want them, none of them are compulsory in any way.
It would be fairly easy to add a homebrew feat giving some mechanical advantages and disadvantages to certain skills. If that's what you wanted to do.
See my post above for why this wouldn't be accurate to those conditions.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
First I want to say how pleasantly I'm surprised at how productive and mutually respectful this thread has turned out to be.
Next I want to clarify what I meant when I mentioned both neurotypical and neurodiverse "outliers" represented with INT/WIS/CHR stats in either direction, I wasn't arguing for a mechanical solution to illustrate ASD identity, or any of the neurological, mental health, or diagnosable personality or behavior condition (which again, are all very very different things from a clinical and social standpoint). I can see how that may have been interpreted as advocacy for "make the condition affect the states" but that was not what I was intending.
What I meant was that, if the player wanted a character with a neurodiverse identity, they could use that as a way to interpret some stats and perform it as such in role playing. Yes a lot of intellectual and creative outliers in the world also were ASD or had other conditions diverging from the neurotypical. A lot of others were not. The identity could come into play as the back story behind stats, just as any background factor could.
There's a tradition in point buying games well prior to Vampire and the Storyteller system where "disadvantages" could be purchased or bought, giving the player additional points to create advantages in the character in other regards. I never really liked them, because they were easily abused where you'd have certain types of min max players creating characters basically buying into not just dual but multi diagnosis disorders that would create in reality an entirely non functional person so they could have game maxing stats in combat attributes or a particular skill set etc. I know White Wolf Games paid good lip service to diversity in its storyteller system, but when it came to what it called disadvantages it tended to err to problematic pre-existing tropes (hello, Malkavians).
I think broadly, the problem with addressing these spectrums and conditions mechanically is at the end of the day mechanics assign a positive or negative valuation to something (most games call these merits/flaws advantages/disadvantages, boons/curses etc.). I think those who can speak more from these identities IRL seem to rather not be so mechanically impacted in game play. With ASD communities in particular, my understanding is that a lot of the broader social goals to awareness and public education is not so much to perpetuate ASD as "atypical" but rather to broaden what is "typical" especially as ASD becomes more recognized in the human population. To that end it seems like the best handling comes down to "how you role play" rather than a factor in dice rolling.
I have "thoughts" on how Critical Role handles trauma triggers. I'm not entirely against a pro role playing game going that way, but I handle trauma differently in my game. But I think I'll let the thread breathe a bit more and see if it makes sense to introduce. I will say it seems to me Critical Role could make excellent use of some adaptation of the "drawing on bonds" system used in the most recent iterations of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green (the latter being a good reference since it deals with characters more accustomed or likely to encounter violence).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
MidnightPlat, I think you mean ASD, not ADS. ASD stands for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
As an extremely ADD person, all of my characters are probably ADD (ADHD without the hyperactivity bit ;). However, I am really weird, because I can easily conectrate on things until I can't, and then I completely zone out. I don't know if there is a way to mechanically portray ADHD, but for roleplay just come up with thousands of extremely different ideas fr any given problem. That should do the trick...
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Reply, thanks, and fixing. It's funny I started using the correct acronym but switched to ADS halfway through. I blame my glasses today.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Alternatively, you could use the flaws / inspiration system. You can choose any flaws you like for your character. So you could take a difficulty interacting in social situations as a flaw and use that to gain inspiration. You can then spend the inspiration to get advantage on anything you think is appropriate.
Fascinating topic! As a player with both mental and physical disabilities, I have often wondered, "what if I made....a CHARACTER with some of the challenges that I face in life?" but....I would want to tweak that character's mechanics myself, and if Dungeons and Dragons made arrangements for such characters to be made in their mechanics, I don't think I'd be as comfortable as deciding to do it myself. I would also hate for neurotypical persons to make a disabled character as a "joke" because the mechanics offered that option, albeit with the best of intentions.
But, as far as how to do it? I would say, give your character traits you'd recognize as familiar to your own experience as a disabled person (or someone close to you who is disabled, if you want to play such a character in a mindful, respectful way--now that would be cool!). This may not come out in stat blocks, but adv/dis.adv in various checks to do with certain skills. Consider the land speed of a merperson, 10 ft, vs. their swim speed of 30; their physical differences come out in another area than "low charisma".
💙🤍~*Ravenclaw*~ 🔮