Episode: 3206
Title: HPR3206: Dungeons and Dragons for the blind
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3206/hpr3206.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:48:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3206 for Monday, 16 November 2020. Today's show is entitled
Dungeons & Dragons for the Blind,
and is part of the series' Tabletop Gaming. It is hosted by Clartu
and is about 59 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
I discuss some easy workarounds to make Tabletop RPGs easy for both
sighted and non-sighted players.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Everybody, this is Clartu, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio. In this episode I want to address an email
that was made to the Hacker Public Radio mailing list, which by the way, if you're not on,
you should join or you should think about joining. It's a really good mailing list.
There's not a whole lot of traffic there, but the traffic that does appear there
tend to really, really enjoy. Anyway, there was an email sent to this list
about playing and specifically running D&D Dungeons & Dragons as a blind player,
a player without vision. I thought this was an intriguing email
because in fact, I play Dungeons & Dragons with a blind player.
Now, I do not, I have not run a game without vision myself,
but I have run games without a whole lot of materials in front of me.
I've done this sort of just off the cuff, so I do know a little bit about running it
without having reference material in front of you within your vision,
or we could extrapolate that and say, well, okay, let's just say there's no vision there at all.
So I know a little bit something about that, and I know quite a lot about
sort of running it with a blind player. Keeping it in mind that I am not without vision,
you obviously need to take this sort of with a grain of salt,
but I do hope that it can be inspiring and or thought provoking for someone
who's listening to this, who may be interested in playing Dungeons & Dragons,
but feels that for whatever reason they are at a disadvantage,
because the central theme of this episode is you can do it anyway.
And that's not to minimize obviously the disadvantage that you are at,
if you feel that you are disadvantaged in some way.
I'm just saying Dungeons & Dragons is a highly, highly flexible system,
and there is a universal workaround to anything that may impede you from playing Dungeons & Dragons
that I may as well just say up front, and that is, and this is going to sound harsh and cheeky,
but don't play D&D.
So what I actually mean by that is Dungeons & Dragons is a very specific thing.
It's a role-playing game, it's a tabletop role-playing game, generically,
but very specifically it is a branded product by a company that owns Dungeons & Dragons.
And what that entails is a set of ideas and stories and lore that belongs to its respective creators.
So for instance, if you think about Tolkien and you think about the Hobbits or Lord of the Rings,
that fantasy world belongs to Tolkien or his estate.
Well Dungeons & Dragons also has a world, and the world is a specific planet or actually a number of planets,
and those planets are populated by specific kinds of people and certain kinds of monsters.
Some of those monsters are very generic and well known, some are very, very customized exactly to that world by the company that has created them.
So if you want to quote unquote play D&D, you kind of have to ask yourself what you're really wanting to play.
And there are two, I think, well there are three valid answers to this.
One is you want to play a tabletop RPG, that's one answer.
The second answer might be, well I want to play a tabletop RPG with a certain set of rules dictating what I can and cannot do during the game.
That's a potential second answer, and then the third answer that I can think of is, well I want to play a tabletop RPG in a specific world, in a specific game setting.
Okay, so of those three answers, only one of them involves vision, and even then only tangentially.
It's that second answer, that middle answer where you want to play with a certain set of rules.
And I say that that involves vision tangentially because one of the easiest ways people find to consume or rather ingest those rules, to learn those rules is by reading about them with sight.
So printed words on paper.
The other two don't actually necessarily need vision at all.
So the first one, you can play any RPG, there are rules sets out there for tabletop RPGs that literally fit the rules are so non-complex that they fit on one side of a paper.
There are games defined by essentially four rules or two rules or something like that.
We could even design one ourselves really quickly, like really fast.
We could say, okay, well here's the rules to our game, you come up with a couple of attributes like strength, agility, and magic usage.
So strength would be for brute force and for hitting things and pushing doors open and stuff like that.
Agility would be for dodging and rolling and summer salting and acrobatics and stuff like that and magic use would be for magic use.
You roll to assign a value to those traits, to those abilities.
Whenever you want to do something in the game world, you roll die.
You roll some set of die and if you roll underneath the number that you've chosen, then you are successful.
If you roll over the number that you've chosen, then you fail.
The higher that number gets as you level up, the more likely it is you are to succeed.
That's it. That's our rules. There you go, you're done.
And as you play, you can develop those rules further.
Like, well what happens when someone tries to hit you with a sword?
Off the top of my head, we could say, okay, well, then you roll your agility.
And if you get higher agility, then they got when they rolled to hit you, then you succeed at dodging the sword.
Something like that.
So you can make this stuff up in a way that it is not complex, that it requires no reading and you're done.
So that's that problem solved for everyone.
You got three things you can anyone can remember three numbers for their for their different attributes.
And now you're often playing a role playing game.
So the third one is, well, I really, I like the D&D world.
Maybe you grew up as I did reading dragon lands and forgotten realms novels.
Maybe those are part of your fantasy that that's part of your fantasy linguistics.
That's just part of the language of fantasy for you are is dragon lands and forgotten realms.
That's you know the characters, you know the worlds, you know the traditions, you know the gods, you know the different kinds of elves that exist in that world.
And all those other things.
If that is true for you and you want to play in those worlds, well, good news.
You don't have to, you don't have to buy really anything for that.
I mean, you might if you want to get really, if you're not familiar with it and you want to get familiar with it.
But a lot of those books, like those, the books that I've just mentioned, those have commercial audio books available.
And you can listen to those and learn about the worlds.
And then when you go to play your role playing game, the one that we just invented just now, then you can just set your game in those worlds.
It doesn't require any purchase. I mean, it does if you need to, if you're wanting to reference details about those worlds.
But generally speaking, if you have an idea for, if part of your goal is to play in a world that you grew up in anyway, then you can, you know there's nothing about that lore that requires you to reference any kind of materials.
You can just, you can play in that world according to what you already know of it or what you have read in the books of whoever, you know Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss or R.A. Salvatore or Ed Greenwood or whatever.
So those are the two sort of non D&D solutions to how do I play D&D through whatever limitation there might be in terms of vision and possibly even finances, that sort of thing.
Okay, so the middle one, the one that wasn't solved by that is when you want to play a very specific rule set.
And I think that that is a significant one because that is a great appeal of D&D.
I mean, I think that the lore is a huge appeal of D&D, but I think that that rule set that's very specific kind of way of playing an RPG is a big draw for D&D.
It's a very addictive system, it's a very elegant system. So let's talk about how this can be done by a blind player, whether that player is playing as a player character or is playing as the dungeon master.
So first of all, we might ask the question, how do you learn the rules as a blind player?
Well, the good news is that there are audiobook versions of the rules available.
If you are in the United States of America, then you have access to the Library of Congress, whether you realize it or not, I do believe that you have to sort of register or something for access to their audiobook program as a blind citizen.
But they will send you or maybe you download at this point, I'm not really sure. There is a way to get audiobooks from the Library of Congress and Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons has confirmed recently that they have made that available to the Library of Congress.
So it does exist, you can get the books in audio form. Now if you're not in the US, then you do not have access to that probably, but that's okay. There is another option.
And that option I cannot find anymore online. I found it and then I downloaded the resource and then forgot completely what website it was.
I've searched and I've searched in preparation for this very episode, cannot find it. Long story short, I'll put a link in the show notes to someone out there on the internet who has happened to download the same assets, converted them to Ogg and Opus, and then uploaded them back to a place on the internet.
I don't know who this person who did this was and I'm disavowing knowledge of that because I'm not really sure now that I can't find the site, I can't guarantee that this is entirely approved by Wizards of the Coast.
I'm assuming, however, that if you are a blind user player and you want to hear the rules, then this is probably a good option for you.
And if you feel like you still owe Wizards of the Coast money for the rule set, then you are by all means welcome to go and pay them for the book.
All I know is that online, I found someone found these audio files and uploaded them to a location on the internet and you can go get them.
I don't know who that person was, but boy, I'm glad they did it.
So I will put a link in the show notes to those audio versions.
From what I understand, they do a pretty good job of translating tables and things like that.
There's a lot of tables and dungeons and dragons, not as much anymore as there used to be, but there still are quite a few important tables.
From what I understand, the audio versions try to translate that in a useful way.
I can't confirm. I've already know the rules, so it's a little bit difficult to sort of try to imagine how they're sounding, you know, how they would sound if you had not read them first.
So if you feel like the information in the player's handbook and the main rules of dungeons and dragons are a little bit difficult to parse in the form of just one big audio file, which I can imagine it would be.
Just finding the thing quickly would be difficult potentially.
There is a system reference document published by Wizards of the Coast.
These are the free basic rules of dungeons and dragons licensed under the open gaming license.
And I have taken that system reference document.
I've extracted the text from it and placed it into a text file.
I discussed this in a previous hacker public radio episode that I did with McNally.
We chatted about this a little bit in relation to the open gaming license.
So I've got the system reference document in a text format, which I believe would be possibly easier to get a screen reader to sort of cooperate with compared to a PDF.
Although I could be wrong about that, but I find the plain text easier to work with either way.
And I have, as part of my work, converting that PDF to plain text, I've translated all of the tables to bullet lists.
So for instance, when you want to find out at what level your Bard gets to choose a different Bard College, you could look up the Bard Class definition and then look on the bullet list and discover just level by level what kind of features that Bard gets.
As written, it's in a table, which I believe would be difficult to parse potentially or at least to find quickly in an audio file.
So if you think that would be useful, I have published that online in a Git repository.
So you can take a look at that and download it and parse through that.
I will again have the link to that in the show notes.
And then finally, the other option for learning the rules that I can think of would be to play the game frequently as a player, as a PC, as a player character rather than dungeon master.
By playing, I find you can probably learn a good 75% of the rules to be honest and probably 95% of the rules that actually come up in a typical game.
It doesn't really take reading like the dungeon master's guide or even the player's handbook to understand the rules that actually matter.
I'm not going to say there aren't corner cases and times where a very specific rule might come up during a game that's never come up before, and you'd need to reference that.
But in practice, and this is with or without sight, in practice, I find that when that occurs, you stop and you do one of two things.
You either look it up real quick in the handbook, in the player's handbook, or actually three things.
You look it up or you have a player look it up because you're busy running the game.
Or you all agree to not look it up and just move on with the game because looking up rules is not really fun.
It's not necessarily like part of the game. I mean, it is for some people, but generally speaking, you just kind of want to get the game play in during that time.
And then you can just agree that, okay, well, our solution for today is to do it this way.
And then in the next session, by the time we play again, I will have looked that up myself, or one of you players will have looked it up.
We'll do a little report presentation at the beginning of the next game, and then we'll all know for the future.
And frankly, all three of those solutions are things that happen all the time in real life, whether you have vision or no vision.
That sort of thing happens, you look up, everyone learns together, and then you move on.
And then finally, and this one I've gotten confirmed very recently from the person who posted the email to the list, D&D Beyond.
It's a website. I believe it's either partnered with, or maybe it's an outsourced project of wizards of the coast themselves, the owners of Dungeons and Dragons.
D&D Beyond is a kind of interactive digital character sheet for Dungeons and Dragons.
And along with that, it's really sort of a delivery content platform, digital content delivery platform.
There you go, because you get your character sheet, but in order to add stuff to your character sheet, of course, you need books, you need source books.
And traditionally, you would purchase those as hardback books from the bookstore.
On D&D Beyond, it's all digitized, so you purchase the content from D&D Beyond, and that content lives there in D&D Beyond.
It's not a PDF, it is digital content that you have access to now through the site.
Now they give you the basic options that are available anyway through the system reference document.
For juicier stuff, though, you have to buy into it.
You only have to buy in if you want to, because there's plenty there to work with without purchasing anything.
And the site is accessible to low vision and sightless users.
That has been confirmed by someone who over the internet has claimed to be blind, so give that a go if you want to try it.
D&D Beyond and the books, that applies for both player characters and dungeon masters, like both types of players benefit from what I've just talked about.
I think for players specifically, I'm going to say that you do need a character sheet.
You need some way to track sort of the status of your character and the progress of your character.
And D&D Beyond is one option, apparently.
But another option is to simply forgo the sort of official tool set and just use whatever accessible computer interface you are currently comfortable with and kind of roll your own character sheet.
By which I mean, simply a character sheet, we typically think of them as a very specifically designed thing and it's got to lay out to it.
And that's very useful for people with vision because muscle memory and things like that.
But if you don't have that, then you can just list, you can just have a line delimited, a new line delimited list of all the different attributes and skills and features of your character.
You can use keywords so that you can search for them quickly and so on.
And it doesn't really have to be in any kind of special format or it doesn't and it doesn't have to be laid out in any special way.
So it doesn't need to be anything fancy. It could be a plain text file. If that's what works best for you, that would be fine.
And you can keep that editable and searchable and accessible.
Okay, so that's for player characters for dungeon masters.
The I guess the closest analogy to that would be NPC and monster stats.
Now, I'll be honest, I don't really do NPC stats usually myself because, I mean, not that often because generally players are fighting monsters, not other people.
That's not always true. And I guess it really does depend on your game.
But for the purpose of this, I'm just going to assume that when I say NPC, I'm also talking about a monster.
So whether that NPC is a human or an actual monster, either way, it's something that someone is going into combat with.
Now, if you need NPC stats for some other reason, for social interaction and such, then you can just play that.
You can treat that NPC essentially as a player character. Just do what I just said for player characters.
List their stats in a text file or whatever format is best for you and most accessible for you.
For monsters, no, those are usually stated out for you in a monster manual or a bestie area of some sort.
And that can be difficult for the same reason that rules are difficult to process without vision because usually the model is that you grab the book and you flip it open to the page that you want and you read the stats and the abilities of the monster, what kind of attacks they have, how many attacks they have.
And so on. A couple of methods that I can think of for that. First of all, again, D&D Beyond. Apparently it's accessible and it has a lot of monster stats on it.
So you could look up the monster there and learn all about it. Maybe take some notes for yourself. If you're, if you want, you know, if you want to have like a little dungeon master notebook of sorts, take some notes in that accessible program of yours, whatever it is, I'm imagining it would be just a text editor with a good text to speech interface.
Write down the key stats in there and you're good to go. Now you've got your monster, you know, the monsters for that session.
The second way I could think to manage this is to simply have a monster manual available to your players and when a monster is needed, have a player look up the stats for you and tell you what those are as needed.
But with some people, there is this illusion that players are not familiar with the monsters that they're about to fight.
And there's a kind of, there's this anti-metagame reason for that sort of this in-world justification of, well, if this person is a brand new adventurer, a level one fighter or rogue or whatever, then they're out in the wilderness and they've come across this horrible beast, they shouldn't know how strong that beast is.
They shouldn't know whether the beast is really, really powerful and has poisonous breath or whether it's a really weak, not very scary monster.
But it happens to be immune to fire and that sort of thing. So they want the monsters to be sort of a surprise to the players. But in practice, people are by varying degrees already familiar with what you're throwing at them.
Whether they know the specifics of Dungeons & Dragons because they've memorized the monster manual, there are players who sort of do that because they love to read and they have a great memory, not me, but they do exist or maybe they've grown up with D&D.
And so whether they're thinking about it or not, they just happen to know that if they run into a red dragon, that that is going to have a fire breath.
Or when they run into a mind flair, they're going to have a psionic mind blast. And so on. It's the same way that we all just kind of generally know, droids speak in series of beeps and blips and boops and wookies speak in growls and grunts.
It's just common knowledge. And I think there's an argument that if your players happen to be familiar enough with the D&D world to know that sort of detail, then so might their characters.
Whether that PC heard stories of this strange beast through legend and lore, or whether they've gotten field reports from other adventurers, maybe it's not such a surprise when they encounter that monster.
And then finally, you can just wing it. And this one admittedly takes a little bit of experience. And again, I think you get that experience through playing and through running games with friends, but probably through playing mostly because you eventually you'll get an idea of what a fair fight looks like, what a challenging but fair fight looks like.
And it's not unheard of to simply make up your own monster stats. You'd have to be kind of be careful with this because there is a risk of sort of having something in mind that's a little bit too fuzzy.
And then just kind of saying, okay, well, the monster is dead at whatever point it happens to be that you get bored with the combat.
And that's a difficult thing to recognize because sometimes when you're bored of the combat, that doesn't mean the players are bored of the combat.
Or it may mean that the players were getting bored with combat, but had you taken just one more turn, suddenly the tides would have turned, and your monster is now winning the battle instead of losing the battle and so on.
So I feel like this one would take a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge, intimate knowledge of how the game is supposed to play and feel.
But it is totally possible. You could just make up your own monster stats and not reference pre-written monster stats at all.
To some degree, any dungeon master has already done this. I mean, maybe they haven't invented a monster completely from scratch, but they've definitely taken a monster and had to modify it for an adventure.
And certainly the adventures themselves do that. You'll find custom monsters in a lot of adventures. I almost want to say most adventures will have custom monsters.
And they might be variants of an established monster, but for the same reason that I was just describing, people are generally familiar with monsters a lot of times.
They'll do a little twist on that monster so that the players are surprised by what that monster is like. They weren't expecting that monster to have this ability because from their memory, they've never seen a monster with that particular ability before. That's new to them.
So you can either insert special abilities at will after your player has read a monster stat back to you out of the monster manual or you can just roll with it all the time and just invent monsters off the top of your head.
And they can be variations of what you may already know from traditional D&D or they can be completely brand new monsters that you're making up or that you're basing off of local legends and that sort of thing.
This brings up, I think, the next natural question, which would be, well, what about those adventures? I often have said, I think, here on Hacker Public Radio, I consider adventure modules in D&D to be the board to the D&D game.
The books that you buy are the rules of D&D, but they're literally just the rules. They don't actually have the game part in them or the content that you fill up a game night with.
So you have to come up with an adventure. I think traditionally that was done by designing a dungeon and your players go into the dungeon and they find stuff and they fight monsters and maybe even eventually a dragon.
Hence the name Dungeons and Dragons. But that does take work. You have to design the dungeon. You have to come up with, you have to populate the dungeon and kind of make it into a thing.
So wizards of the coast and other companies publish adventures for you to follow along as you play. That way you don't have to do as much thinking.
I quite like them. They make it pretty easy to run a game. That said, I have and many people do run games without any kind of written material in front of them whatsoever.
And I kind of mean two different things by that. One is literally making it up as you go along. I've done that at gaming conventions. It's not a problem. I've done that for friends. It's totally doable. You simply kind of keep track of where the players are, what they're going into and what they find there.
And they progress through this scenario. It really is quite simple. And they tend to, you know, the game kind of tends to design itself after a while.
Once you put people into an imaginary situation, you present one small problem and that problem tends to compound upon itself the more they try to get around it.
The game more or less just it creates itself through social dynamics. So that is not difficult. It could be difficult for a long-term game though.
I mean, at some point you're single sitting kind of scenarios start to wear thin and you maybe want a longer story that's a little bit more drawn out.
In that case, again, you can create these yourself because ultimately in any dungeon master will tell you this. Any module that you buy off the shelf, any adventure module that you buy off the shelf.
People don't adhere to that module. You can open it. You can read it through. You know what the players are meant to do.
But ultimately the players aren't meant to do anything. They're just meant to be presented with a problem as presented in the adventure. And then it's their job to solve it. That's Dungeons & Dragons.
So no matter what you purchase off the shelf and read, ultimately you're improvising the adventure in the end because you do just no way to predict what the players are going to do.
You can essentially do the same thing with audiobooks. There are fantastic ideas out there in lots and lots of different fiction. A lot of it is branded as D&D.
And in fact, many of the early adventure modules in existence were based on those stories.
So you have things like Tarte, what is it, Tentra, which was based on a novel in the Forgotten Realms. You have Dragon Lance. You have a bunch of Dragon Lance adventures that were based directly off of the books.
And you wouldn't exactly play through the books, but you would play in the same world as the book, as the characters of the book were doing their thing. You would do something maybe in parallel or in the same neck of the woods.
And it worked really well. I mean, it totally worked. And whether or not your players were familiar with that story, it didn't really affect their enjoyment of it.
Because again, you're not actually playing through the story that they've already read in the novel. You're just playing in that same space.
So if you go and read an R.A. Salvatore novel and decide that you would really, really like to throw your players into the Underdark and have them navigate the politics of the different houses of minzo barons or maybe you want them to go into the Underdark and discover a different region of the Underdark that wasn't covered in the book.
Instead, you're going off into the Lovecraft regions of Underground in the Dreamlands. Whatever you're using as inspiration, you can just go with that and build a story around it.
And the story doesn't, by any means, have to be original. It can be something that you're lifting right out of a book. And that's really ultimately all in Adventure Module provides is a bunch of different inspiration.
So I think in terms of running an actual game, like what do the players actually do during the game, that can largely be done without vision because largely at the end of the day, it is done without vision.
It's done without any foresight whatsoever on the DMs part because all they've done is they've maybe opened a book, maybe they've read the Adventure, they've read sort of the setting, and then the players go into it and everything changes.
So that's not a big deal that you can't sort of follow along a literal graphical flow chart while your players go through because it doesn't matter, no one can.
That does, however, require or demand that we sort of talk about how do you keep track of stuff because that is one thing that an Adventure Module does imply, and sometimes it physically provides it, is a map.
But the Adventure Modules at least have a built-in history and a built-in sort of a canonical truth. And if you're making stuff up as you go along, then it becomes your rather uninvealable job to remember every detail that happens during a game, such that when someone goes back to a place that they've already been, everything is in the same state.
So you have a reason for it not to be in the same state, which is entirely possible. There have been many a dungeon out there that when you go back to the beginning of the dungeon, you find everything different.
Why? Well, because there are denizens of the dungeon whose job it is to clean up after the adventurer, the foolish adventurers who have come through and surely died and get ready and reset all the traps for the next group of adventurers, that sort of thing.
So you could have a story element for that, but let's assume that not every game you play will have that story element.
So you need some kind of, some kind of canonical truth to your setting, and I think that's going to involve, again, two things.
One, notes. You can have your players take notes. You can also take notes. I think both are easy to do, and both are a great idea, honestly.
You can take notes in whatever accessible application you're using. I'm imagining Emax, but it could be anything. Just take your notes.
The way that I do it usually is I have a section for my players where I add any kind of significant thing that they have found or done under each player name.
I do this in org mode. I have a section for the different quests that they have been given, and the progress that that quest is on, whether it's still to do or whether it's done.
I add notes to things that they've discovered about the quest as needed, and then I have what I call a hot take.
And the hot take is the very last bullet point in my list every time, and the hot take is always exactly where the players left off at the end of the previous session, so that we can pick up right where we left off.
That's my dungeon master note format, and I just do that in an Emax document, and it works out pretty well for me.
I imagine you could do something similar, and Emax, of course, has Emax speak, so it could actually literally be Emax for you without vision, and I think that that would probably work, but you know your accessible applications a lot better than I do.
So that's note taking, and of course, if players are taking notes, then you can compare notes, and that's always useful, because sometimes they get something wrong, you get something wrong, you get to pick the better idea of the two. That's always nice.
There's also the map, though, and that's kind of the physical source of truth. I mean, if the players have entered a temple and gone through a four-year way, and then through a long haul, and then into a secret laboratory, then when they leave that laboratory, they had better be going through a long hallway that then ends up in the four-year again, or else they're going to wonder why this space has changed physically, since they first went into the laboratory.
You know, again, maybe that's a story element, maybe it is a changing room, maybe it may be the thing shifts around, or maybe going into laboratory triggered something that did actually physically change their setting.
But again, assuming that that's not something that's going to happen every story you play, at some point you're going to need a map.
Apparently, and this is something that I've heard, and I don't know for sure, but I think it was actually lost in Bronx that told me, apparently back in the day, when people used to play these role-playing games,
like Dungeons & Dragons, the map had to be maintained by the players.
So if you went into a dungeon, or into a maze, or into a forest, or into anywhere, and you didn't keep track of where you were and what you saw, then you just got lost.
Just like in real life, I mean, in real life, I do not have a map maker following me around to remind me of where I need to go next in order to get back to where I came from.
I just have to keep track of that in my own head, and if I'm in a new location, I sometimes have to keep track of it in some other way via a map, or some reference points, or something.
So players ought to be able to take that duty on by themselves, and I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation.
I think that that's actually quite fair.
It might be a little bit more bureaucracy than some players are up for, which I think is fair, but I feel that if you request it as a blind DM,
they would for someone in a group of players would be willing to take up on the cartography of the group.
I have had to do that in some old school games myself.
For that very reason, it's just you're gonna enter the space that you're not familiar with, and the dungeon master just says, hey, one of you had better take notes, or else you will get lost.
And I think that's a very fair way of playing.
Again, it's not necessarily what everyone is used to today, because a lot of people are used to now just having the map like on their computer screen, or having a map laid out on the table, and that's just part of the game.
But it kinda does, it really does depend on the style of game, and it depends on the direct request of the dungeon master, and it is not absolutely at all unheard of for a dungeon master to just lay down the law and say, look,
if you do not keep a map, then you will get lost, and you may starve, because you will be lost in the forest, and you will not know how to get back to civilization.
You've been warned, and then you move on, pretty easy.
So that's the kind of global setting world map.
There's also the question of a grid map, like a battle map, that a lot of people use when they go into combat.
And that is useful, because you might have a creature, or like a barbarian, at one place on the board, as it were, and you might have, I don't know, a dragon somewhere else.
And if you know that there's 45 feet between them, and you put this on a map on the table, and you draw, you know, it's a gridded map, so you have little squares.
And you know that each square, let's say, represents five feet, so you count the squares.
Okay, yep, 45 feet is between you and the dragon. What do you do?
Well, the player knows that they can move 30 feet in one turn.
They know that that will get them really close to the dragon, but dangerously close.
So maybe they won't do that. Maybe they'll instead move, let's say, 15 feet over this to the south, and then they'll try to circle around.
But they'll do it by keeping their distance until they can get kind of behind the dragon and try to attack from behind, or whatever.
But then the dragon, what the player didn't know, was that the dragon has a special ability to do a tail attack, and that has quite a long reach.
And so when they move within 30 feet, now they're subject to an attack, and so on.
The sort of these kind of the distance between characters and monsters starts to matter when you start to play very tactically, as you do in combat.
That is very useful, and I've seen, I mean, when I play in real life with friends out at the cafe that I play D&D at on Sundays, obviously not right now during a pandemic, but generally speaking, when I do that, yes, we have a map out.
The grid on it, I draw, it's a wet erase thing, so you draw the map, the walls, that sort of thing, and you just have your players, your miniatures on it.
People can move around. Everyone can see where everyone else is. It's very clear, and it does enable a certain tactical kind of play, which I quite enjoy.
And you can do that, obviously, on computers as well. There are applications out there that display a map, and you can move your token around.
Everything is about that though, well, a couple of things. Number one, it is very visual, so if you do not have vision, then that is difficult to use.
People could describe it to you, that sort of thing, that would work, I imagine, but really it's just not necessary at all, and honestly, the whole miniature side of Dungeons and Dragons, while really, really popular, is optional.
It is expressly optional in the rule book. You do not have to use physical miniatures to play the game. So what I do when I'm playing online is we just for sheer sake of efficiency, we do not use a map.
Well, I say efficiency, I guess I should just say simplicity, because it would be efficient to use a map, because then everyone knows where everything else is, and so there is a certain efficiency to that.
But it does require more technology, and when I'm playing online, really what I want is just our voices. Also, it doesn't hurt that I have really bad bandwidth right now here where I'm living, so having fewer things happening on the computer over the network that need to be synchronized the better.
We just, we play everything in our imagination, so when the players enter, when the player characters enter a room, and there's a dragon 45 feet away from them, then I tell them there's a dragon 45 feet away from you.
You're all clustered, sort of near the front entrance. The room is 100 feet wide and 100 feet deep. What do you do? Well, I'm going to move 30 feet forward. All right, well now you're 30 feet in front of the dragon.
Well, I'm going to move 15 feet south and then 15 feet west, trying to circle around this dragon. Okay, so now you've got, we've got our barbarian 15 feet away from the dragon right in front.
We've got our rogue, about 30, let's see, 15, 15, so it's 100, so I don't know, 30 or 40 feet away from the dragon. Brilliant. See how that works? You just, you keep repeating with the positions of each player, and you make all of the distances very, very fuzzy.
And when I say fuzzy, I mean, really fuzzy. And the reason for that is because when you're playing, when you're playing on the physical map, like everything is exactly where everything is, and all the numbers are, are exactly the numbers provided in the book. We're on the character sheet.
So if a fighter says I can move 30 feet in my turn, and a dwarf says I can move 25 feet on my turn, then those are the numbers that they can do. And if a spell says it can reach 60 feet distance, then that is exactly the distance that that spell can reach.
But in the real world, where there's physics and stuff, we all know that there's actually a lot of variation to that sort of thing. If you say, oh, I'm a really good runner, and I can make it so far in six seconds, then that's great. But if we timed you 10 times, that we would probably get a slightly different time each iteration.
And so when you're playing purely in the imagined space, you can just change those numbers, just assume that what we're really meaning are averages.
You can move generally speaking 30 feet in six seconds on average, sometimes sometimes you move more, sometimes you move less. And so when the dragon attacks, even though it was only able to attack, I don't know, 15 feet away with this particular attack.
Well, today it happened to do 25 feet because it just did that attack a little with a little bit of extra vigor, and so it still worked. And as long as everyone kind of recognizes and acknowledges that we're using approximate distances and that that's not really part of the game, the distances don't exactly matter.
Then that works out really, really well. It works, it works perfectly. It's not a big deal. Now, I honestly personally do prefer the sort of the tactical map.
That's kind of my preference. Like if I, if I could only play one way, then I would choose the in person way with a tabletop map. And if I could just beam my players into my game room that I'm imagining that I all of a sudden have, then that would be the way that we would do it. And that would be great.
But because that's not necessarily what's possible, I find that the imagined map works perfectly well as long as you just keep it fluid and just kind of instead of using sort of numbers, just use your close your far. And that's kind of it that those are the values.
It can get a little bit tricky because, you know, if you've got, I don't know, lots of monsters in a room and some of the monsters are fighting each other and some of the monsters are running after the players and the players are running to get away.
And you've got large spaces and part of the, part of the suspense there is, well, how, how quickly can you get from point A to point B because there's a monster on your tail and you need to get, you need to get out that door or whatever the scenario is.
It can get a little bit tricky, but as long as you just kind of describe it in, say, numbers of turns, then, then that has the same effect.
So you don't have to say, well, look, okay, so you can move 30 feet. All right, so, and there's 100 feet between you and the exit. All right, so let's just say, you know, don't worry about that.
Don't worry about the calculations. Just, just sort of get a feel for where the person is versus the point that they want to be. Well, you're about four movement turns away from where you want to be.
Now the player can make the choice. Well, do they want to spend their attack action to also move there by shortening the distance to just two turns or rather two, two rounds?
Or would they like to move once in an attack and then move, move, move, or, you know, they've got choices to make and it's still just as impactful as counting grid squares on a battle map.
So in other words, it works perfectly well to not see the layout of a combat and it's done all the time. I would argue that it was done as often as playing with the natures.
And maybe even more often, I'm not sure I can't imagine how I would ever find that data, but I mean, it is definitely a popular way of playing is to not use miniatures just as much as it is popular to play with miniatures.
Okay, so let's talk about the degree of combat a little bit more. There's always initiative and health point tracking and damage tracking and that sort of thing offload that on your players. Easy answer.
When all the monsters and players roll for initiative have your players track that for you. I wouldn't bother with that at all. You're going to have as it is with or without vision, a dungeon master has plenty to look up and reference and sort of information to juggle in their head without having also to keep track of whose turn it is next.
That is something that any one player can manage. It's fine. And frankly, it even helps players stay engaged because I mean, it is easy as a player to get distracted during a combat when it's not your turn.
Because sometimes, you know, you're a fighter, you step forward, you take a single swipe at the creature. Okay, your turn is done.
And now you have to wait six minutes while the wizard does whatever calculation they have to do in order to figure out what kind of DC spell DC they've got so that the monster can do a resisting saving throw against this thing and then what kind of saving throw is it anyway.
And does this spell require concentration and if it does am I already concentrating on something and so on. So while they're figuring that out, the fighter can absolutely be keeping track of health points and damage and initiative or whatever else.
So that's a definitely a player thing just as much as the the world map is a player is within the player domain. Okay, finally, what about dice rolls quintessential part of dungeons and dragons rolling dice.
That's that's the classic thing so much so that a 20 sided die is basically emblematic of dungeons and dragons specifically half the time. So how can you do that without vision?
Well, obviously as as as many people know already, there are dice rolling apps on the computer. You can even program them yourself in in in bash in Python in Lua, whatever.
So that's easy to do as long as you know of a good way to do that in an accessible fashion, you can you can you can probably use a digital dice roller.
You can also do something called pre rolling and pre rolling dungeons and dragon dungeon masters rather some dungeon masters do this that conferences for conferences because there's just a lot of times there's a lot of players and the time that it takes to roll a die after attack and damage and so on.
Sometimes it's just better spent by looking at a chart and that chart can just be a bunch of random numbers. So in other words, before the game, you you generate a bunch of random numbers with whatever application you would use for that. Again, it's easy enough to do with something like Python or bash generate a bunch of random numbers and you'd need to do a one chart for each for each die type that you would need.
You might need a D20 pre roll list, you might need it like a D6 pre roll, a D4, a D8, maybe maybe a D10 just depends on your monsters and then you don't know what action that you don't know when you're going to start on that chart.
It'll be up to the players. Whenever the players need a roll from the DM instead of rolling die, you just look at that chart. And again, that chart can be in some accessible application that you have that you already know and you just flip over to that tab or that that column or whatever.
And you just look at the next the next value in your in your list and that counts as a die roll. And the randomness, I mean, aside from having been randomly generated in the first place or pseudo randomly generated in the first place, that's there.
But then you've also just got the point of entry and how often players require a roll from the DM. And sometimes it's not the players who will require a roll from you. It's it's you who will require roll from you.
You know, you might attack with the with a monster or you might need to roll for the probability of some event happening and so on. So there's plenty of randomness there. The fact that dice isn't rolling is not that big of a deal.
But you know, the idea of dice rolling can often have a powerful kind of effect. And so if you if you really, really do cherish that, you can either have your players roll for you. That's a perfectly acceptable thing. I do that all the time.
And it's not a vision thing. It's just because a lot of times I'm sitting at the end of a table with three books open and a notepad for for frantically scribbling notes throughout combat or something. And I just can't be bothered to reach over grab a d20 reach to the center of the table where our dice tower is and throw the dice in there. And I saw I just tell players somebody roll me a d20.
Okay, cool that hit. Roll a d8 for your damage. Okay, that's how much damage you take. Oh, plus five because it's a monster and they do a lot more damage than you think they do. And that's it says easy as that. And it's I feel like it's a lot quicker. Usually I really kind of prefer prefer to do that half the time. I mean, I love to roll die myself. I really do. I love that that that tactile feeling getting the die and the sort of suspense of holding it over the dice tower.
What's going to happen and then rolling it that is fun. But sometimes it's just easier quicker to have the players do it. And frankly, sometimes it's a lot more fun for the players because they get to roll more die.
First of all, but they also get to roll die against each other or it feels like they're rolling against each other. So they they roll to it for a monster to attack their friend and oops, it hits how awkward is that. Well, it's not awkward. It's funny. And people get angry at each other in a fun kind of way.
So it introduces a weird kind of almost player versus player mechanic without it actually being player versus player. It's more just like how badly am I going to get screwed over by my friend when they roll the die for this monster to attack me. And it can be fun.
I mean, it depends on players, I guess, and what kind of sense of humor they have and so on kind of report they have. But I have found that it doesn't it doesn't hurt the game anyway.
And then yet another way is just simply like I say, get a dice tower. There there's lots of them out there. And what that does is it keeps your die from sort of going all over the place.
Keep that dice tower near near you or in a known location or have a player guide your hand to the top of the dice tower and then let the die roll and then have the players read the die back out to you.
Now, I I roll all of my die out in the open. I know that some dungeon masters prefer to conceal their their dice rolls behind like a dungeon master screen or something and they they do it ostensibly.
I guess to protect their players from sort of inconvenient death and that sort of thing. I do not do that. I it's a game. So the game, you know, you play the game. And so I roll the dice so that all the players can see the dice in real life.
I online we just roll privately and we just trust each other that we're telling the truth, not that big of a deal. But when I'm playing with my friends or at conventions, I always roll die out in front of people.
So generally speaking, I don't see a problem with just either again, letting players roll the die or letting the players see what you have rolled and telling you what you rolled.
As long as you trust your players and I don't I can't imagine playing with a bunch of people that I don't trust. So as long as you trust them, tell you the truth of what you've rolled, then that's great.
And you know what? If they cheat, first of all, the likelihood of all four of your players conspiring together to lie about your die rolls is pretty low. I feel if if the global pandemic of 2020 has taught us anything, it's that you can't get more than two people to agree on pretty much anything.
So four people conspiring to lie to you about your die roll, I think is pretty low risk. But even if they do, if there's some kind of thing going on and they lie to you about a roll, who cares?
I mean, it's a game and it's going to be fun no matter what. And if they tell you that you've got a five when you actually roll the 15, that's alright because you've got that other power in your back pocket that that monster has.
They don't know about yet that is definitely going to hit because there's some kind of ridiculous DC 20 charisma save to resist it. Nobody's got that. So there you go.
So it it'll all even out in the end. It's not something that I really think I give no thought to that sort of thing whatsoever. I know different dungeon masters have different theories on sort of like, I don't know, the sanctity of a die of a dice roll and the transparency of dice rolls and all that other stuff.
Not me don't care. I roll it so everyone can see it. If someone dies, they die. That's that's part of the game. And if someone's lying about their own die dice rolls, that's fine. I'll kill them in some other way. It's it'll all come out in the wash.
That is about it. I think I mean, that's really all there is to running a Dungeons and Dragons game is sorting out what numbers get associated with specific characters or monsters.
Sorting out what kind of problem the character is going to face and then just kind of the details of how you're going to run combat.
The more you play it, the better at it that you'll get and eventually you'll be able to run it literally with your eyes closed. If you have vision or definitely with your eyes open, if you have no vision, it'll be basically the same the same process is just some of the details on how you reference some material will differ.
Some things like spells and I don't know specific feats or conditions that nobody remembers that that's sort of those quick reference rules.
Again, you can either get my my text file of the rule book or you can just have your players look it up. And I kind of I think I probably prefer just letting the players help you sort of look up rules and reference things because that way everyone at the table learns.
You never know a side benefit of that might be that a player who didn't think they wanted to just wanted to be a dungeon master may eventually learn enough to think well maybe I do want to be a dungeon master.
Maybe I do want to give this a go and then they'll run a game and you'll get to do a player character for a while and wouldn't that be nice.
So hopefully this has been somewhat helpful. Again, I've got limited experience in some of these areas and then a lot of experience in others.
So it kind of it's all it all depends and I get that but I think that I don't believe that having no vision is actually much of a barrier to role playing games.
And I think in fact that of all the board games out there I think role playing games are in a unique actually of all games out there.
I think role playing games it's got a unique it's in a unique position of really not depending on vision.
And I think that's a really really big deal. I think that's an almost an under sold aspect of RPG that that people are just kind of catching on to.
And like I said at the very beginning it doesn't even have to be D&D directly.
Like if if those rules and referencing all those things if that's too much there are lots and lots of other systems out there that you can check out.
Some of them are open source and free. Some of them are free. Some of them are cost money.
But there's a lot out there that are very rules light and very sort of they lean on the narrative side of things such that the game part of the experience is more about can we can we construct a story that sort of makes sense together for this set of for this set of imaginary characters.
So there are lots of different ways to do it you can either go really really heavy on the dice if that's what you're into or you can go sort of lean into that storytelling aspect if if you don't really care so much about the number side of the game.
And if you want the if you want some kind of something in between you can make up your own system whatever it it's a beautiful beautiful thing because so much of it happens just all in the imagination.
And I guess I should mention here that hacker bubble radio has an RPG club we meet on UTC Sundays around UTC 6 o'clock like 18 o'clock UTC so whatever that equals out to you in order to calculate that you're going to have to find out what UTC at what UTC mark you are and then either add or plus numbers according to what time zone you're in.
But that's when we meet we play a different system approximately every month and you're invited if you've heard this episode then you are invited to the HPR club RPG club and it might not be D&D that we're playing at any on any given month you kind of have to you know you'll catch us sometimes playing D&D sometimes not it really does depend and it probably won't be fifth edition it'll be something like second edition or pathfinder or something like that but it's generally some really fun RPG playing we play for about two hours.
And we're happy to teach and to learn together no matter what your experience level no matter your vision heck even if you don't hear well we have a text chat as well no matter what you are invited you're welcome and I hope to see you there thank you for listening to this episode talk to you next time.
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