Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Greetings, Hello,

In my current GURPS campaign - adapting the "Star Trek" universe circa 2262 the ship's Captain and offercers have hired a Therapist or 'counselor' who is completely Blind because of glaucoma.

In her interview with the Department heads she was using a High-tech cane to get around that I said tapped out the width of the corridors on her finger tips in braille - in real life contemporary times there are devices that do that kind of thing.

Looking for advice, ideas, and suggestions here...

Has anyone run a game where either a Player Character or a Non Player Character had the Blindness Disadvantage?

How did you work that out 'in-game'?

Did the character use devices or gimmicks to get around?
-OR-
Did they use the same techniques as current contemporary Blind folks use to get around in the world?

- Ed C.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Most sci-fi games I run where characters have Blindness for whatever reason, I usually have bionic eyes (and other bionic prostheses). I'd probably use those even for an Enterprise-Discovery-SNW-TOS-era game like you're currently running, even though those are actually a late-comer to Trek canon (because TNG wanted their blind pilot (and later Chief Engineer from S2 onward) to have a girl's hair band over his eyes in order to see in more than just the visual spectrum, and he didn't get actual bionic eyes until the final episode of TNG).

So yeah, I'd just declare "I am altering the canon; pray I don't alter it any further" and have the bionic eyes appear in the Enterprise or Discovery era. Particularly since they're on the "we're working on it now!" list.

YMMV, ofc.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Blind characters — or characters with mere Bad Sight — will almost always have a Mitigator on their Blindness: Miranda Jones has her sensor web; Geordi La Forge has his VISOR; Velma Dinkley has her glasses. If not an actual Mitigator, then some other sense that replaces it: Lynx-O from Thundercats has ESP and high levels of all the Acute Senses other than Vision.

(And in some silly fiction, blind characters simply stumble around and "coincidentally" end up where they need to be or wherever will make the best joke. Mr. Magoo is an example, as are the Three Blind Mice in Shrek.)

And I bring up these non-Star Trek examples in order to illustrate the possible approaches you can take or not take in a Star Trek game, not to suggest that Velma Dinkley or Lynx-O belong in Star Trek. Take my post as it's meant.

Characters who are simply not able to see at all are rare in adventure fiction; this should be avoided unless the player is willing to be led by other characters all the time. In the case of Star Trek, it seems quite clear that Mitigators are available, common enough that they can be disguised as a fashion accessory. I can't imagine a crewman simply being blind with no compensation.

So your player's character probably has Blindness with a Mitigator, the cane. That makes the cane basically part of the character, not merely a piece of gear.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Well that 'sensor web dress' of hers was her way of disguising or covering up that she was blind. Diana Mulduar dida wonderful jopb of acting - I am surprised that Kirk and Spock did not catch on sooner than they did.

That episode takes place around 2268 in the timline.

My group's adventures are currently in August of 2262.
That means 'sensor bet dresses' are about 4 to 5 years off in availability. The 'VISOR' device like LaForge had I think of as 74 to 80 years into the future - tho, someone did spot a background character in either "ST: Discovery" or "ST: Strange New Worlds" that appeared to be wearing a VISOR-type device.

The character is actually an NPC - but based a lot on a real person that I know.

In her job interview I emphasized with her responses in character and her bio that she had been on both a Starfleet Destroyer and a Heavy Cruiser earlier in her career. Both of those times for longer than a month or closer to a year. SO, that means she has the typical layout of the primary hull or 'saucer' part of the ship memorized. There are some differences between a Saladin-class Destroyer and Constitution-class Exploration cruiser - but two thirds of the deck plan layout would be the same.

- Ed C.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

I anticipated that you'd say that. See my previous post on the examples being an illustration.

As for the sensor web, the fact that it not only exists but can be disguised just shows that it MUST be a somewhat mature technology. Just because ONE person was using it in 2268 doesn't mean it doesn't already exist in 2262. Unless it was absolutely state of the art, it MUST be an available technology.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

FWIW, Kayla Detmer in the recently-finished Discovery series has a bionic eye c. 2257, with an obviously inhuman appearance. Unfortunately, the Memory Alpha article for her doesn't have any pictures of her c. 2257 ocular implant.

Another officer with bionics, serving prior to 2258 is LT Ariam . She's clearly a partial cyborg with two artificial eyes.

Detmer's bionic eye is obviously reliable enough to give her full normal vision, since she's Discovery's helmsman for the entire 2nd season. Ariam's eyes also appear to give full range of vision.

A c. 2257 style bionic eye, which provides no extra functionality uses Blindness (Mitigator, -70%) [-15]; Distinctive Feature (Obviously Artificial Bionics) [-1] and possibly reduced Appearance.

RL Blindness adaptability aids include service dogs (or equivalent) and echolocation. The latter allows a surprising level of adaptation. It could be treated as a Perk, levels of Acute Hearing or as a limited form of Detect or Vibration Sense.

The ability to use a White Cane and similar devices effectively should also be a perk for the non-Blind.

A "native" blind person will also have the Braille version of their written language as their native language. Someone who goes blind must relearn to read in Braille, effectively making it a Written Language [1-3 points] or a Perk depending on how the GM wants to handle it. Native braille readers might also have levels of Acute Touch.

Since Glaucoma usually affects people by narrowing their field of view, giving them some form of Restricted Vision (p. B151) there's a chance that a person affected by the condition just has Tunnel Vision [-30] and Bad Sight (Uncorrectable) [-25], representing near blindness. Unfortunately, the combination is worth -55 points, which is more than the cost of Blind. I'd model the Bad Sight aspect as a +25% enhancement to Tunnel Vision, giving a cost of 38 points.

Finally, since most forms of glaucoma are treatable by 2024, it's quite likely that there are permanent cures for it by the mid-23rd century, analogous to the later Retinax V.

If that is the case, and since canon has established bionic eyes as a mature technology used by Starfleet by 2257, it's quite possible that your character has suffered a recent injury and is still recovering since she's using a cane rather than implants.

Unless you've established that her glaucoma is indeed genetic and incurable, one explanation for her problem is exposure to sudden low pressure, like explosive decompression or extended exposure to a thin atmosphere, which damaged her eyes without (permanently) affecting the rest of her body.

Another condition which can damage the optic nerve, like glaucoma, is exposure to intensely bright light such as lasers or nuclear explosions. Since it's Star Trek, sudden, untreatable glaucoma could also be triggered by exposure to all manner alien threats.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

My Father started controling his glaucoma with eye-drops some time around 1980. It was an elaborate regime with 3 different kinds of drops but it alos worked stopping progression for the rest of his life.

Given that first Miranda Jones and later Geordi La Forge were apparently unique within the Federation, a very high level of treatment for eye maladies may reasonably be assumed.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

This NPC has some 23rd century version of glaucoma...or there have been mutations over the centuries....

She does not normally wear a device or gimmick on her face.

Now, I am still curious if anyone had a player character who was blind or ran a character with blindness in their games.

Heck, the movie "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" had that one character who was completely blind - and he was a nbig help.

- Ed C.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

How well the Mitigator mitigates is up to the GM.

We have visual prosthetics even today, retinas or cameras that signal the brain either through implants or wirelessly, though they're experimental, and just barely effective. (That is, recipients can see light/dark, and learn to recognize shapes like "doorway" or "person", or even "spoon" vs "fork". So, somewhere between Basic and Discriminatory in GURPS terms.) 240 years of progress in that direction would likely produce something considerably better.

On the other end, Jeordi's visor was superior to human sight. It detected all sorts of fields people can't see, and also could measure them quantitatively and precisely. (An "Analyzing" sense in GURPS terms, though it has other modifiers as well, including being multispectral including technobabble fields quite useful to an engineer.) That device being 75 years in the future still leaves a lot of room for human-equivalent visible-light-only prosthetics in 2262.

So, if you want the cane as an interesting feature of the character, so mote it be. There's always the "temporary pending recovery / completion of the more advanced prosthetic" out, which is also something to spend earned character points on. (NPCs may not actually earn points in the game, but if they're part of the party, they generally advance with them one way or another.)

If you want to Mitigate the Blindness more thoroughly, that would also seem to not unreasonably advance 22nd century tech to threaten the 23rd's.

If the Blindness, is 100% Mitigated, and there's no real chance of the Mitigator being lost/broken/jammed/stolen, then it's just a zero-point feature of the character description.

I've never run a game with a Blind character. Much as with Stormcrow's comment, I generally dissuade players from making an action-adventure character too physically handicapped, because in practice that usually means Disadvantaging the party rather than just the individual character, making them pay for the extra CP of the one character. It's also a burden on the GM to constantly have to come up with ways to spare that character a logical fate. (The games I'm in usually aren't very ruthless when it comes to killing off PCs.) If the character's just supposed to hang around on the ship as a sort of Contact, then that's not likely to be an issue.

I'm also leery of the "brain in a jar" sorts of concepts, since I've rarely if ever seen one that wasn't really motivated by the stack-one-thing-til-it-breaks kind of munchkinism, or just an exploit of a loophole where it was cheaper to replace vision with another sense for fewer points than Blindness gives. In an theoretically ideal world, any build equivalent to human vision would come out to exactly those same 50 points, but it's not an ideal world.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

GURPS 3e Black Ops does a good job pointing out that military orgs that feature the "best of the best" will by their nature weed out a lot of higher point disadvantages if they're not mitigated, and sometimes even if they are. e.g. Sadism mitigated by daily medication would probably be a disqualification for Starfleet. Geordi's visor is more than a mitigator as it grants him superhuman senses.
Kirk's reading glasses are considered to be an unusual mitigator in-universe resulting from a less-than-quirk level allergy to Retinax Five, the usual medication that corrects eyesight. Given that R5 is applied only twice every Earth year, it's a hefty mitigator (rarely allows the disadvantage to surface in game). It's basically character flavor at that level, explaining why a "far sighted" PC gets no points for a disad they don't suffer from.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Oh My Kahless!

I Never said that this NPC was 'military' - she is a civilian character hired by the ship's command crew to work onboard as a Psychologist /Therapist/ Counselor.
It was implied in her job interview that when she was younger she did go through Starfleet Academy and possibly served a year on a starship in her 20s.

This being "Starfleet" and not a contemporary military - there are a lot of scientists, explorers, and researchers in the organization.

Part of this all grew out of the 'meta-game' aspect of both player characters and NPCs having disadvantages like 'Flashbacks', 'Nightmares', 'Insomnia', 'Paranoia', and 'Workaholic' on their character sheets and descriptions.
I had their NPC chief Medical Officer half joningly say "This ship really needs a psycholigist or therapist". Then one of the players said, in character: "She's right we do."

At first they thought about having a Starfleet Medical Officer who was a therapist (Remember that other thread I did? ) But they leaned more on having a civilian because they were also worried about Section 31 spying on them.

- Ed C.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

If that were the case, then I would recommend Courtesy Military Rank 3: She's not in the chain of command but she retains the title she earned during her active service.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

I think you could make a case for most starfleet ranks being courtesy ranks anyway, the chain of command seems very flexible even among the parts of the service that lean more to the military side. The Captain and First Officer usually seem firm enough to be actual ranks. Anything beyond that, not so much.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Just how closely are you adhering to the actual Trek canon, given how TOS and DSC/SNW were produced nearly 55 years or so apart?; things in DSC/SNW were not even thought of by TOS writers.

As I said above,Of course, there's also the possibility she has High Rejection Threshold (from Bio-Tech and Power-Ups 6: Quirks) in which case her body tends to reject cyber-eye replacements.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

I'm not sure about any of the following.

I had a look at this https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=152810 , but while it has a 'have you used this in your games', there don't seem to have been many replies to it. What particularly were you looking for comments on, if anything? The rules for the Blindness disadvantage do seem to leave a lot to GM improvisation.

'In unfamiliar territory, you must travel slowly and carefully, or have a companion or guide animal lead you' - how long does it take to become familiar? The figure of eight hours' use to become familiar with a weapon seems too short, the 200 hours for learning a point of Area Knowledge seems too long. Characters page 294 has a rule for learning languages - 'Time spent in a foreign land counts as four hours per day toward both Cultural Familiarity and the local Language, no matter what else you are doing', even if you're doing something else at the same time, and that seems as if it might be a good fit for this. If you wanted, you could halve the time required because she's already familiar with a similar type of ship.

'If using a ranged weapon, you can only attack randomly, or engage targets so close that you can hear them' - how close is that? Campaigns page 358 has rules for Hearing rolls, but it seems to me that they don't make sense, and on a quick search on the forum I didn't find much except other people saying that they didn't make sense and that they didn't use them.
In any case, it seems to me that you'd often be wanting to run them backwards. If something is approaching rather than standing still, often you don't want to know if somebody hears it at a pre-determined range, but how close it is when they hear it. I suppose that would be equivalent to the MoS on an unmodified Hearing roll, so that, for insance, a success by 3 would mean you head it when it go wihin a ange equialen to a ange penaly of 3. That would mean 8 times further away than the range listed next to that particular sound, if you were using the rules for Hearing rolls from Campaigns, the ones that possibly don't make sense.

Given that starship computers in the TOS era seem to be set up for voice commands and voice output routinely, a Blind character should have a much easier time with day-to-day work in this setting than some other settings even without any additional gadgets, once she's learnt the layout of the ship. It occurs to me that until then, since it seems to be possible to determine crew members' locations for the purposes of emergency beam-outs (this possibly goes by communicators, since it only seems to apply to crew members), if the computer hears 'Computer, where exactly am I?', it should be able to tell her the answer. As she's a non-combat NPC who mostly won't be leaving the ship what she'd do in an emergency shouldn't come up, unless something happens like there's a hull breach or the ship gets boarded. I can think of a lot of ways of possibly solving some problems with gadgets, depending how much use you want to make of gadgets, but you may want to leave that as an exercise for your players.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

In the first season of Star Trek : Strange New Worlds, which takes place in 2259, Hemmer is blind and has no VISOR or similar device to mitigate his condition. He has limited psychic abilities that help him cope, but nothing technological. This would seem to imply that VISOR technology does not exist in the era of your game.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

No, Hemmer was just unwilling to accept a technological fix to something he didn't consider broken. A big deal was made of this in the first season of the show.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

In a somewhat similar vein, I could see a therapist who is blind deciding to eschew solutions that allow her to see, if she feels she gets a better understanding of someone without visual stimuli getting in the way, if she doesn't want their appearance to influence how she treats them, and/or if she has found that the degree of quasi-anonymity granted by her not knowing what people look like makes them more inclined to open up to her. The cane that tells her of her surroundings is a really good idea, but I feel that, rather than a Mitigator, it may be more appropriate for it to grant her Vibration Sense (which explicitly doesn't replace vision - although I believe there are Enhancements in GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses that make it more useful in that regard). I can think of three ways to build such a thing. First off, you could give the character Vibration Sense with a Limitation for requiring the cane (I'd eyeball it at -10% or so if the canes are relatively easy to get). If the cane is somewhat unique and would be more difficult to replace, you could build it as a Gadget. Finally, if it's just gear that grants Vibration Sense to anyone who takes the time to become Familiar with it (and is sufficiently fluent in braille), wait until the 27th and build it using GURPS Meta-Tech. In all cases, you could have further Limitations if the information is limited to the width of the corridors rather than giving her an idea of where people and objects are at (that's probably -50% or more, honestly), if it takes her a moment to read the braille output (Takes Extra Time), etc.

As an aside, I'd like to commend Qoltar and/or his players for opting for a therapist that is a retired member of Star Fleet. Having previously served means she's likely to know more about where they're coming from (or at least they'll feel she does) than a typical civilian would, but at the same time they won't be potentially intimidated by her rank (as she either no longer holds one, or simply has a Courtesy Rank).

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Apologies on something....
...I just rediscovered a rough draft character sheet I did for her over a month ago - I had her as part of the 'Merchant Marines' earlier in her life - not 'Starfleet'.
But Somehow I remembered it as "Starfleet" as being in her past..

The more I thnk about it all Starfleet has been shown as willing to take a risk and try somedthing different. She may tested really well on entrance exams and got into the Academy. Then once 'there' they thought "Okay, we will come up with a device so she can be active on ships" That didn't work out perfectly.

Liking the idea more and mopre that she did have some Starfleet experience when younger. The character as hired by the crew just turned 59 years old - plenty of years for back story with her.

And again - the deck plan layout for most starfleet 'saucers' or primary hulls are pretty much 80% the ame from the ship to ship. She only has to learn the 20 percent of it that is different or unique to this ship.

- Ed C.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

With her failed eyesight being a consequence of glaucoma, which is something that typically occurs later in life, I assumed she was perfectly healthy during at least her early years in Starfleet, and either the glaucoma started after she left to pursue other options or was in fact (part of) the reason she left, perhaps as a form of medical retirement. A quick look online notes that untreated glaucoma typically results in total blindness within 10-15 years, but with higher intraocular pressure can be as little as 3 years. She likely would have received some treatment for it, slowing it, but I'd say you could probably be safe assuming it took around 15 years (say she had really high IOP but the treatments slowed it down enough to take 15 years). If we assume she's been totally blind for 5 years, that would mean it would have started around 20 years ago, or around the time she was 39 - a bit young for glaucoma, but far from impossible (particularly if it was induced by some sort of odd phenomenon/anomaly). I'd imagine she would have been able to continue serving for at least 5 more years, but let's call it 6, which would have her medically retiring from Starfleet at the age of 45. You mentioned in a previous thread that new ensigns (or at least the new ones you wanted for your "Design an Ensign") tend to be between 20 and 27 years of age, which would have meant a good 18-25 years of service from her (probably on the shorter end if she was already a therapist when she first joined, but it's possible she didn't start out as such). Would that work for your purposes here?

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

A short and simple answer to your lengthy post.

She got the glaucoma in childhood.

In her teen years she had very limited partial sight, she could see changes in light and some partial color...still had already learned how to read Braille.

As an adult is totally Blind because the glaucoma got worse.

Again, basing this on a real person that I know who is totally blind, but loves "Star Trek"....

- Ed C.

Re: Blindness in GURPS, and the "Star Trek" setting 2262...
 

Ah, understood, I must have missed the bit where she was based on a real person. I think you're right that Starfleet would have been willing to take a risk on her, particularly if, as you suggested, she tested extremely well. I'd imagine she had a more effective means of mitigating her blindness during her time with Starfleet but has sense opted to move on to something simpler - perhaps she originally had something that outright gave her Vibration Sense, but now the cane gives her a much more limited version of that and she largely relies on her memory to get around with a bit of assistance from the cane. On that note, it may be appropriate to give her either Eidetic Memory or Photographic Memory (perhaps with the latter renamed to something like Perfect Recall to avoid confusion), but not strictly necessary.