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Comment by hellepardo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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No 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.

Your list is excellent, but wanted to throw one more out there: Cyberpunk 2020.

Definitely a great game too. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of games I have omitted. There's a lot out there.

I’d probably say thousands of games we both omitted, but it wasn’t my intent to list them all and very likely not yours either.

Yeah, I have no intent to try to list them all. It's better to point to RPGgeek.com[0], which lists nearly 10,000 RPGs. (Though that's counting different editions of the same game as separate games.)

[0] https://rpggeek.com/browse/rpg

Ah, sorry, you are absolutely right. When I said 'no real other option' I was missing the numerous other RPGs that are out there. I did not mean to denigrate them by omission. I meant more that we were forced away from computer games.

How about MUDs? There are a lot of choices with screen reader support these days.

Nice to see mention of Traveller, I thought I was the only person that even knows about it anymore. I think I spent more time designing ships than actually playing it, but I have fond memories of both Traveller and Car Wars (and still have the sets along with my AD&D books and modules).

Traveller definitely still exists, but I have no idea how many editions there are these days. I'm not sure anyone knows.

What non-D&D game would you suggest to someone who enjoys D&D but would like to explore other systems?

I’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.

There 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?

> If you want to get further away from D&D, well, what direction do you want?

SF or Cyberpunk

Shadowrun is the canonical cyberpunk RPG.

Starfinder is, I believe, Pathfinder in space.

GURPS is setting-agnostic.

GURPS works better in some eras trying to do modern you have dozens of skill's to keep track of.

>Shadowrun is the canonical cyberpunk RPG.

Aside from the dated and weird essentialization of Native American cultures, Shadowrun's setting is really good and fun.

Unfortunately it's hard to run a game with a decent narrative flow just because the combat system is so complicated. My group decided to shame people out of playing mages or riggers just because we didn't want to have to deal with simultaneously doing combat in cyberspace and the astral plane at once. It really puts a damper on having a fun game that flows. I wouldn't recommend it for someone new to pen&paper RPGs.

On the other hand, the tedium of combat gave us a strong incentive to talk our way out of problems instead of going the murder-hobo route.

In addition to the three listed above, Alternity (if it's still in print?) is a reasonable SF system.

Oops, not in print since 2000... yep.

If you want pure cyberpunk, take a look at R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020.

If you like fantasy mixed in with your cyberpunk, Shadowrun is the gold standard. A word of warning: Shadowrun has a rather heavy, complex system, because it does absolutely everything. But I like it a lot.

Generic systems like GURPS and Savage Worlds can do cyberpunk of course, although I don't think GURPS Cyberpunk has been updated to the 4th edition. No doubt something exists for Savage Worlds, but I have no idea what.

There are other cyberpunk systems that I know very little about, but others are enthusiastic about, including Eclipse Phase (seems to include space and transhumanism, so it's probably not pure cyberpunk, but it might suit your taste), or Ex Machina.

Sprawl seems to be the Apocalypse World/Dungeon World adaptation for cyberpunk.

SF is much broader. The original SF RPG is of course Traveller, which is somewhat retro; the game predates computers and doesn't have many (any?) robots either. But if you want to travel around in a space ship, this is great.

Stars Without Number is an SF game that translates ideas from the OSR movement to the SciFi setting.

There are of course several different Star Wars games, including the original d6-based game by West End Games (recently republished by Fantasy Flight Games), the d20 (D&D-like) Saga Edition, and the Edge of the Empire-style games by Fantasy Flight.

GURPS is great at SciFi, and I'm sure Savage Worlds does it too.

Diaspora is a small but really cool hard SF game based on the Fate system. I love how you first generate the worlds together and then generate the party together. In space combat, dumping heat is a major concern.

Paranoia is weird dystopian funny SF. The Computer is your friend.

Starfinder is the SF version of Pathfinder. I assume the system is therefore D&D-related, but I honestly don't know.

Dark Heresy takes place in the Warhammer 40K universe.

But there are dozens if not hundreds of others.

R Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 is a nice retro (think William Gibson Neuromancer) game.

https://talsorianstore.com/collections/cyberpunk

But if I were to recommend a single (set of) games, it would be the classic World of Darkness games, like Mage: the Ascension 20th anniversary Ed:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/149562

For a game with some interesting mechanics, you might enjoy Underground:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/2873

And for something... Different, we've had a lot of fun with Microscope:

http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

If you like the basic 'fantasy' setting of D&D, but want a game with a more gritty and 'low' fantasy feel I very can highly recommend trying to find a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying.

If you want a game which is more realistic and almost entirely 'straight' historic medieval Europe, but where magic, as they believed in it at the time, is real, go check out Ars Magica. Ars Magica is especially recommended if you like playing mages and want a game with one of the most fleshed out and 'realistic' magic system ever seen in a role playing game.

Losing one's imagination seems more common than losing one's sight. :(

This comment inspires me to work on my art.

That sounds like a good thing to me. It would be unfortunate if going blind was more common

The 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.

It is still undoubtably useful, even if thanks to technology we can manage without.

Can 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.

There’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!

Fortunately there are plenty of cookie-cutter computer games available for people with impaired imagination.

Reading 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.

I 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.

These days, the number of non-pay MUDs with an average of 100+ people on them at a time can be counted on two hands.

How about paid ones?

http://astaria.net/wm_client/webclient.php is still going, but I think it has only a few dozen on average.

I 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.

That 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.

Thanks.

I’m especially interested in creating a 3D soundscape, maybe something similar to what is described here: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131900/playing_by_ear... but not necessarily instead of text, but rather to augment it. Based on what you’re saying, it would probably work well enough: have separate volume controls for music, ambient sound and sound effects (as most games have already anyway — many games have a voice volume too, but I guess voice should be left wholly up to the screen reader and it should control the volume/speed).

Using a browser sounds like a good idea. Definitely wouldn’t want to implement screen reading capability yourself!

Shades (a very early MUD) used to have a Deaf/Blind Player and she used to come to eyeballs with her Guide Dog.

Indra Shah (booker prize shortlist author) wrote a book called Cyber Gypsies that covers this late 70's online community

I 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.

It'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.

Can 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_Conn...

[2] https://dev.minetest.net/Main_Page

A 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...

Maybe 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.

The game relies heavily on visual queues for efficient puzzle-solving, so I don't think its very suited.

I 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.

Unfortunately 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.

It 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.

Tau Station was built to be entirely accessible to blind users: https://blog.taustation.space/blog/making-tau-station-an-acc....

I was wondering - do you tell your blind friend what he/she rolls or how do you deal with dice?

Tactile dice don't seem too difficult a thing to make: 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.

If 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.

I 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.

My 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

Sorry to hear about your friend's misfortune.

Are they using their disability during gameplay, and/or in-character?

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