Roll for Accessibility

Hello everyone! I’m Rogan, and today I’d like to talk TTRPGs. This video is based on a presentation I gave at Deaf Talks (Seattle’s version of TED Talks) in spring 2025, so it may be a little long, but I would appreciate it if you watched at least most of this video! Timecodes are available to move around easily. Let’s get into it.

What even is TTRPG? This acronym means tabletop roleplaying game, and most people are familiar with the concept because of a very famous one, Dungeons and Dragons. At the core, TTRPGs are storytelling games, often collaboratively with a group of people, the rules are there to provide structure and guidance in telling the story. Many of them use dice, some of them use cards, and usually include character sheets for the players. A few other well-known and popular TTRPGs are Pathfinder, Daggerheart, Coyote & Crow, Kids on Bikes, Vampire: The Masquerade, Spire, Monsterhearts, and Thirsty Sword Lesbians. There are thousands of them out there, in all genres and varying levels of complexity, truly something for everyone. The key to all of these, regardless of rules and structure, is collaborating to tell stories. I’m emphasizing this because that is the main thing I want to talk about today.

Storytelling and the deaf community go hand in hand. We love our stories and jokes passed down through generations of Deaf summer camps and events where we gather to perform stories and share laughter. Storytelling is so important to humans, this is something that we’ve shared and passed down since our cave ancestors. It’s how we relate to each other, and learn about things outside of ourselves.

In American Sign Language, or any sign language really, there are so many things that you can do for enhancing storytelling that written and spoken languages can’t do. The greatest example of this is VV, short for Visual Vernacular. I’ll insert a few clips here for those not familiar with it. — With sign language, we don’t as much say things as literally act them out, which can contribute to the story immersion. Sign language can be an asset to tables that rely on spoken languages, as a way to help visualize some settings or actions. TTRPGs are a fantastic medium for telling stories, and they really benefit people that may have a desire to tell stories, but don’t know how to get started. These games provide structure and tools for creating new worlds from our imaginations.

In the TTRPG industry, there is underrepresentation of disability, especially of Deaf people. There’s also a severe lack of this representation in actual plays, shortened to APs. APs are a show or podcast where people play TTRPGs for audiences. The most well-known are Critical Role and Dimension 20 (my personal favorite), among others. For a very long time, the TTRPG space was predominantly white cis straight male, but it’s been rapidly changing. There’s more women, queer people, and more BIPOC than ever. There’s still not enough representation of all these identities, but it has been improving. Representation of signing Deaf people is vanishingly small, despite this being something that the Deaf community would excel at and something I see people enjoying very much.

Currently, the most visible representation of signing Deaf people in the TTRPG community is from Deaf Tabletop Gaming Online, or DTGO for short. It’s barely known outside of geeky Deaf circles. DTGO grew from Deaf Board Game Convention at the start of COVID, and are still running today. They’re mainly on Discord and sometimes stream on Twitch, and do TTRPGs of all kinds, along with board and card games. — Occasionally, there’ll be random AP streams with ASL interpreters on the screen, but no signing Deaf players in the cast. There’s at least one stream that has a couple of Deaf players, but still no all ASL table. The number of streams with captions is slowly increasing, but it’s still extremely low. Usually, captions are available only after the live stream, and those that do provide during livestreams tend to be using some auto-captioning software which will have a lot of inaccuracies especially with fantasy or unusual names. — I’m not saying this to put myself on a pedestal, I’m saying this as an unfortunate fact. I am the only signing Deaf person who has been on a few larger streams. The largest is Dungeon & Dragons Beyond: Galesong, and that was for an all-disabled cast. I was also on Role D5’s stream for Disability Pride Month, and participated in a charity stream for Games for Change with Ampistrano. All of those were within roughly a year, and that was in 2022. They were all wonderful, and did their best to be inclusive, but there was room for improvement – including myself! Since that, I have not seen any other signing Deaf players, or been in more streams myself. There are a lot of reasons why, and probably a whole other video to dive into that.

Let’s talk about the benefits of uplifting Deaf players, and the needs to achieve this. Of course, this is such a big thing, it’s impossible to tackle this in a short time frame. But we can start somewhere and build the momentum.

TTRPGs lean heavily into the power of play. This could be implemented in Deaf schools and programs, encouraging children to play with language and stories. This can be used to teach history, math, science, literature in unconventional ways, which can benefit children who struggle with English. Roleplaying games have been used in therapy to allow someone to explore their self without any real-world consequences, it can help people face their trauma, identity struggles, and be confronted with mortality and death while having a safe distance from their real self.

TTRPGS are huge skill builders. They build skills in the school environment, bolster their interpersonal abilities and problem solving, encouraging creative thinking. They bring an extremely diverse community with equally diverse perspectives to the same table to collaborate and learn from each other. With all of that said, there’s a gap here.

Many TTRPG sourcebooks or rulebooks are very text-heavy, filled with dense English that isn’t accessible to people who don’t have English as a first language. Even the average layperson sometimes struggle with reading through these books, and there are near to no resources in sign language. Having more explainers, how-tos, etc, in sign language will increase the ease of use for the Deaf community. That leads into the next major gap, there’s not a lot of exposure or visibility of TTRPGs in the deaf and signing community. That means a lot of people don’t know much about it, what the potential of TTRPGs is, and what the community could get out of it. The next thing I’m going to say is more targeted at people who work within this industry – producers, people responsible for casting, GMs/players, etc. There need to be more opportunities explicitly for disabled players and deaf players. Reach out to them, ask them to be on your channels, ask them to take part in what you’re building – both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Get more signing deaf players in front of the camera, either as a guest or regular player. Support the deaf community in establishing an all-ASL channel, whatever that looks like.

A few additional things before I close out! I talked about how sourcebooks or rulebooks often are text-heavy, but despite all of that, there’s not nearly enough content out there on how to play disabled characters. I’ll name some that I know of, and I’m sure there’s some I missed, but this is still barely anything compared to the volume of work out there. The TTRPG Fate has a whole toolkit, which you can find by searching for Fate Accessibility Toolkit. What’s important about this one is that it’s made for both disabled players and non-disabled players. It includes how to create disabled characters to play and respectfully, and how to support disabled players who are at the table. Some TTRPG sourcebooks include these sections directly, such as Daggerheart and Pathfinder, among others. I know if I don’t say this, my friends are going to yell at me again. The section on how to play a Deaf character in Daggerheart was written by yours truly, and that’s not the only thing I’ve written or consulted on. I also want to mention a couple of games that are based in sign or use it as the foundation of their system. Inspirisles is one of them, and they have both ASL and BSL included. Another is Sign: A Game About Being Understood, which is a game where you develop your own sign language as you play. I have yet to play both, but I plan to one day! Both of those games were developed by hearing people, but they had heavy collaboration with the deaf community as they were making these games.

Alright, if you made it this far, thank you so much for watching the whole thing! I would love to read your thoughts on this, and I’m happy to answer any further questions you may have. I will leave links below to everything I talked about in this video, and if there’s anything missing, please let me know.

If you want to support my content financially, I would really appreciate it if you joined my Patreon or made a one-time donation to my Ko-fi tip jar. Thanks for reading, see you next time.

Rogan Shannon

Roll for Accessibility

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