Accessible Rules

In my dayjob I’m a Product Manager who works in the health space. Both of these parts strongly encourage one to look out for Accessibility. Is the thing one creates useable by as big an audience as possible? What about those with impairments of various kinds?

One example is maths: Delaney King is a strong advocate for game mechanics that don’t require players do do any complicated maths at all during actual play. (that is the one twitter account I really miss since leaving that site.)

This is a) very considerate of those who have dyscalculia, but generally lowers the cognitive load for everyone, freeing up the brain to do, you know, actual gaming.

Raiders of Arismyth is, alas, not completely maths-free. But the calculations are few, and those that happen during play usually are restricted to a removing a few points of damage from an attack due to armour.

Otherwise, Hit Boxes and life points are represented visually, so you can simply scratch them off (or use those handy dice-based tracker boards that I made for my group).

Three small MDF labels with lasercut insets for dice. Three rows of dice sized insets are on the top, with some filled with red six-sided dice.

There are two larger insets at the bottom labelled "offense" and "defense".

To verify success in any given roll, be it combat, spells, or skills, you just check if at least one dice shows up in the upper half, and that’s it. How many dice do you roll? Just take one for each skill advancement you have, that is counting, not math.

Another example is making a product accessible to people with vision problems: I’m actually pondering to make custom dice in the future, where the lower half numbers on any dice are coloured in a darker colour or something like that. So on a six-sided dice, the 1,2, and 3 would be dark, the 4,5, and 6 would be in a bright colour. So you roll a bunch of dice and immediately can say “at least one bright Number is visible? Success!”

Ideally, we’ll find a colour contrast combination that is still discernable to those with impaired vision.) I did think of swapping the numbers for symbols or leave the “failure” sides of any given dice blank – but the system has some random tables, and for things like combat or damage, the actual numbers are needed too.

The other reason why I ditched the “have super-special dice with symbols” idea is that the way the rules are currently written, you can use your standard RPG polyhedrals, and I don’t need to rewrite anything in the rules, or, worse, have alternative descriptions for different kind of dice. That’s another accessibility factor: You can play the game with just your normal stuff and a PDF of the rules – you don’t need to spend extra money on fancy things (although these would make things nicer, as it is so often with fancy things).

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