Ability Score: Tabletop RPGs & the Mechanics of Privilege

Tabletop gaming can help us not just explore contemporary issues, but also imagine new worlds and solutions to them.

by G.T. Reeder

Tabletop gaming has experienced a recent surge in popularity to heights never before seen, bringing hordes of new players into close contact with what are frequently decades-old mechanics for the first time. This Great Leap Forward in gaming has brought new and necessary scrutiny on what are in many cases antiquated notions of race, gender, and valor that had been baked into the tabletop RPG landscape over the years.

The result of this has been twofold. First, it’s led to a great “spiritual purge” of the genre, as publishers grapple (or fail to grapple) with issues that had long been overlooked or tolerated within the once-insular tabletop community. This sea change has also opened doors onto new issues and new perspectives, such as transgender characters, race mixing, and questions of accessibility. 

Questions of identity and experience are unavoidable in tabletop roleplaying. After all, a character in an RPG functions essentially as a number of modifiers, either positive or negative, to the dice rolls that propel gameplay. A player can even opt to hobble their character — losing an eye, having less ability in a hand — in exchange for yet more points to spend on positive parts of gameplay. The result is that the in-game privilege of the characters is often tied to the possibilities of the adventure on which they are embarking: games are considered easier (and therefore potentially more fantastical and fun for players) when players are given more points to use while creating their characters, or harder (and therefore more “realistic”) when there are fewer. But in truth, the story of a character with less privilege in their imagined world need not be less fun or less fantastical—indeed, it may be just the opposite.

Historically, characteristics like race appeared during character creation primarily in order to establish early modifiers to a character’s attributes. In the Pathfinder First Edition core rulebook, for insance, Orc characters were given positive modifiers to strength but negative modifiers to intellect rolls, while Elves received the opposite. As part of a larger shift within the tabletop industry to recognize perceived racism within the games and their lore, recent editions of Pathfinder have attempted to update race mechanics to include dual modifiers for heritage and ancestry—one representing the way the character was raised, the other its racial lineage.

In truth, the story of a character with less privilege in their imagined world need not be less fun or less fantastical—indeed, it may be just the opposite. 

But there is an issue within this shift that presents a clear ethical dilemma for both the games and their players; namely, that continuing to use race as a mechanic tied directly to charcter attributes amounts to a sort of fantasy phrenology: some races have abundant intelligence, or wisdom, or charisma, while other races lack it.  And while there is major debate in tabletop RPG circles around whether or not the nature of race in fantasy games should be — or even could be — removed, there are better ways to go about it. Systems that choose to still use race and background might consider replacing racial modifiers with specialty training, allowing players to adjust the attributes of their characters in a way that is still related to their story and identity while leaving race itself to function as an aesthetic choice rather than one that dictates ability and potential. This would preserve an essential aspect of playing a tabletop RPG: players are not just actors, but co-writers in the story the game master is telling. A good character is a costume for the player, a good NPC a plot device to draw out their best improv—and allowing a player to be a little stronger or faster than other members of their race provides more opportunities for a player to adjust the narrative tools at their disposal, without engaging in race essentialism.

Ability presents yet another challenge. In a world where some characters are capable of breathing fire or shooting spells, the question of how abilities and disabilities are treated is a critical question—and just like race, disability has seen a change in consideration as the tabletop RPG community has expanded and revisited some of the foundational assumptions of the genre. Traditionally, a character who was missing a leg might move slower than other members of their party and have the options of a painful peg or a crutch—and the rest of the party might reasonably expect to have their mobility aided by magic or steam tech in short order, depending on the setting and system (and the whims of their GM).

Although some third party game companies have taken it upon themselves to create modifications for major systems to allow for differently abled characters, official support for playing disabled characters is very sparse. For example, in Pathfinder‘s Second Edition there are more resources available about how to treat a Druid who has fallen out of line with his druidic order (a rather rare occurrence) than there are for a character that has a broken bone or needs crutches to get around (a far more common outcome for aspiring adventurers). Likewise, characters in recent editions of Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder might be “afflicted by a condition” to model the experience of disability, but this has the consequence of placing the charm spells of fun-loving fae alongside the impact of real-world disabilities like deafness. (Not to mention the fact that most “conditions” in an RPG have a readily available tool or spell to counteract it—something that may not be possible for a real-world disability). 

If race and gender are fluid parts of our party’s costumes, then we need to also recognize players’ desire to create and play characters with a disability, and therefore the need to adequately represent those disabilities. This presents an issue similar to race: here is a group of players and real people who deserve to be fairly represented, but for whom the mechanics-only lens is inadequate. (Likewise, the least such systems might offer is a variety of physical aids to the differently abled.)

If race and gender are fluid parts of our party’s costumes, then we need to also recognize players’ desire to create and play characters with a disability. 

We should regard fantasy as a place to not only reflect on the issues we face every day, but as a constructive space to imagine new worlds and solutions to those issues. In a world where Seven-League Boots exist, who’s to say a wheelchair with similar space-warping abilities couldn’t exist? Why are potions to transition between genders out of the question? Pathfinder in particular has played with gender fluid races with their Changelings—beings born of humanoids and hags who can appear with any number of physical characteristics at will—and so why not extend this idea to the physical form by providing players with a school of arcana devoted to flesh warping, imbuing their characters with powers and abilities that are as useful for helping those with dysphoria as they are for creating terrifying monsters? We can envision a landscape in RPGs where a magic user’s familiar might also be their service animal, where barbarians on crutches strike down queer liches, and a dwarven wizard carries a spell book written in Braille.

Cultural landscapes in TTRPGs represent a vital part of the roleplaying experience, but they must be handled better than they have been, and better than they still are. The first step to that is not just recognizing that ability and disability exist, but also exploring the multitude of different perspectives that could inform each game, each setting, and each story.