Daily Archives: 23 June, 2010

Damn Y’all White Wolf

My [biggest] fandom is White Wolf’s Exalted. I’ve complained about it before and I’ll complain about it again.

I build characters because it’s fun and I often spend a lot of time working at it trying to make a person rather than a collection of attributes. Right now I’m working on a character who I actually have an expectation of playing and as ever I’m borrowing much from my life and some from various other places. This person is a rabbit (specifically this rabbit) shapeshifter with a very big hammer. Ou has told me ou doesn’t speak and I try to listen to my characters when they tell me things.

Also disabled folk can damn well be heroes. They don’t have to ‘overcome’ their conditions neither. I will try to not fuck this up too badly. Transient dysphasia and aphasia are conditions I have personal experience with but not full-time.

Thing is: Because I’m making a new character I’m taking an enormous hit on experience and power — the character I’ve been playing has more than twice as many experience points as the GM is giving me for my rabbit person. Ouch. (But I’m getting to tell a new story.) So I may do something I’m not entirely comfortable with: Use the Flaw system built into the game.

See, you can get points to buy Cool Shit by taking Flaws. Some of them are okay, like being wanted by authorities or being widely known as a demon or whatever. Some of them are more problematic, like missing body parts, mental illnesses, communication and sensory impairments.

Here’s the one for not speaking:

Mute
Cost: 1 pt. or 4 pts.
Your character is unable to speak normally. For one bonus point, the character is simply unable to speak above a whisper, while complete dumbness[1. Hi there, dumb means does not speak! I have not missed you.] grants four bonus points. A character with the one-point version automatically fails all Performance or Presence checks that require public speaking but faces no penalty on social attacks as long as his target can hear him, which requires the target’s player to succeed on a (Perception + Awareness) roll at difficulty 2.

A character with the four-point version of the Flaw automatically fails all Performance or Presence checks based on verbal communication and suffers a -5 penalty on all social attack rolls made for her unless the attack expressly has no verbal component. While there is no universal sign language in the Age of Sorrows, the character and her allies can communicate through an informal sign language if each of them commits one Linguistics slot to it.

Just kind of as an aside they tell us there are no widely-known gestural or tactile languages. None. There aren’t regional languages even. Anyone wanting to use one has to make up their own and teach it to whomever they want to communicate with. Deaf people wanting to build a community are going to have a tricky time of it in canon Exalted.

Sometimes I hate my game. I could use those four bonus points but that’s some horrible shit. But not using this mechanic isn’t going to make it disappear from the game either (there’s another player whose character made use of it — as a hot blind assassin chick). The casual disablism is not exactly unusual for gaming (and this isn’t even the worst example of disablism ((or casual bigotry)) I could pull from Exalted) where currently non-disabled developers assume a currently non-disabled audience and write accordingly. Because heroes are CND or super-crip amirite?

So yeah. I’ll probably do it. I’ll just feel icky about it. :(

Cross-posted: Aperiodically Legible.

Quick Hit: The Relationship Between Disability and Poverty, Part 1,293,495,594 in a continuing series

Did you know that being poor puts people at greater risk for disability? And that people with disabilities are more likely to be poor? And that there’s a very strong relationship between poverty and disability, the worst kind of vicious circle? Well, you probably do, especially because we talk about it a lot here, but here’s another study confirming that, from Wayne State University (bolding mine):

Dr. Bowen and Dr. Gonzalez said the study suggests that early socioeconomic conditions play a role in a person’s risk for disability that persists throughout the course of their life.

With much of the available literature on disability focused on the role of mid-life diseases, Dr. Bowen and Dr. Gonzalez took a unique life-course approach to the topic. “This study set out to determine if early life conditions contribute to the risk for developing a disability, and if so, what those risk factors are,” Dr. Gonzalez said.

The study utilized data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative study that followed more than 18,000 Americans 51 and older over the course of eight years. Using generalized linear latent and mixed-model commands for their statistical analysis, they examined the early-life parameters of parental education ranging from zero to 17 years, as well as the father’s occupation when the respondent was 16 years old. They factored in respondents’ social mobility — education, income and wealth — and health behaviors like smoking, drinking, exercising and body weight, throughout their lives, examining whether these factors mediated the effect of early life conditions. Analyses adjusted for the predisposition for certain forms of disability caused by characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity and disease, and tracked the changes from baseline measurements over the course of the study.

Dr. Bowen and Dr. Gonzalez said the study suggests that early socioeconomic conditions play a role in a person’s risk for disability that persists throughout the course of their life.

Our research strengthens the argument that poor conditions during childhood can put you on a path of heightened risk for health problems,” said Dr. Bowen, now a patient-safety research fellow at James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Fla. “This isn’t to say that people who grow up with certain socioeconomic risk factors are going to be disabled, but it does provide evidence they will be at a disadvantage. This is most likely due to the lowered access to good nutrition and to important health information characteristic of people living in poverty.”

(Note: I can’t say I care for the implication that this is an education issue, which implies that it’s caused by volitional choices of people in poverty. I think it’s much more accurate to look at the constellation of socioeconomic factors which are strong determinants of health outcomes – stables and habitable affordable housing, financial and locational access to nutrition, and health care access – all of which are systemic issues, rather than individual actions. But the overall conclusions are, well, exactly what we already knew.)