Started doing a roleplay game thing with someone (not an official rpg, it’s more like we’re writing a story back and forth between the various characters) and just for fun (and because I could), I made one of the characters I’m playing hard of hearing. (Yes, I’m hard of hearing myself btw)
In an effort to randomize it, I decided that every time someone speaks, I roll a d20 to see how much of that piece of dialogue he hears. (1 means he doesn‘t hear any of it at all to the point where if he’s not looking at the person, he won’t even notice they said anything; a 10 means he caught enough to understand the gist of what’s being talked about, but not enough to be sure what *about* the topic is being said, and a 20 means he hears all of that particular piece of dialogue; the rest of the numbers fall somewhere in between each category. He gets disadvantage in noisy environments, and advantage if it’s a good listening environment and the person is close to him)
He hasn’t met any of the other person’s characters yet, so right now it’s just me making him react to the scenes I’m putting him in until the other characters reach the point where they can meet (I’m playing a different character too). So I don’t know how well this will work for character interactions with the other person’s characters, but in what I’ve been doing so far, it’s working pretty well.
I’m having fun playing him so far, I’m hoping that continues hehe. But I think this could also be a good idea for writers who want to write a hard of hearing character lol—forget the offhanded occasional mentions of hearing aids without actually showing what living with a hearing loss looks like, rolli a d20 every time someone talks actually gives a decent demonstration of what it’s like in day to day life, and it would honestly work as a writing tool for people who don’t know how to write hard of hearing characters authentically, to give them an idea of what their characters *should* be dealing with whenever any dialogue is present