Had this conversation with someone who chose to no longer be at my table after meeting a blind NPC

Why would that even be a problem? Plenty of blind people in ancient stories, myths and legends. Probably better off without this person.

I'll echo the words of my friend, who is a permanent wheelchair user:

"Yes, I identify with my disability as part of who I am, but I would still take a cure without hesitation"

Yes, people with disabilities identify with their disability, so even in a fantasy setting I can see how their disability would be part of their character.

But every disabled person I know would figuratively leap at the opportunity to reverse their disability with magic. It is also basically impossible to use a wheelchair while holding something like a wand or a staff or a fireball in one hand, so if there's enough magic around to push a wheelchair, there's probably enough to make your legs work. That's why somebody has a good reason not to expect a wheelchair in a fantasy world. I can see how somebody who doesn't really know any disabled people would panic at the idea of a wheelchair being part of the narrative or something like that, and I can sympathize with it.

I mean... You live in a world where magic healing exists. Why would anyone be blind when you can find a sorcerer, wizard or cleric (or even a spoony bard like Volo) and restore your sight in at least 20 different ways? 🤔

This was a bit of weird shit in Star Trek with Geordi, too. They can literally grow him new eyes (and do eventually) but the visor is also cool, and the rule of cool wins.

It's not so much that a disabled person being realistic is unfun; it's that it doesn't seem to fit the world itself which kills suspension of disbelief if you understand how the game world works. You'd have to work extra hard at giving a believable reason for this person to be disabled and not have gotten healed through magical means.

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.

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.

I fucking love it when settings have the magic to cure any disability or ailment. I also fucken love it when inequality is so bad most of the population can't afford to cast it. I once had my players blow nearly everything they earned to heal a child with a terminal illness. Why would I make such a cruel world? Because tears taste good and memories are nothing more than a heartstring pulled.

Ok but a wheelchair would be dumb when you could just get some enchanted armor.

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.

In the United States, millions and millions of people walk around with conditions we can treat with our own kind of magic: modern medicine. So why don't they get that prosthetic arm, treat that chronic pain, get that surgery, or take those pills? They can't afford it. Why don't they get that vaccine? They don't believe in it. If magic exists to eliminate all disabilities, then there should be no smart, rich people with disabilities in your world building, certainly. Plenty to go around otherwise though.

I don't see why anyone would take issue with it, but one of the coolest things about powerful magic is that nobody needs to be disabled. You can heal them with magic! I know I'd love to get a fantasy healer to heal some of my old wounds. But even in D&D magic comes with a price, and more powerful spells consume very expensive reagents. So it's understandable that there would still be injured and crippled people.

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.

Wait wait I know how this one went: “You purchase this media to ESCAPE the real world and they FORCE their WOKE AGENDA down your throat!!!”

Fucking pissy crybabies, let em cope

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?

dear disabled mages

just enable it in the settings

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.)

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?

If they can't tolerate the idea of a blind NPC existing, good riddance to them. Yeah, sounds like you dodged a bullet.

It's fine, provided it's not a plot hole - i.e. your fantasy setting needs to not have abolished blindness as a realistic malady, which some settings do. E.g. LOTR 100% has blind people, while the Harry Potter universe only has very poor blind people, since solving blindness is as trivial as a polyjuice potion, even if nothing else works (and something more effective is bound to work).

That reminds me of a conversation at a DnD table where somebody's OC's mom was a noble died during labor due to bleeding and the DM started asking questions "Do they not believe in healing there? No potions no resurrection, nothing?" and eventually it became canon that she was a badass who killed an orc monk while 9 months in and took the last bit of damage as bleed damage.

Couldn't a cleric heal partial paralysis tho?

How did they even come to such a perspective? There are all kinds of physical handicaps in fiction.

Raistlin had a mysterious uncurable ailment imposed by Par-Salian.
Albrech has to forsake love to attain the Rheingold. Several gods and heroes are missing various limbs.

And blindness? Daredevil. Tiresias. Any number of blind kung-fu masters.

Sometimes they're afflictions that are paid as a price for powers, sometimes their curses, sometimes their obstacles that heroes overcome. But disabled people have been all over fantasy literature for millenia.

Realistically most adventure parties leave many disabled people (and beasts) in their wake...

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'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

The thing I find difficult about disability in a TTRPG is that it's something that is either ignorable due to the character backstory (e.g. they have some mcguffin/ability that allows them to operate without difficulty); or it's going to be a repetitive complication that the party has to constantly work around (e.g. the barbarian carries the wheelchair up every set of stairs they encounter).

If it's just flavour, then it seems like less of a disability than a backstory. If it's a constant hassle, then it changes the nature of the game - it becomes more about a party helping each other through individual adversities. The latter sounds fine, but I'm not sure how I'd run it.

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 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.

I've always wanted to have a DND character that's an armless monk and all they do is kick bad guys to death.

I don't doubt their existence but the wheel chair doesn't look like fantasy.

Well it is quite strange to be so offended of disabled people that you would leave the game But as a devil's advocate what the problem is actually a world building one. If you establish that the world has magic, magic is widespread and powerful then the fact that there are disabled people could be slightly immersion breaking. For example in DnD lesser restoration a 2nd lvl spell would cure most blindnesses (well except if the person has actually lost their eyes). Hard to say anything more because you gave so little details. Ultimately that person had a disproportionate response but I find your meme both pointless what aboutism and generalization. Hope you have a good day.

Fantasy and sci-fi are designed as alternate realities to this world and usually disabilities are expressed through metaphor rather than literal real world disability. A person can’t use magic so they become the worlds greatest artificer and the like.

I’m all for representation, but what is fantasy without being able to fantasize about not having a disability?

Conversely, why would a person want to fantasize about having a disability? I’m not saying there aren’t valid reasons, but I would imagine most people would be doing it in a performative manner.

Reminds me of my favourite Flamethrower Source Tyrant of tower defence game

In Pathfinder there is a whole subset of assistive items so that all gamers can feel welcome at the table.

It depends on the tone of the setting. Someone who gets their leg broken in a Forgotten Realms game can usually find a small-time priest to cast Cure Wounds on them, preventing most disabilities that aren't from birth. Someone who gets their leg broken in Warhammer Fantasy has to hope within their gimped traveling distance that there's a priest of the correct faith capable of appeasing the gods for the healing to happen, before their detriments become permanent. As such, having a disabled character in a game with more accessible healthcare requires an extra degree of explanation, on top of the PCs' and players' emotional response to someone being so downtrodden. The circumstances of their ailment, who or what was responsible, how they see their ailment and work around it, all are weights on the players' suspension of disbelief that a GM has to take into account that they generally otherwise wouldn't with John Miller, the able-bodied dude who runs the mill with a wife, three kids, and a problem with rats stealing the grain that he mills. It's like a Chekov's Gun in that sort of way, the GM as a storyteller surely wouldn't spend the effort to decide that an NPC has a trait that is notably separate from the default without it being somehow relevant to the plot. The mage asks the party to do a quest for their magical research, a general asks the party to do a quest for national security, and a person in a wheelchair... what desire do you give them that wouldn't be misconstrued as able-ist or a waste of that character trait? It's very difficult, often comes with an air of making some kind of a statement, either that they're a writer capable enough to wear disabled-face without it being offensive, or taking a preachy high-ground telling people a message about human sympathy, determination, and adaptability that they've already been made well aware of by the existence of popular culture.

Depending on the magic it might not make sense because people could heal everything, although you could explain it away by saying that the character could not afford a skilled healer.

I looked it up and the first known wheelchair that you could move yourself in was invented in the 1600s, which was after firearms became relatively common.

I mean, dwarves in wheelchairs is already a thing in 5e. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Banak_Brawnanvil

Conservative old men are so sensitive.

Could magic overcome, resolve or undo a disability?

.

someone who chose to no longer be at my table after meeting a blind NPC

Sounds ridiculous to me.
Anything in roleplaying is possible, why not this stuff then?

.

I have a metal mini-titan in my chat text roleplay with friends. It got born 2 weeks ago (game lore time). It doesn't speak and understands pretty much nothing when other party members try to communicate.
Still they have been happy with my character and they have played normally.
(I have agreed that if it becomes too boring we can find machinery that helps communicating.)
I told about our game to an acquaintance and she seemed happy/intrigued of my character choice!

I'm dreaming of a VR game with a disabled wizard who is confined to a chair and uses telekinesis or teleportation to move around. That would give the game a lore reason for VR locomotion.

I don't have an issue with it, but that wheelchair does look mismatched to everything else, looks too modern.

Why are people in the comments arguing about what is or isn't possible in D&S or Star Trek or whatever? As far as I can see it, there is no description about what kind of universe this plays in.

It doesn't make sense to argue whether or not a wheelchair like that "makes sense" in a D&D universe?!

If characters in a story have a disability the question should be "What is the DM/Author trying to say, and how does this character add to the world they are portraying?" The plague of diegetic essentialism etc.

The wheel chair is a bit of weird in the setting. GRRM was more creative and in a more massively magic world it should be easy to think of a more fitting solution.

Well yes, but if there is powerful magic in a world, aren't all disabilities healable?

Reminds me of all the discourse about the chair

Crippled mage load out

But... That depends on the magic, doesn't it? I'd argue you could easily use magic to fix disabilities. Or do healers not exist in your world?

This would be cool to see! Lots of ways to represent historically unrepresented people in alternative settings.

They probably shouldn't have left. If I was playing I would interrogate the blind person and find out why they don't try to cure it. Do they hate themselves? Do they like the pity parties people throw for them? Is there a neferious force preventing them from curing it? Or is the DM a fucking idiot?

Make magic that cures disabilities, then there’s no more disabled people. The only reason then would be if you want to be disabled.

Let's just pretend that Zatoichi wasn't a thing. NB he might be fiction but the blind swordsman kicked serious ass.

Rysn

If you don't treat people as people because of a disability, you have both violated the social contract.

Had a session last night, where my player where asking this question, and posted this post as a response on the screen, and it started in, how could we do a magic chair into, let's make an exo-squeleton. I come there to say,

That as a DM I have stollen your stuff and added it to my campaign

Maybe he really didn't like Hawk the Slayer.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/06/hawk-the-slayer-film-sequel-terry-marcel-jack-palance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Götz_von_Berlichingen

Game of Thrones. Bran Stark is literally crippled from the very first episode.