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

[Qoltar]

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.

[Phantasm]

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.

[Stormcrow]

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.

[Qoltar]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Blind characters — or characters with mere Bad Sight — will almost always have a Mitigator on their Blindness: Miranda Jones has her sensor web;.... Take my post as it's meant.

.....

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.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

My group's adventures are currently in August of 2262.
That means 'sensor bet dresses' are about 4 to 5 years off in availability.

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.

[Pursuivant]

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.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

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.

.

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.

[Qoltar]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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.

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.

[Anaraxes]

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.

[Culture20]

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.