Playing w/ a colorblind player (and modifying Aura tint/ Health Color API)

So, a couple of days ago I was DMing a Curse of Strahd table and while we were in the middle of a boss battle a PC (a healer) was constantly asking about how wounded were other PCs and enemies...At first I ignored it because I thought he was doing a little meta-gaming but when I felt he was asking too many times I asked him ¨How come non of the other PCs are asking? Just look at the health aura around the token. Green means healthy, red means almost dead¨, and then it hit me...he is colorblind and I just assumed he wasn´t going to have problems reading the token´s aura. I apologized of course, and told him that I was going to fix that.  I did a little research and there´s at least 3 types of colorblindness. My player suffers from the one that has difficulties seeing different levels of green and yellow (not gonna get technical here,unless you have questions), so I started to think of every time I used something of those colors to show something that used that scheme of colors to express important information. I am now trying to adapt as much of the adventure as I can to accommodate his needs. So my questions are: 1) Have you ever dealt with an issue like this? 2) Is there any way to change the API´s health aura colors?

Hello.- I have never dealt with an issue like this. However, you should try to arrange a 1-on-1 with him and try to ascertain the type of colorblindess he has, and change the colors of the API accordingly. This should include the BAR colors as well. The healthcolors API does provide the possibility of changing the used colors. By using the !aura command you may configure the healed/injured gradient accordingly. You could also use the deathmarker API to add a statusmarker to half HP characters and unconscious PC's and leave everything else off, to make things much easier for him. You could, for instance, add the bleeding statusmarkers for <= half and the pummeled status for unconscious. Dead is redundant but since it's red he may not be able to see it.

If you type !aura in the chat you can see an option to change the colors at the bottom. Ask the player what would work for him. You have to enter the color as a hex code, which you can find on a lot of websites, this is one I found in a google search <a href="https://html-color-codes.info/" rel="nofollow">https://html-color-codes.info/</a>. Another option is to just reveal health bars to players. As long as you hide the numbers it's no different than the aura's. I'm a fan of using the "bottom overlapping" and "Compact" options.

Juan C. said: The healthcolors API does provide the possibility of changing the used colors. By using the !aura command you may configure the healed/injured gradient accordingly. It just gives you the option to change the ¨heal/hurt¨ FX color. Or am I missing something?

That's true. Since I never changed it I took it for granted. Can't help you, sorry. newColor = function(ratio) { var color = hsl2rgb(ratio, 100, 50); var hex = rgbToHex(color.r, color.g, color.b); return(hex); }, rgbToHex = function(r, g, b) { return "#" + ((1 &lt;&lt; 24) + (r &lt;&lt; 16) + (g &lt;&lt; 8) + b).toString(16).slice(1); }, hsl2rgb = function(h, s, l) { var r, g, b, m, c, x; if(!isFinite(h)) h = 0; if(!isFinite(s)) s = 0; if(!isFinite(l)) l = 0; h /= 60; if(h &lt; 0) h = 6 - (-h % 6); h %= 6; s = Math.max(0, Math.min(1, s / 100)); l = Math.max(0, Math.min(1, l / 100)); c = (1 - Math.abs((2 * l) - 1)) * s; x = c * (1 - Math.abs((h % 2) - 1)); if(h &lt; 1) { r = c; g = x; b = 0; } else if(h &lt; 2) { r = x; g = c; b = 0; } else if(h &lt; 3) { r = 0; g = c; b = x; } else if(h &lt; 4) { r = 0; g = x; b = c; } else if(h &lt; 5) { r = x; g = 0; b = c; } else { r = c; g = 0; b = x; } m = l - c / 2; r = Math.round((r + m) * 255); g = Math.round((g + m) * 255); b = Math.round((b + m) * 255); return { r: r, g: g, b: b }; }, Note: Ratio = perc = Math.round((curValue / maxValue) * 120); This is the part of code that addresses the gradient from green to red. Someone else might be able to help you with this.

Green deficiency colour blindness is the most common type and it affects around 1 in 20 men (more prevalent in men than women). There are various web sites which give good colour palettes to use to cater for this particular variety. I have this, and in my campaign I have health bars enabled (without numbers), so that players can see how healthy or injured are the characters. I don't have it enabled for monsters and NPCs though. For dead creatures I switch on the red X condition marker, which covers the entire token with a nice big X to indicate the dead tokens. I would hate to be in a game that uses any form of colour tinting of tokens.

My GM is Red-Green colorblind, so we make our health bars purple for his visibility and for contrast against common background colors (another important feature).

I'm a moderate protan (red-green) and if I'm honest, I don't have a problem with this API. My set up is to have it kick in at 50% health and I use tinting rather than auras but with that setup I don't have to change anything else for it to be obvious to my mutant eyes how things are looking but that could be years of training my eyes to recognise the difference :shrug: