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.
What I won’t accept is that for some reason, all the illustrations that depict this use the hospital wheelchair design. If you are an adventurer who goes into dungeons, you should be getting something that can handle that terrain better than a squeaky shopping cart. Go for the fantasy version of Professor X’ flying chair. Or at least get something with all-terrain wheels, and have them angled like the ones in the wheelchairs athletes use.
Tenser’s Floating Disk could be used as well, if you want to abide by D&D magic. A magic disk that hovers 3ft - 90cm over the ground, but can’t overcome obstacles taller than 10ft - 3 meters. It only lasts 1 hour and only follows the wizard, so you can’t command it from atop, but it doesn’t need concentration. I’d haggle with the DM to make some allowance on movement while atop it, like having to cast a cantrip (using a valuable action if during combat) or having it last 8 hours if cast as a level 2 spell.
This looks to be a wizard being ambushed along a well paved path. I don’t think they needed an all terrain wheelchair. They were just going about their day.
Isn’t there a sorcerer sub-class that can float? I could see someone just floating around all the time and everyone thinks they’re just doing that to be cool, but the reality is they can’t feel/use their legs, but they don’t tell anyone.
Man, this guy floats everywhere. We were sitting down and dinner and then fwoom! he’s floating to go take a shit! like, really? floating to go take a shit?
I’m picturing something that walks like a spider.
Maybe they’re making a run from a hospital invaded by goblins.
Right? If I were a disabled adventurer I’d be driving a tank.
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.
Unless they want to pretend they don’t have magic to seem harmless for a moment
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.
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.
A lot of this has probably been said already, but I want to point out that restrictions breed creativity.
This is a magic fantasty world, how would your character deal with their differences? What coping mechanisms would they develop? Would a blind character develop some alternative to vision? Would a physically disabled character find some other way to navigate the world?
I see people asking “why would disability exist in a world with magical healing” as a way to dismiss the entire concept. I feel that engaging with the question, and trying to answer, it leads to more interesting characters.
Toph from Avatar is an example of following these restrictions. Would her character and abilities even exist if the writers didn’t sit down and wonder how a blind character would work in their universe?
I was thinking Toph while reading your comment lol. And in case anyone feels like Toph is “fixing” disabilities with convenient magic, ATLA also addressed disability in non-magic people as well too with Teo, the inventors son who is in what is effectively a wheel chair, who even takes part in a naval invasion.
How about the deaf general in the Dragon Prince?
She can silently issue complex commands in stealth situations with sign language. It’s pretty dope.
My setting has a lot of nautical aspects to it, including lots of drowned and sea creatures. One of my players in a captain of a ship (they’re all level 15+ now, so he’s worked his way up there). I’d have the blind character have a parrot that narrates the world to them, much like a DM.
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.
Possible but unlikely way around this: cast unseen servant and make it push the chair.
We see almost nothing about “the setting”. Not everything is LOTR, Harry Potter or D&D.
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.
“If you have an amputated leg but offset it with a prosthetic leg, you are not disabled”
What if the magic is still not as good as a fully functioning body, for one reason or another?
I think you may have missed my point. Finding creative ways to offset a disability with magic is great. But even that magic would have limitations.
Maybe you have a flying carpet instead of a wheelchair. But even the best magical items have a limited number of daily uses, because magic power isn’t unlimited.
Maybe you have blindsight instead of regular sight, like giant spiders who can see even in magical darkness. But then you’re completely blind outside of the 30’ range, because blindsight only applies to the specified range.
Maybe you’re missing an arm and have compensated with an artificer’s prosthetic that has some built in features/tools. But you don’t have any sense of touch or proprioception (so you tend to bump into things and knock it against things when you aren’t consciously paying attention to where it is,) and have disadvantage on strength or dexterity checks/saves that involve gripping/climbing/etc.
My point isn’t simply that using magic to counteract a disability is wrong. In a world where magic permeates everything, it would be expected. My point is that you can’t simply erase the disability and use it for flavor text only when it’s convenient to you. Because disability permeates the disabled person’s life and inherently shapes how they interact with the world on a day to day basis.
The thing is just that this started with a Psychonauts 2 character, and I haven’t played it, so for all I know maybe it makes no difference. But I assume constant telekinesis is at least somewhat inconvenient in that world. What about someone like Toph from Avatar TLA, whose blindness is acknowledged occasionally, but most of the time functions fine?
A question might be, how do you define a sufficient amount of limitations? I’m sure there’s a point where everyone will go “yeah, you may as well be healthy”, but I assume most situations are a grey area. But I’m also neither disabled nor have experience with disabled people, so I’m probably the furthest from judging.
Also things like, how that magic carpet would be even more useful for a fully functioning person, even with a large amount of uses. Still a disadvantage on the merit of being the only option, rather than being AN option.
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…
For the sake of roleplay and being friends, the idea of disabled people in fantasy settings should not be difficult to accept, but that doesn’t mean that all fantasy IPs should have all sorts of modern disabilities. Like in a ttrpg you are creating a collaborative story using the ttrpg systems and in that sense heck yeah you can have magic chairs to transport otherwise disabled people. BG3 straight up cures blindness by use of a magical prosthetic eye, so there is even precedent for it in the popular dnd video game.
But what I totally want is some more creative and magical ways to handle disabilities, or maybe just whimsical. What about a druid that wildshapes into a snake to move around, and just slithers on the ground. straight up never uses a wheelchair cuz snek. Or magical leg armor. Prosthetic eyes? why not just have a large crystal ball that balances on your head that does the seeing for you.
And, those are awesome solutions, my thought is, that a random peasant could get disabled and not afford magical solutions. Or maybe they’re superstitious of magic. Maybe they’re part of a blood cult that worships some demon that values the sacrifice of limbs. There are legitimate reasons to have some npcs with disabilities.
Holy shit these are some amazing ideas. Got anymore I can
stealuse?
I mean that really depends on the world you are set in: if magic is everywhere/can heal anything someone who is blind could break immersion IF there is no good reason (he doesn’t want to see for personal reasons, it’s a curse and can’t be removed etc.)
However if magic treatment is rare/expensive of course there would be lots of disabled people (monster attacks, accidents, diseases, etc.)
Obviously thats not the problem here(the guys just a dick) but it’s something i run into a lot when designing worlds/characters: a lot of our real world problems fall apart if introduced into a magical setting.
it could lead to really cool story/character stuff though like jjk: people born with broken bodies but incredible magical powers
Never miss an opportunity for unique challenges/stories.
It could be a hook like fullmetal alchemist or a realization for characters later: they are fine the way they are they don’t need to be fixed kind of stuff. simply discounting disabilities takes so much potential out of worlds/stories.
If I were a DM, I’d consider magic to be another human sense. It can’t fix the body more than the body existed before injury, and still doesn’t fix all injuries. So like a blind monk that trains can extend magic to act like an echolocation, but they were born blind so can’t be unblinded. Or someone broke their back and it healed incorrectly causing paralysis, only highly specialized magic has a chance of fixing it.
You’re overstating how common magic is. Aragorn is only 5th level, and you need to be a 13th level bard/cleric/druid to regrow limbs. Even then, you can only regrow one or two per day. It can be done, but it’s not common.
Is that enough to feed the party?
As always, the real issues are being discussed in the comments.
Another possibility is that maybe magic can only heal injuries and illnesses, but can’t do anything with congenital disabilities, because the magic restores the person to their natural state, and being blind/etc is what’s natural for that character. So even if magic could heal those who are disabled due to circumstances, there would still be plenty of disabled people who were born with their disabilities.
But… There’s a spell called remove blindness in several dnd editions. It’s not even high level.
I’d say that if there’s a spell that literally states a fix, it’s fixable. There might be some that do not though.
Maybe the spell only removes acquired forms of blindness, say through the magic spell Blindness, curses, etc, and has no ability to generate new, functioning tissue for someone that never had any.
Pathfinder 1e / dnd 3.5 : https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/removeBlindnessDeafness.htm
Remove blindness/deafness cures blindness or deafness (your choice), whether the effect is normal or magical in nature.
5e spell: https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/lesser-restoration
5e’s spell might be interpreted as in, it removes the “blinded” condition, which might be different than being “blind”. However I would guess that when they developed the spell they did not think about it, they just bundled a bunch of spells in 1.
Yeah, I would agree that they probably didn’t even think about it. I’d probably interpret the spell as removing the “blinded” condition, whether it’s caused by magic or just someone throwing sand in the character’s eyes or other “normal” causes of the blinded condition.
The Pathfinder version also specifies “The spell does not restore ears or eyes that have been lost, but it repairs them if they are damaged.” Someone with congenital blindness or deafness may not have “damage” that can be repaired, and with the ears/eyes being naturally non-functional, the spell giving them a new ability (sight/hearing) that they previously didn’t possess could be interpreted as being beyond the spell’s scope.
I couldn’t care less if there is a disabled character in a fantasy game. But it does beg the question: why would there be a magic character who relies on a real-world wheelchair when they presumably have magical abilities that would eliminate their disability, and why would that be someone’s fantasy?
That being said, it’s fantasy. You’re allowed to do virtually anything you want. It’s up to the DM to accommodate their players.
It may simply not be a disability in their eyes. If you can use magic your ability isn’t as grounded in your own physical ability. A fighter sure, but there are other classes that may not have a desire to “fix” what we would consider to be disabling!
This would almost certainly be similar to how people on the autism spectrum feel vs how people who don’t, expect them to feel.
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.
why would there be a magic character who relies on a real-world wheelchair when they presumably have magical abilities that would eliminate their disability,
Even moreso in something like a typical medium-high magic D&D setting, where most medium size towns have at least one person around that can fix those sorts of problems for people several times a day.
and why would that be someone’s fantasy?
Because to some people the most important thing of all is representation of specific groups and everything else is secondary.
Because to some people the most important thing of all is representation of specific groups and everything else is secondary.
This but unironically. Any TTRPG game is about the players first and foremost, a good DM can take a few minutes to work out any inconsistencies with the world building if it makes a player happy.
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.
Versimilitude is one of the most valuable, and hard to maintain, things at the table.
You hate it but it’s still true, it’s a genre set entirely in fictional worlds.
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
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.
Why can’t magic cure them though? In star trek, people don’t cure Picards baldness because people don’t care about it, they realise its nothing to mock. But that’s just a “cosmetic” ailment.
Things like blindness, or being unable to walk should be curable by magic, right?
To continue with startrek: Geordie la forge.
He was added because they wanted to represent a blind person, and show how technology can help offset disabilities.Picard was bald because they didn’t care, and Geordie was blind because they couldn’t cure him.
The inclusion of a blind person lets them tell the story of how this future society deals with a disability like blindness.
So you can use magic to tell the story of a disabled person. Why are they disabled? Why can’t magic help them? How has their society reacted to this?
Maybe it’s as simple as simple healing magic can’t cure an injury you were born with, so they only have use of their legs through an advanced transformation spell. They live with the worry that a passing dogooder will cast a healing spell that will “restore” their condition and leave them stranded far from the magic that can actually help them. This makes them come across as brusque to people who are “only trying to help”.
It’s a story, so the magic only does what you want. The point is that we often choose to tell the stories that leave people out because it’s more convenient.
To speak more to the point - Geordi is asked by his doctor a few times (by different doctors) why he didn’t upgrade to a more modern prosthetic. He preferred the visor.
Eventually, in the movies, he did switch - presumably his new implants finally had feature parity with the visor. Or he got tired of the visor popping off…
The argument could be made that they did cure Geordi La Forge’s blindness using technology by means of his visor and later ocular implants. When I think about disability in fantasy settings I think of golem/automaton prosthetics replacing limbs and the like, and that most disabilities could be helped in one way or another. So to me the simple answer of why would there be disability in a world where magic should be able to cure everything is that not everyone has enough gold to pay for that magic or skill to wield it themselves. In that sense it feels very relatable to our real world, people unable to afford the technology and services that could help them
Magic medicine means magic ailments. Just like the introduction of antibiotics produced bacteria like MRSA, the use of magic to cure wounds could produce MRSA. That is, magic resistant staphylococcus aureus, as opposed to methicillin.
Curses and other such primarily magical ailments could also be much more difficult to deal with than simple infections/wounds.
Because magic is a tool to tell stories, and you want your group to meet a blind person. Maybe you invent a kind of blindness that can’t be healed by ordinary healing magic, or a social rule that doesn’t allow for it to be healed, or a severe negative side effect, or whatever makes sense to explain it.
Not everyone views their differences as disabilities.
Cochlear implants perpetuate the idea that deaf people need to be “fixed” — and a lot of deaf people take issue with that.
https://www.insider.com/why-deaf-people-turn-down-cochlear-implants-2016-12
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; it’s a perfectly reasonable question.
consider a character where the one disability gives rise to a heightened ability in another form. For example, someone who is blind may have a heightened sense of hearing. That could would really well in a tabletop rpg in a scenario where the character could hear something before anyone else could sense it.
Daredevil.
I like to imagine healing magic as almost a targeted time reversal. Otherwise, things get would get strange when people are overhealed.
My head cannon is also that repeated magical healing increases the risk of cancers and defects when it is shown as a form of natural regrowth. It’s totally worth using in combat if the alternative is death, but you risk shortening your life with repeated use. This helps explain people having sick battle scars and other wounds in most fantasy settings.
The other explanation that would make sense is that healers are exceptionally rare, but since we are heroes in these stories/games, it just doesn’t seem like it to us.
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
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.
What if the spell simply accelerates the healing process. Basically like a forward targeted reverse time reversal?
I feel like that opens up the opportunity to say they experience rapid aging in that area as well, accelerating cell divisions, right next to areas running at normal speed. Probably wouldn’t be great for the circulatory system.
It’s fun to think about
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
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.
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
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.
You think poor people never had their own cultures? Lol, lmao
Magic doesn’t fix being poor
Not my point, obviously.
(but like any useful skill, those with access have much better chances)
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.
It is like saying a Wizard isn’t allowed to have glasses.
I’ve seen them somewhat often in RPGs and related material. There’s those who are blind, frail, deaf, weak or lacking a skill to do something necessary. Even Basic D&D had notable penalties for rolling INT 3-5, being illiterate to start with.
NPCs in fantasy settings still have hinderances, and they’re expected. Maybe they can be neutralized by healing magic in D&D, or there may be equipment that works around them. The wrong part is shutting down the concept, as that’s contempt for the weak (technically a symptom of fascism.)
While Nazi-Germany was infamous for ‘euthananizing’ disabled people, it is sadly not a principle reserved for the right extreme.
Luckily most don’t go as far as right out killing the weak. But sadly there is almost always a splinter group in any political or ideological orientation that shows contempt for the weak.
Why people downvote you I don’t know.
I just got here, but I’d guess it’s because their comment reads like they are saying “no, facists aren’t the bad guys, both sides show contempt for the weak sometimes!” It’s a false balance fallacy.
I’m not sure if that was the intention, or it was just unfortunately worded.
It is - in your strawman argument. Because they’ve just said that evil is not limited to fascists and described how.
I agree with every word and the tone too. There are plenty of people with “contempt for the weak” who for whatever reason disagree that they are dirt.
It’s an attack at dishonorable people, and if you have the need to resort to strawman arguments, then maybe it has something to do with you.
You asked why the comment was getting downvoted. I responded with how the comment could be interpreted in a way that warrants downvotes.
You seem to have taken that proposed explanation very personally for some reason.
I took it personally because you’ve put that “implying Nazis were not as bad” part as if it’s normal thought process. It’s really not, I only see such when the one expressing it has already made up their mind and is just trying to silence\condemn the initial commenter. I haven’t ever seen that IRL being expressed sincerely. It’s always “burn the witch”.
While I personally haven’t downvoted it, I did have a nice eye roll at it.
Nothing stated is false, but there’s a massive gulf between contempt and euthanization. Both are wrong, but one involves stuff like murder and forced sterilization. The other may involve terrible treatment if the bigot is given the opportunity. Scale/magnitude is important.
As a personal thing, whenever people start tossing around nazi and fascism I find it a bit harder to take their statements seriously. The terms are becoming significantly less impactful through modern overuse. Nazis and fascists absolutely still exist, but it feels as though the terms are becoming shorthand catch-all labels for general reprehensible behavior/beliefs for people too lazy to explain further or to use more specific terminology. Not saying that’s ocurring here, but in general.
Like are we talking about people who believe that all the world’s issues are caused by meddling and scheming of the genetically inferior and rule of the world is the birthright of some genetically pure ubermenschs, or is it somebody unable to handle a blind character in a TTRPG? Someone going to a protest to shoot people, or some couch potato who has stewed too long with right wing media? All are bad, but it’s a matter of scale which is significant.
Much like how issues of unconcious biases or microaggressions should probably be solved with attempts at education rather than shouting someone down like they’re calling for eugenics. There has to be a better solution than just dismissing large swaths of people for the wrong beliefs, or in a lot of online discourse, calling for physical violence against them.
That’s not happening here, but I’ve seen so much of it that it shades how I interact with online discourse.
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”.
You can do it with limits, like having bigger wounds heal wrong if you try to heal them too fast (which is how broken bones are handled IRL, sometimes they must be re-broken to correct the healing process)
Couldn’t a cleric heal partial paralysis tho?
There are plenty of reasons a disabled person could exist in a fantasy setting. A transaction, giving something up for power (e.g. Odin). A curse from an enchanter, that they do not have the power to remove. A religious superstition around those that have had accidents befall them (that it is the will of their god). Or even simply the fact that a number of common people may not be able to afford the services of a cleric (for a villager in the mountains, a journey to the city to have their paralysis cured may be beyond what they can manage).
Hell. After reading this I feel like permanent effects from magical damage resulting in physical disabilities should be a trope!
I can think of a few examples: The Magicians, Game of Thrones, etc. But as a gameplay mechanic it feels like it would have some seriously cool possibilities.
In addition to the list of explanations for why disabled people can exist in a fantasy setting that [email protected] provided, I’ll also just say:
Using diegetic explanations for why a problematic aspect exists in a piece of fictional media does not address the substance of the problem. The problem is that disability is often not represented in fantasy stories. Pointing out that there’s an in-universe explanation for why this may be the case doesn’t solve the lack of representation. These stories are fiction, and you can add any explanation for why disabled people exist as easily as you can erase disability completely.
This video does a good job of explaining this some more: https://youtu.be/AxV8gAGmbtk?si=YRvXjpZv_YP9Z5sC
Compared to a high fantasy setting, everyone is disabled. I cannot fight a dragon any more than a blind man can be magically cured of blindness.
What if the cleric isn’t around when it happens? I mean if you take an ax to the spine and don’t run into a cleric for 3 years can they do anything? I would probably say no.
There is nothing in the rules as written that prevents it
Edit: forgot i am not in the dnd community
What if they’re born with it?
You’ll get so much hate for stating the obvious
