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.
I mean on one side you’d have the magic to heal many if not all disabilities.
On the other hand in reality we have wheel chairs and stuff to heal and prevent many diseases, too, but still not everyone can get those…
As a fun saying goes “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”
The same could easily apply to magics of many kinds
Every time I see shit about cutting edge prosthetics with near-full motion capability, controllable via muscles and nerves or whatever they even use nowadays, I’m reminded of my friend from work who couldn’t even afford something beyond a simple plastic harness arm that essentially is just to make it look like he has an arm, with no utility value.
He would take it off during work because it just got in the way, but wore it out to avoid all the questions about it with randos.
Every time I see things about cancer treatments I’m reminded of a few people I knew from my parents social events that have died in the last 10 years simply because they couldn’t afford the treatments. A few even got divorced to keep their debt from ruining their spouse after they’re gone.
The future can be here all it wants, but until everyone has access to it, we may as well be considered a medieval society.
5e isn’t that bad. Even poor people make two silver a day, and if hiring someone to cast a second level spell to cure a family member of blindness was more than they could afford, you could get so rich casting for money. But those rules are just a suggestion, and I’d probably make it so at least some cases of blindness are a little harder to cure. And you could also make it so economic disparity is much worse.
We have the ability to make Tuberculosis not exist and have for half a century. At least 1.6 million unnecessary deaths occurred because of it in 2022. Anyone who can’t think further than the first point has the thought capabilities of a gnat.
I just found John Green‘s account.
On a serious note, it is really sickening to hear stuff like this. It’s not even that those drugs are crazy expensive or extremely difficult to distribute. It’s just greed and very bad distributed wealth
We have the ability to make Tuberculosis not exist and have for half a century.
Please tell me more. My knowledge about this must be very outdated.
There are a lot of things that are really only failing for a lack of distributing ressources. But Tubercolosis (where our once widely used vaccine was mostly ineffective in eradicating it and the treatment is complicated and long requiring monitoring of each patient because of the possibility of secondary infection from the antibiotics or organ damage) is not what comes to my mind first, second or for quite a while.
In fact in both cases research is ongoing in search for more effective vaccines and easier treatments (primarily for shorter treatment periods as well as against the multiple antibiotic resistences), because our tools today are not actually up to the task.
Our tools today are absolutely up to the task. Of those deaths, how many of them do you think are in rich countries vs. the rest of the world.
Seventeen of the twenty-two countries that account for 80 percent of the world’s TB burden are classified as low income (GNP per capita of less than US$760, World Bank 2000). Within countries the prevalence of TB is higher among the poor, and other vulnerable groups such as the homeless. Studies in both high income and low-income countries (USA, United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Vietnam, Mexico and Philippines) reveal significantly higher rates of TB in poor populations (Davies et al. 1999; Grange 1999; Barnes 1998; Tupasi et al. 2000).
The costs for people in low income countries are so high that often they are unattainable
TB patients and households in sub-Saharan Africa often incurred high costs when utilizing TB treatment and care, both within and outside of Directly Observed Therapy Short-course (DOTS) programs. For many households, TB treatment and care-related costs were considered to be catastrophic because the patient costs incurred commonly amounted to 10% or more of per capita incomes in the countries where the primary studies included in this review were conducted.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3570447/
This helps the disease spread and fester in these countries. Whereas so called developed nations reap the benefit of something that does not need to be a problem for anyone.
Something that struck me as so obvious only after losing faith was when one of the “new atheists” pointed out that of all the miraculous healings people claim their gods do even today, they never seem to heal amputees.
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.
Critical Role had a guest playing a blind character. It was a wizard with folk hero background who used his bird familiar to see. He was awesome.
I could swear he was a cleric who somehow had the familiar spell. Yeah, cleric: https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Shakäste
Shakäste and his familiar the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna! Very awesome character.
Played by Khary Patyon, aka the voice of Cyborg for the last two decades.
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.
Those are from our world where magic is no more than a suggestion. In dungeons and dragons magic is tangible and can very easily cure blindness or any other ailment
Hmm, that doesn’t mean everyone is perfect and beautiful though. Maybe they can’t afford to pay a sorcerer. Oh, I know! Maybe they have a curse.
Those are great explanations and if that was the case I would try to help them because it’s ridiculous being blind in that world. But the vibe op gives off suggests to me that they weren’t planning on someone helping them, they were just there for diversity.
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.
It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Representation is great, because it makes us feel less like a shame to be ignored or scorned - but also, being disabled fucking sucks, kind of by definition, and it’s hard to take seriously people who peddle the ‘handicapable’ stuff. I don’t need any toxic positivity in my life, thanks.
The only people I have ever seen claim that disabilities aren’t so bad and you can live completely normal etc. are people with no disabilities at all. I’m not disabled, my eyesight is just shit and I don’t know what I’d be willing to do to get normal eyesight. Just to get rid of a pair of glasses. I can’t imagine the lengths someone actually disabled would go to in order to get a cure.
“I’m not disabled, my eyesight is just shit and I don’t know what I’d be willing to do to get normal eyesight. Just to get rid of a pair of glasses.”
I apparently would pay someone a large sum of money to zap my eyes with a laser using a giant machine with only the vague promise that after the laser burns heal, your vision will be better.
laser burns
Technically not burning. Even though (and nobody warned me of this before my procedure) it sure af smells like something is burning while the laser shines down on your exposed retina, that’s actually the smell of vaporised cornea.
TL;DR: laser vaporisation, not laser burning. Much more metal.
That somehow sounds even worse.
Valid point, let’s work with it
Nitpick: “large sum of money” - at least here laser treatment is pretty cheap (less than 1k for both eyes)
1: My eyesight is too bad for laser treatment, by the time my eyesight would be corrected there would be nothing left of my cornea and likely retina as well.
1.5: I still have options available to me that, as you point out, just involve throwing more money at the problem
2: me having that option is beside the point. The point is that even just a minor nuisance like glasses is enough to seriously fuck with someone’s (perceived) quality of life, never mind something that actually severely impacts your daily life.
at least here laser treatment is pretty cheap (less than 1k for both eyes)
I’m not sure where you are, but that’s exceptionally cheap. I got it done in Vietnam for about $2k for both eyes. Here in Australia it would be more like $4k per eye.
I suppose the health insurance covers a lot of it, but given the quotes my mother and I (well mine was more a “would cost this much but no can do with your eyes kiddo”) got respectively plus what the health insurance likely paid/pays the “normal” price would still be ~1.5k-2k for both eyes.
I’m in the same boat, and I’ve learned that the answer is I don’t want the smell of burning eyeball lingering in my mind no matter how well I see afterwards.
In our world we do have the magic to push a wheelchair around, and it’s not even hard to do this. Tinkerers can cast the spell of self-propelling wheelchair in their garages.
But magicing someone’s legs to work is still a far way off.
(Remember, when magic is well explained and documented, and people get used to it, they tend to call it technology.)
(Remember, when magic is well explained and documented, and people get used to it, they tend to call it technology.)
Depends on the kind of magic. Magic machines that do wondrous things? Sure, technology. Magic where you manipulate energies with the power of thought and will alone? I’ma stick with magic, thank you.
“oh that’s just telekinesis”
“cool nickname, still magic!”
If by “not even hard” you mean “costs as much as a car”, then sure. My friend also let me know just how costly power chairs are.
It’s expensive for sure, but that’s mostly because powered chairs are made by medical companies and in comparatively low numbers.
A mobility scooter has almost all components a powered chair has, and these can be had for as little as €1000.
The technology behind a powered chair isn’t hard.
And even if we use the high price of a power scooter: How much does it cost to make a paraplegic person walk?
“Not even hard” and “costs as much as a car” aren’t mutually exclusive when it comes to the field of medicine, especially in the US. Many drugs cost pharmaceutical companies pennies to manufacture, but they still sell them for hundreds per pill simply because they can. Medical equipment often employs similar price gouging for no other reason than to profit as much as possible from people who have little choice but to pay.
My friend talked a lot about the forces at work. Not all of it was simple capitalism. Disabled people are notoriously hard to design for because each disabled person is different and has different needs. This kind of business is not scalable and disabled people are already a minority. Even proper hand wheelchairs are fucking expensive cuz only a couple companies make them.
That does make sense. But still, making a powered chair is not at all technologically difficult. You need the chair, two motors and an input system that works for the user.
Sure, if there’s a lot of bespoke parts and manual labour, coupled with basically no economy of scale, it’s going to be expensive. But it’s not difficult.
Cochlear implants are frowned upon by some in the Deaf community.
I went to a NTID school, the community there does not consider themselves to have a “disability” literally. To them, it’s just a language.
There’s a lot of cultural stuff there that I’m certainly not qualified to comment on.
To them, it’s just a language.
What is? Being deaf isn’t a language. Sign language absolutely is a language, or to be more accurate, it’s a whole class of languages, because ASL is as different from AusLan or BSL as English is from Spanish or German.
And like any language, it’s more than just a set of definitions and rules of grammar. It carries culture.
Yeah exactly, for them it’s about the culture, in which language is a huge factor.
It is also basically impossible to use a wheelchair while holding something in one hand, so if there’s enough magic around to push a wheelchair, there’s probably enough to make your legs work.
First, off the top, you can stop your wheelchair, use your hand(s) for something else, and then start moving again.
Second, you’re making a lot of assumptions about the magic system. Every magic system has limitations. What if healing is a clerical spell, not a magic spell, and there are no clerics around? Maybe the nearest cleric who can heal is many miles away, perhaps over dangerous terrain inhabited by bandits, monsters, etc. Maybe the spell requires some very specific and difficult-to-obtain materials. Or maybe the spell is very high-level, requiring many years to learn, so clerics or mages charge a very high fee for this service. Any of these, or a combination, could be a reason why a disabled person (or a family member on their behalf) is questing.
Maybe the knowledge of the healing magic was held by some ancient civilization and it was lost when that civilization fell, but the disabled character has found a clue to where some ancient ruins could be unearthed where the secret might be found.
Or maybe the GM just says “Yeah, spells can’t do that in this setting.”
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.
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I’m picturing something that walks like a spider.
Maybe they’re making a run from a hospital invaded by goblins.
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.
Sadly, it’s easier to imagine a world with literal magic than one without brutal inequality.
I have a complete equality setting too. Its easy to imagine when you replace the concept of owning things with a concept of being able to use the things you need when you need them.
So you’re saying, it’s easy if you try? ;-)
It’s easy if everyone tries and is on one page
I hope some daaaaaay you’ll join us 🎶(on that page)
Not really, most worldbuilding is shit and barely takes a second step after “it’s the middle ages, but some people can do magic”.
Because it wouldn’t be the middle ages. It would be a massively different society in every single way. But that’s really hard to do, even harder to properly communicate and often it simply takes a backseat to telling the story.
The world without inequality would be just hard to make properly as the world with magic. It’s just that the world with magic doesn’t shake apart quite as quickly if you build it poorly…
Ok but a wheelchair would be dumb when you could just get some enchanted armor.
This is my issue.
Its a fantasy world. Dont copy paste non magic human solutions to disability. Create fantasy ones.
Enchanted pants that give you mild telekenesis while wearing them, but only on the pants. You can walk with your mind now, but you need the pants to do so.
Youre still disabled, but now your disability is more akin to glasses. An aide that is required, but in most cases completely masks your disability and lets you go about your day to day mostly unhindered, all while maintaining the worlds flavor without the weird clash of having a piece of tech that doesnt match the world around it.
Dont want your disability fully masked? Give them a familiar to ride. Or keep the telekenesis, but make it a chair whose legs can walk.
Its fantasy so we can ignore reality for a lil while. You dont need real solutions to problems, you need fantasy solutions.
Gnome paraplegic? Be a gnome in a mech!
Fuck me thats funny, I love the idea of being a semi agoraphobic ironman
The benefit of homebrew. None of these need to be considered an actual restriction by the PC. Where X is the disability
- Paladin: Oath of Restriction: You lose X in favour of your patrons
- Warlock: Any pact: Patron takes X and wishes to see how you fair in life
- Sorcerer: Any: Born with X but also born with innate magic powers
All of these have a reason to have a special Counter Remove Curse item.
A more general idea, cursed heart causes X but if curse is removed host dies.
I guess a fucker could still steal the homebrew item but if you’re doing that much to negate it that’s a player problem. No reason an enemy would attempt to remove a PC curse unless the knew the affects of the last one.
The other obvious choice is to play it like real life and refuse the help because its part of your identity
Spider legs on the chair for rough terrain would be badass.
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Also Yao in New Kaineng, self describes as “agendered”.
There’s a line of dialog something like “… and he had a husband!” in part of the story.
Nice to see diversity represented, sometimes feels a little clumsy but I’ll put that down to writers that are learning how to do it.
One of the PCs (new guy brought in after the other guy left) at the table literally has prosthetic legs as an artificer because his character was born without them.
Magical legs work better for an adventuring party for sure IMO but a wheelchair bound NPC in a city is fine.
Hell the artificer has made it a personal goal to no matter the cost allow people to walk again with their prosthetic legs. (A generous patron gave them their first set) He’s going to encounter one soon (I’m the DM, it’s going to happen) and the player will (likely) have the gold for a set. But they’re not free to make and the components aren’t free.
It’s interesting to me to put problems in front of my players for them to solve in inventive ways. They never fail to surprise me.
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That sounds like a very high level magic item which would absolutely not be available to a character at level 1 (let alone a lowly NPC or pre-adventuring PC). And by the time it does become available, the PC might be so comfortable with their wheelchair that it wouldn’t feel right to them to change.
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.
Which is actually how it works in the real world too!
Except it’s called medicine instead of magic. Trolololol.
Doctors have specialisations, some are very very specialised: e.g. specific types of neurosurgeon.
Also, accidents happen. Sometimes the doctor/magic-user gets it catastrophically wrong.
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.
In most magic systems (RPG and books/films) using magic costs the magic user something (decades of studying, exhaustion, life force, mana potions/crystals, …). So it would be natural that they want to be compensated for their work.
So depending on how difficult regrowing an eye is for the magic user that could be quite pricey.
Some magic systems also require the magic user to exactly picture what they want to cast. Not sure if anyone can actually picture all the connections of an optical nerve.
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.
Create food and water is a 3rd level spell. Use your spell slots wisely.
Odd because blindness is very commonly represented in mythology and fantasy.
A wheelchair is a tough sell in a questing/adventuring party, but in the right context we have seen paraplegics manage, in a popular fantasy setting ( GoT, bran), but it required someone to move them around
And then there’s bloodborne.
First guy you meet in bloodborne is in a wheelchair.
The old man who helps you is in a wheelchair.
You get shot at by tricked out wheelchair tanks.
One of the PCs (new guy brought in after the other guy left) at the table literally has prosthetic legs as an artificer because his character was born without them.
Magical legs work better for an adventuring party for sure IMO but a wheelchair bound NPC in a city is fine.
Hell the artificer has made it a personal goal to no matter the cost allow people to walk again with their prosthetic legs. (A generous patron gave them their first set) He’s going to encounter one soon (I’m the DM, it’s going to happen) and the player will (likely) have the gold for a set. But they’re not free to make and the components aren’t free.
It’s interesting to me to put problems in front of my players for them to solve in inventive ways. They never fail to surprise me.
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.
There could be magic, but not magic capable of curing diseases. If the extent to which your mages are capable of manipulating the elements is spewing fireballs or perhaps summoning a storm, treating an infection might be beyond their capabilities. You might also have a setting where disabilities are the result of curses that only mages of exceptional capabilities are able to treat.
Also could be a warhammer fantasy/40k situation where magic is kinda unstable and a good chunk of mages are batshit or kinda weak. Sure nobody would complain if Teclis or Malcador offer you healing but neither are insane or weak. Also the reason for that comparison is that I suspect the two are roughly comparible to eachother in their respective settings.
Also the Emperor is the 40k equivelent of Nagash. I will take no questions.
Also could be a warhammer fantasy/40k situation where magic is kinda unstable and a good chunk of mages are batshit or kinda weak. Sure nobody would complain if Teclis or Malcador offer you healing but neither are insane or weak. Also the reason for that comparison is that I suspect the two are roughly comparible to eachother in their respective settings.
As a Bright Wizard, I take offense to this. I am not weak. My flames purify entire hordes of filthy rat men. Now, if you can excuse me. There is a horde of Northmen at the gate and my tea is getting cold.
Thank you!
Likewise, if fantasy magic did exist in our world that could cure illness we would have a large percentage of our population calling it fake and saying it doesn’t work.
It is easier and cheaper to pretend it doesn’t exist and they want that to extend to fantasy as well. They don’t want to think about real problems.
There is also another dimension to this; millions are still direly ill because they can’t afford treatment.
And even in our modern world, with all our magic, there are some diseases and conditions we haven’t been able to cure. There is more than one problem that has the same output (blindness) so maybe in the fantasy world they have magic to fix someones macular degeneration but not their optic nerves
If magic exists to eliminate all disabilities, then there should be no smart, rich people with disabilities in your world
I disagree. I know plenty of smart people with disabilities who wouldn’t take a cure if it was possible. Most of them are autistic. Autism is a disability in a world that doesn’t accommodate it, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a disability politically, not intrinsically. And deafness is pretty undeniably a disability, but I’ve read about deaf people not wanting to join in on hearing society because they think the deaf community is better.
This might sound hard for you to understand if you’re fully abled, so I’ll put it in terms you can understand. Imagine if tomorrow scientists invented a cheap, painless procedure to install a third arm in your chest. Everyone’s getting them because they’re so useful, and clothing stores are quickly switching to shirts with three arm holes. It’s getting hard to find shirts with only two arm holes, in fact. Even if everyone you knew said they preferred having three arms, would you get one?
I am disabled. I would take a magic cure in a second, as would the vast majority of disabled people.
I’m disabled and I wouldn’t. I don’t think I’d be me if I wasn’t autistic.
I think if you do not want or need a cure, it’s not a disability. Doesn’t make sense to call it a disability then.
Autism is a disability mostly for social reasons, not for intrinsic reasons. I guess you could say that I do want a cure, if the cure is society becoming more tolerant. But I don’t want a cure that changes my intrinsic nature, because there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being autistic.
What is a disability “for intrinsic reasons” or that is “intrinsically wrong”? Only disabilities that cause direct pain?
Per definition, a disability is something that gives you a handicap for living in how the world is.
A disability for intrinsic reasons would be something like paraplegia or deafness. There is no social relativity to whether people with these conditions can do less things. But whether something is intrinsically wrong with that person is up to their own judgement. They are free to set their own standard in that case, and determine whether they really should be able to walk or hear, just as I’m free to determine whether I really should be able to make eye contact or process speech. (It is my opinion that the loudness of public spaces is unnatural and unjust, and that people need to fucking speak clearly instead of being lazy and making me do the work of listening closely)
But I think you’ve ignored my point. Which is that I don’t want to be cured of my mind’s nature, but I do want to be free of a society that disables autistic people. My question to you is, do I want to be cured? Is social acceptance and accommodation a cure?
I mean, some people literally just don’t view their conditions as disabilities. We don’t even need to talk about ability to afford something.
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.
Ive played a one armed barbarian before. He touched a cursed item that was slowly Turning him into a demon, so he chopped off his arm.
The DM said I lost Ambidexterity for that, Which I accepted. I later found out that I derailed part of his plan to make my character evil & work as a minion for the Big Bad.
I think you made up your mind about losing ambidexterity well before the DM told you you wouldn’t have it anymore lol
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
I can absolutely see magic not being able to correct genetic or congenital conditions. It can make sense for developmental delays aswell. But something like missing a limb from a traumatic injurie or blindness due to macular degeneration… There is no reason a mid level adventurer or powerfull character would not just use magic to heal or fix it.
Maybe an injurie by a powerful lich, or since kinda of cursed weapon that makes it impossible to fully heal with anything short of a wish spell…
Poor people on the other hand, should absolutely have debilitating injuries and disabilities that will never be fully fixed due to magic being expensive.
Reincarnation can cure all ills
*You may be reincarnated as a half orc. If unhappy with new body, consult with your local druid. Full price is charged for all reincarnations. Ensure your soul is happy to come back or permanent death may occur. No refunds
Why do you assume there is only one kind of magic?
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.
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’
Wrong idea of magic in my opinion. I like Tolkien’s one more.
We don’t play games to imagine some heavenly world where we don’t need to be stronger IMHO. That’d be boring and depressing.
We play games for a world where we are stronger or know our goals in life better. IMHO again.
D&D’s leveling system is all about becoming stronger.
Well, I very rarely play DnD, but it very much depends on the DM and the quest.
EDIT: Hey, guys with downvotes, good stories are a thing, roleplaying is a thing. If your whole session consists of combat and preparation for it, or magic and preparation for it, then it’s your own particular regrettable situation.
And “rarely play DnD” means literally DnD itself, like third edition or Pathfinder. Tabletop RPGs - rather often.
How can any magic be wrong if magic does not exist?
A world in which magic can cure all ills has integrity problems. (I mean, it was funny in the W.I.T.C.H. series when Cornelia’s little sister was dreaming and her dreams were affecting the world around everybody else. I don’t accept critique for liking that series, be it comic books or animated.)
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Why would anyone want to be crippled? I’m all for accepting things as they are, but I’ve never met anyone who would rather have less ability as opposed to more. I’m hard of hearing, and I’d do an awful lot to get my normal hearing back.
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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I never implied that people shouldn’t play what they want and even said in my first post that I don’t see why someone would have issues with it. In my last response I thought you were talking about real life, since the conversation has been going back and forth between games and real life. Do whatever the fuck you want with your character. Why would I care?
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Way too harsh there.
What if someone wants to be a cripple? Wouldn’t healing them ruin their self esteem?
Your earlier comment was not “what if someone wants to role-play a cripple?” If it was meant to mean that, I don’t understand the relevance of healing hurting their self esteem. Whose self-esteem? The player’s, or the character’s?
The response made sense by querying why would a character want to be crippled, not why a player would find it interesting to do so.
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K
You can literally resurrect people in D&D.
Which is a high level spell if you want it to regenerate lost limbs.
The average peasant does not have access to this.
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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.
dear disabled mages
just enable it in the settings
ability TRUE
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?
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
The unspoken part of that argument being they deep down desire a world that has no non-white, disabled, queer people in it at all and don’t understand others don’t think that way.
I would love a world with no disabled people in it in the same way that I would love a world without refugees.
Which is very much not the way the people who generally list those thing together mean it.
Yeah, I suppose in a way both sides want a world without marginalized people.
I can only speak for myself but the slight issue I take with “woke” aspects in games is more down to the fact that it takes me out of the experience and forcibly makes me recall the very real discussion around it. That alone wouldn’t be a problem because quite frankly every game is political in some way but the “woke” discussion has been extremely loud and, at least for me, exhausting in both directions. So if I stumble upon an issue of it in a game it immediately pulls me back to reality, ruining my moment of escapism.
And I don’t think your conclusion of people’s actual desires is accurate. There is wanting all characters to be white, having a problem with 50% of a supposedly medieval european population being black and a lot of nuance in between those two extremes. Again, I can’t speak for anyone except myself but the vast majority of complaints I’ve met are from people who do not take issue with represantation itself but with the degree it is pushed with.
Disclaimer: please excuse the typos, I’ll maybe fix them later
If you’re so annoyed with just having to hear about it, imagine how shitty it must be to walk out into the world and deal with discrimination. Not just, like, people asking you to think about someone else, but people treating you like you’re not even human.
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.
