Another player who was at the table during the incident sent me this meme after the problem player in question (they had a history) left the group chat.
Felt like sharing it here because I’m sure more people should keep this kind of thing in mind.
Why would that even be a problem? Plenty of blind people in ancient stories, myths and legends. Probably better off without this person.
There’s also the common modern fantasy trope of blind heroes - Daredevil, blind swordmasters, demon hunters from Warcraft, etc. I wouldn’t count these characters as “disability representation” because they can perceive their environment as well as a sighted character could, but they certainly set a precedent for meeting a blind NPC in an RPG.
The Blind Swordsman is a massive trope in fantasy literature. Take a look at David Carradine’s character in Circle of Iron for an archetypal example. It’s a staple in many kung fu movies - the Master uses their hyper developed senses for sounds and for movements in the air to sense and react to their enemies. Or take Luke Skywalker fighting the drone with his eyes covered by using the Force. Hodr was the blind son of Odin.
Blindness also occurs throughout mythic traditions, sometimes as punishment by the gods. It occurs in Greek and Jewish myths. The witch-woman in Hawk the Slayer was blind (played by the great Patricia Quinn, who also starred as Magenta in Rocky Horror).
I think it makes perfect thematic sense to include blindness in characters. A blind beggar, a blind prophet, or a blind samurai are all staples of the fantasy tradition. I’d actually love it if we had to work out a player character who is blind, but that would take a fair amount of effort. I think the payoff would be remarkable and memorable, though.
This wheel chair looks out of place for the setting. I love what Psychonauts 2 did: there is a disabled character that uses psychic levitation for his “wheel” chair.
Another reason the chair looks out of place is because it’s a transfer chair, not a self propel chair. These chairs are designed to push someone, they aren’t designed for independent mobility.
These chairs are commonly represented in media because they are cheap and often the “first chair” a disabled person will get because of their affordability and needing something quick. But they are bog standard and you can’t really get around by yourself in one without more pain or fatigue. You’ll then start the process of getting a measured for a chair that will fit your needs.
Some people only have a transfer chair because they are semi-ambulant/part time chair user, so that’s all they need. But most people who use a wheelchair will not use a transfer chair long term. It’s temporary because it’s shit.
So it doesn’t make sense that someone with an active lifestyle, like a DnD character, would use this style chair as their main aid. Unless there’s something in the campaign, like their main chair was damaged, or the disability is recently acquired, the character is poor, etc.
They busted out of the hospital and took what wasn’t nailed down. Turns out, that was the only thing not nailed down. Twas an odd hospital
Possible but unlikely way around this: cast unseen servant and make it push the chair.
The issue is that this toes the line on erasure. If a character is disabled but offsetting all of their disabilities with magic, they’re not disabled. The disability is just flavor text at that point, which feels a little bit like wearing an offensive caricature of a race as a Halloween costume.
If you want to include a disabled character in the party, that’s great. But disabilities come with drawbacks that real people with disabilities struggle with every day. If a person with a disability wants to erase their disability in a fantasy setting, that’s cool. At that point, it could simply be a power fantasy, the same way people want to play super powerful wizards and super strong barbarians.
But if an otherwise able bodied person wants to play a caricature of a disabled person without actually role playing the disabled part, it could become downright offensive to the people who actually struggle with those disabilities. Because at that point it’s not roleplaying a disabled person; It’s just leaning on stereotypes when it’s convenient, without actually roleplaying the real life struggles that accompany the disability.
Look at Toph from Avatar as a good example. She was blind and used her abilities to offset that when possible. But the important part is that she was still blind, and still regularly dealt with the drawbacks from being blind. She couldn’t read or write, because braille hadn’t been invented. And if she was ever away from solid ground, (like when flying or on sand) she wasn’t able to see anything. Because her sense of “sight” relied on her physical connection to the solid ground. So when she wasn’t touching solid earth, she was completely blind. And she also couldn’t see anything that was airborne, like when they were attacked by giant flying insects. She was blindly throwing rocks into the air, because she couldn’t see where the enemies were.
So what you’re saying is that if she shits her diapers in the game, it’s ok? Weird kink, but w/e floats your boat, I guess…
This wheel chair looks out of place for the setting
dude…
It’s literally a made up world.
There’s most definitely a better solution than a standard wheelchair in a magical world though
I could definitely see like a gnome tinkerer coming up with something like a wheel chair that, after numerous iterations, looks pretty similar to a normal wheel chair.
Ok, start with a chair that literally just has 4 wheels on the feet. Gonna need a way to push it so put handles on the back.
Ok that’s pretty unstable and the test subject fell off repeatedly, damaging several important pieces of equipment and also themselves. Ok so what if we moved the back wheels out a bit and made them a little bigger. Ok pretty stable, gonna need arm rests though the test subject keeps falling off.
Ok now they stay in, and it doesn’t flop about, but it needs two people to move, what if… Hmmm… Ok we need some kind of drive mechanism that can be both powered AND steered with just the hands. Well this is wildly over budget with all the gears… What if we just push the wheels directly with the hands. Gotta make them a lot bigger and put a handle on…
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It also means that people may have disabilities but won’t be held back by them without removing that aspect of their life. And it could be ruled that the differently-abled aspect is something not even magic can take away because it’s so intrinsic to the character
See Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson (although it has a lot of required reading to reach it, being a novella set between books 3 and 4 of the Stormlight Archive.
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It’s not just about being crippled. The spell „Resurrection“ closes all mortal wounds and restores missing body parts. It will also uncircumcise the Jewish priest, removing all his powers.
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As a DM I would probably assume the player was fucking with me (because that’s the mood in my friend groups)
But my response would be something like ‘fine, but realize not every adventure will be wheelchair accessible, you could hardly take a wheelchair into a goblin cave. The world is not naturally kind to disabled people and this world will not be adjusted for you character’
I don’t have a problem with having disabled people in a TTRPG setting, but I hate the “it’s fantasy, stop whining about realism” argument.
You hate it but it’s still true, it’s a genre set entirely in fictional worlds.
Once you establish a baseline for how that fictional world functions, any deviation from it causes issues with the suspension of disbelief.
Your argument is the same one people have been using for years to deflect any and all criticisms when writers fail to keep up with their own world building or are just too damn lazy to care.
First of all not all parts of a fictional universe have to have the same level of technological advancements. Within that baseline you can do whatever you want it’s fiction. Also the reader or audience doesn’t know everything there is about the world and might have gaps of knowledge.
The argument you’re defending is that a fantasy world doesn’t need to have any realism, yet you’re defending it by coming up with reasons why this fantasy world is actually realistic.
there are a lot of inconsistencies, why are people only focused on the ones that allow people with wheelchair to identify with the main character or whatever?
Who are you talking about? What the OP said was :
I don’t have a problem with having disabled people in a TTRPG setting, but I hate the “it’s fantasy, stop whining about realism” argument.
You came along, not to say anything about disabled people in RPGs, but to defend the claim “it’s fantasy, stop whining about realism”.
This isn’t about disabilities, it’s about dismissing any and all criticisms of fantasy simply because fantasy isn’t the real world.
Fantasy, like any genre of fiction, is of course, made up, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any rules. Each fantasy world establishes its own rules, and tries to follow it as best as it can, because that makes the worlds consistent, and more believable. Does that mean those rules can never be broken? No. But you need to come up with a reason why.
That’s all this is about, coming up with reasons why things exist/happen, that’s the core of fiction. If you have a reason why disabled people still exist in your games despite healing magic, that’s awesome, keep at it. If you don’t, i mean… You do you, but don’t go complaining when people complain about it, they’re not ableists (not necessarily at least), they just don’t like bad writing.
You literally came up with a ton of reasons why disabled people can exist in a fantasy setting, so i don’t understand why you’re so against the idea.
I didn’t mean for you to get upset. I just think that the writer for example of a script has a lot of power to mold things how they want and I feel the only limitation should be that it is entertaining and tells a great story. Of course within whatever system you choose for your univers that should be consistent but we both agree that other than that you can freely pick and choose what the rules of that system are. Again no offense meant 😇 😅
Something being fiction is no reason to throw expectations and consistency out the window.
It’s not that there is a wheelchair in a fantasy setting. It’s that the setting is typical high fantasy that may have magic but is otherwise very low tech. But then you have this out of place modern wheelchair made from a steel tube frame.
It’s like if the bard and the paladin disagree any some fact, then the paladin put down his shield and mace just to pull out his fucking iPhone to show that he was right all along.
If they have steel swords all bets are off
I thought that too, but then I saw their weapons are literally sticks, lol. There’s a fancy one with a rock tied to the end.
The bald guy looks to have some armor though. But armor (or sword) hammered out by a blacksmith is still quite different than a welded tube frame with all straight lines and right angles.
Absolutely, but look at lord of the rings. the orcs while industrialized and definitively in the iron age are not as advanced as the dwarfs or the elves. Then you have the hobbits who still live in dirt holes.
Versimilitude is one of the most valuable, and hard to maintain, things at the table.
I think the real problem is that magic in D&D is so mundane that any problem can be “magicked away”, be it healing a wound, curing diseases or exploding an enemy. That makes some situations only really plausible when it’s explained as some stronger magic or “weird power” interfering with common magic.
It’s a magical fantasy setting, I get it, but magic being so common and consequence free makes it a deus ex of whatever flimsy explanation you can imagine. “Why do disabled people exist in typical D&D?” Cue that meme of the cartoon’s Dungeon Master “It’s magic, I ain’t gotta explain shit”.
I mean, you’re correct but that meme’s vision of what a disabled character should look like in a fantasy setting is probably the most boring I’ve ever seen.
A manual wheelchair? In worlds where levitation, flight, telekinesis, etc exist?
Fuck, even the X-Men have a hovering chair.
Not only that, if you could afford a wheelchair or glasses in a medieval setting you can probably afford healing magic
In nearly every RPG or fantasy story I have ever encountered, performing any magic costs and flight or hover magic cost a fuck load. Why would anyone waste mana on floating around like a fucking diva when they could save their mana and use it to kick ass?
Not to mention that badass moment when you drop your cane(hello Yoda) or get up from your wheelchair using your well stored magic, or force or whatever power, and beat the fuck out of your enemies with all that stored up potential.
Gimme a fucking break. What kind of namby pamby players are you?? Bitching about how it looks to use regular disabled people’s equipment? Fuck right off. Only 12 year olds and fucking hipster posers give a fuck how things look.
Not to mention that badass moment when you drop your cane(hello Yoda) or get up from your wheelchair using your well stored magic, or force or whatever power, and beat the fuck out of your enemies with all that stored up potential.
Only 12 year olds and fucking hipster posers give a fuck how things look.
Yeah, correct, and you seem to qualify.
I never mentioned looking cool, I said it’s a boring interpretation.
The idea that in a fantasy world you’re gonna go to the most mundane implementation of the most mundane option to live with a disability makes it boring, not the fact that it doesn’t look cool.
There are more advanced wheelchairs than that in the real world.
For example: Tenser’s flying disk, it’s level 1, lasts hours, is free, and is an all-terrain vehicle by every definition, so much for magic being expensive.
My man Tenser, he’ll carry your stuff and help you get dramatically swole for short periods.
The very first Muscle Wizard™
Why would anyone waste mana on floating around like a fucking diva when they could save their mana and use it to kick ass?
I’ve seen plenty of dudes with big trucks that have never gone off road.
I really don’t understand what’s wrong with people not “curing all illness and disability with magic™” in a world where magic exists and is a thing.
See, in most such fantasy settings, magic not only exists but it has an attitude. Sometimes, a conscience, and not a very ethically nice one (if it allows for eg.: necromancy!). Sometimes, magic even is a god (or gods). Even if they aren’t, the people who use magic are still ultimately humans (with leafy ears etc but still ultimately humans with costumes, at worst) driven by greed, envy or a weird righteous idea of how should a woman dress and behave when in public.
Would you trust some rando nutjob, who claims to speak for Evelok the Eternal Coffee Mug of Satisfaction, to up and magically conjure you new eyes, new arms, whatever? To alter your body to such a fundamental level? Normal people in such settings are already afraid to death of werewolves and those are quite normal things. Compare: even in our magicless, relatively normal world, we have the power and the money to cure most illness and to treat disabled people adequately yet Obamacare is not universal and we can not trust that the people who give people implants and prosthetics haven’t backdoored them to force those disabled people into corporate servitude.
Your player party may be the goodest bois, but they’re only one. The various guilds and churches around quite likely aren’t such goodies on aggregate either, or else there would simply be no plot.
There are deaf people in the real world with treatable deafness that opt not to because they don’t view their deafness as a disability. In addition, not all neurodivergent folks view their conditions as disabilities and wouldn’t change even if there was a “cure” for it.
So, I don’t see how disabilities in a fantasy setting would be different. It’s not even necessarily about trusting the cure, many times it’s about how folks view the condition and themselves.
I agree. It’s just that I’ve seen that angle tackled already by people who can express it much better than I can, so I went for a vector that I saw unexplored. Like, what happens if in a fantasy world magic itself doesn’t want to cure people?
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What if the spell simply accelerates the healing process. Basically like a forward targeted reverse time reversal?
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Damn I’m so gonna die of cancer by the age of 300 if this was in my campain
I really like this idea
Plus there’s the idea of error stacking (basically cancers) every time healing takes place of reviving someone there’s a little bit of error. And over time those errors start stacking on top of each other.
I think you might like some of the lesser known systems. Your perspective would fit in(or at least it would have a place in) well with systems that represent a world setting that is a little darker brutal savage or just more open.
Burning Wheel, GURPS, Savage World and just about any World of Darkness version/flavour
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This is where a good storyteller would have a blast.
Maybe a mage could heal it, but then they would take on the disability themselves.
Or a magical disability is the result of a 1:1 battle with another magic wielder. Only a being of equal power can cause permanent damage.
The disability is a payment for some rare power. Maybe you lose your eyes but can now see the astral plane and pilot the Event Horizon.
Along with what everyone else said - in some universes using magic has a cost to the user. So one could be exhausted just getting around by constantly needing to be floated along.
We have it set up in our campaign where it’s often seen as hella rare for someone with that level of magic
More specifically out campaign turned into a space campaign amount lv 15 cause our planet exploded cause lore lmao
But there’s like planets where there’s nothing but the most basic of cantrips so we end up being gods to them
so far only one has attempted to exploit this and it was the cleric lmao Mainly because they are now the last embodiment of their God and are sort of designed to become them or something lol
Why would they complain when they could just have the party’s healer offer to heal the NPC in exchange for something? That’d be especially great if they were a merchant.
I’m gonna devil’s advocate this for a second.
Unless you’re very poor (which is fair in most fantasy settings there’s always poor people) magic kinda negates disabilities.
Like is there no spell that can cure these disabilities?
With that said to have that big of an issue with it just makes you an ass
Regenerate is a 7th level spell. A cleric would need to be 13th level or higher to use this spell. They are not that common, and they likely have more important things to do.
I’m no Dungeon Master but when a PC has their limb ripped off, isn’t the magic that is required to restore the limb kept behind quite a high spellcasting level? And the cost of the materials might be out of reach to more like “Michigan poor” than just “Dharavi poor”.
7th level spells, yes. Most people who get to a high enough level to use those spells are busy with politics or preventing world ending horrors.
Modern medical aid negates many diseases and disabilities including some blindnesses. But we still have people with these problems.
This is an opportunity for worldbuilding and comments about society. You’d be a fool to look at any fantasy setting and think it’s an equal society.
Yeah, but I suspect OP did zero world building with blindness in mind.
You don’t have to, you don’t have to work up to the revelation that a society might be unjust. We all know and live that, we recognise what someone being disenfranchised in a world that apparently had fixes for the problem means.
Depends on the world, maybe some magic systems dont allow for healing or performing certain tasks?
A great example is the spell “Regenerate” in DnD
It’s a 7th level spell so not many people will have access to it. And given the nature of wizards being super secretive about their spells it’s no surprise it’s not more common.
Also at my table I ruled that someone having such spells used on them can have the complexity of the idea of “self” play a role on what is healed. ie they may be willing but after a long time ones idea of self will play a role in what one sees as “complete” and what gets regenerated
See that would be the defining information.
To what extent to the healing spells heal?
But I’m reminded of that dnd shitpost about revivify and how it even regrows lost limbs and I feel like something like a spinal cord or ocular nerve would be fixed by that.
Hell you could make a hospital where they just kill you if your sick or wounded then revivify your ass back to full health lmao
Revivify doesn’t regrow lost limbs. That’s explicitly stated. You’re thinking of resurrection, which is 7th level and costs a diamond worth 1000 gp.
Yeah tbh I don’t know much about dnd other than what I’ve gathered through memes and shitposts
Just seemed like something magic should easily be able to take care of
I haven’t checked how this is presented in 5E, but I remember in 2E that the costs of the stronger healing spells that operated on more than hit points, and especially the Raise Dead and Resurrection spells had a very high cost in material components, and took their toll on the caster. In other words, not to be used lightly and all the time. Which means finding someone to cast it for you would come at a correspondingly high cost.
In a well-designed campaign world, that should be reflected in either a high monetary cost for the casting of such spells (a church requesting a sizable donation, for example) or some kind of demonstration that the target is worthy in the eyes of the church or its god.
This can actually turn into a storytelling and role-playing opportunity. Imagine you’re blind, and you and your party need to prove that you’re a worthy person while blind before they’ll restore your sight. Or the whole party is made totally blind for the duration of a test or short quest that you have to complete together before the restoration spell can be cast.
All this sufficiently explains the existence of blind people. Lack of imagination is not an excuse for bigotry.
Also, a character may be unable to get their sight restored, and that can and should be explored for its role-playing potential.
There’s a webcomic I read where the cleric became a cleric and started adventuring so he could be powerful enough to help regrow his mother’s lost arm. When she had the option to regrow her arm, she refused. She didn’t need it. With her extended family, she had all the hands she could ever want.
Extended family tired of moving her furniture:
No, her extended family got mad at her wanting to repay them for a dress, insisting she accept it as a gift. They insist she will never owe them for anything, and for good reason.
I feel like having family who would cast a spell to regrow your arm is part of having family who will help you, but it wasn’t exactly trivial at that point. Regrowing an arm is much more costly than curing blindness or paralysis.
I can easily accept a blind npc or pc, and also a wheelchair npc, but a wheelchair pc is a bit convoluted in a fantasy setting. Like this was literally a subplot in doctor strange. There is just too much power in player parties to not knock this out in the first few adventures.
Whether through healing or artifacts or levitation. Just makes no sense unless you want the tactical “guy in a chair” trope, or want to have navigation be a major part of each story.
“Roll for dexterity” when you enter a city that’s not wheelchair accessible at every single stairway 💀
oh cool. Failed roll, roll for constitutional save. Roll for damage.
Nat1, just roll for damage, or if you are a fun DM, have another roll for dex for the objects at the bottom of the stairs.
Ironically unable to roll anywhere at all anymore.
The amount of people in this thread who assume everyone with any type of disability or difference in ability would even want to have their condition corrected is shocking. Why is it impossible to imagine a blind person who doesn’t want their vision fixed for no other reason than they believe they’re fine as is? Why is that such a difficult thing to grasp? Just because free magical heal exists doesn’t mean everyone automatically wants it. You don’t need to turn to other explanations about why it might not be trusted or affordable when you can just say “this person is blind and doesn’t particularly care to be able to see.”
I would guess that the vast amount of people with serious disabilities, paraplegic, blind, deaf, would jump at the opportunity to correct their issues.
That would go doubley so for someone who lives in a d&d style world with far greater dangers and less accomodations than our own.
Yes, but not everyone would. There are deaf people in our world today who don’t want to be able to hear.
https://www.insider.com/why-deaf-people-turn-down-cochlear-implants-2016-12
Yes, but that is because they’ve either grown up that way or have been deaf for so long that they’re fully integrated into the sub culture. In a fantasy setting, deafness would be taken care of before it could influence people culturally
I think that disabilities would still exist, but they would be limited to the poor and lower classes who couldn’t afford the magic treatments. It really depends on how commonplace magic is and varies by the setting.
It also would depend on the disability. Deafness might be less covered, but people would be willing to save up or borrow to cure paraplegism because that prevents you from working most jobs
They’d force people to hear? That’s not fantasy, that’s authoritarian.
Parents finding out their baby was deaf would probably pay to get that healed asap. And people born with hearing and later lose it are probably going to want that fixed.
Also, your “argument” of gasp, authoritarianism!!!1! is nothing but a strawman and makes you look ridiculous
You’re moving the goal posts. Originally you said,
In a fantasy setting, deafness would be taken care of before it could influence people culturally
Now you’re saying they probably would while still taking a tone of me being wrong. You can’t agree with me that deaf people would exist while still acting like I’m wrong.
Also, what you described earlier is akin to eugenics. Forcefully fixing alleged disabilities without consent is absolutely authoritarian.
Forcefully fixing alleged disabilities without consent is absolutely authoritarian.
So a parent is wrong for wanting to fix their child’s disabilities? You’re actually insane if you believe that, and I hope you never have children
A big part of this is that the existing technology ISN’T a magic fix. It has side effects, it works differently than traditional hearing does and this requires long periods of adjustment and learning to bear with it. Literally being able to magic your hearing back to what it naturally should be doesn’t have those significant downsides.
It doesn’t matter, there are still plenty of people who enjoy their deafness in and if itself and don’t see it as something to fix.
I need to see some accounts of this, the reasoning behind this. Because it is unfathomable.
To you. That’s a you problem.
Yes? That’s why I asked for accounts so I could try to understand?
Try engaging with people without looking for “gotchas”.
Later in this article:
https://www.insider.com/why-deaf-people-turn-down-cochlear-implants-2016-12
This developed because it couldn’t be fixed in our world, long enough for these people to develop communities, culture, and literally their own language.
In a world where it could always have been fixed, such communities and cultures are not likely to have ever developed, since the only people who could not get it fixed would be poor, and the poor are in a bad position to gather together in groups based on their shared experience and thus be able to form their own culture.
Furthermore, people not wanting to be cured today exist in a world where there already are significant accomodations for their disabilities. It is not likely these people would be able to do this if our society had not made the collective decision to put in the effort needed to accommodate disabilities.
You’ve got a pretty weak imagination.
Yeah but this is a game for characters who are played by people who exist in a world where that is not the case, so maybe a little sensitivity is called for.
It’s a big case of “I don’t like myself as I am and this person with a disability accepts themself so there must me something wrong with me; I’ll take it out on them!” Style projection
No, it’s argued agaibst because it doesn’t make any sense logistically or economically.
And no, handwaving it away because “it’s a fantasy setting, realism doesn’t matter” is not an argument. There’s a thing called suspension of disbelief, which requires a settng to be internally consistent.
I’m responding specifically to the difficulty some folks have, with understanding why a disabled person wouldn’t want to be ‘fixed’.
The issue is that in a setting with access to healing magic, you generally wouldn’t suffer from a disability long enough for it to be part of your identity
Again, my comment wasn’t responding to the magical rpg aspect at all, just the person who doesn’t want their disability to be addressed in any way. Not a character, a real human actual person.
It’s not impossible, but it certainly seems unlikely. I’m pretty sure even someone as bad ass as Toph would prefer to be able to see. it would make life easier for her without removing any of her strength. Being blind is fuckin hard according to my visually impaired friends.
If someone at my table wanted to play a disabled character we could have fun with it, if course.
