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.
Im kind of ambivalent on this.
On one hand, ~medieval times, which are usually the general era and technology level the average fantasy setting plays in, have no concept of disability and people who have one are usually ostracized and/or begging in the streets. Blindness may be on the more tolerated side of things, but deformities or developmental abnormalities are definitely not accepted. Also, if there is magic why wouldn’t they use it to cure it?
On the other hand, it’s a fantasy roleplay setting and the primary function is to be fun. So if everyone agrees it shouldn’t be a problem to have a scenario with it, more power to you
There’s a recent anime called “The Great Cleric” that addresses this slightly. People with the ability to heal may charge crazy sums, and even the knowledge of spells that could help may be financially gatekept because of the wealth generated by healing.
If they can’t tolerate the idea of a blind NPC existing, good riddance to them. Yeah, sounds like you dodged a bullet.
Good thing the NPC wasn’t trans or something… who knows how they would have reacted.
If you don’t treat people as people because of a disability, you have both violated the social contract.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Fucking hephaestus! A literal god, either born lame, or made so (depending on where and when the version is), says “fuck alla y’all, imma go make shit” and begins turning out items so fucking good they make gods more powerful. Stuff so good that other gods couldn’t do their job without them.
Motherfucker created robots (automatons), mechanical animals.
And, when he was exiled, fucking Ares, the ultimate fighter, got scared off by him. It took Dionysus getting him shit faced to make him come back home, but he wouldn’t budge for threat or bribe.
Now that’s a god among gods. And motherfucker is even more crippled up than I am.
Crippled mage load out
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?
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.
dear disabled mages
just enable it in the settings
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.”
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.
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
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 think poor people never had their own cultures? Lol, lmao
Magic doesn’t fix being poor
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
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
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.
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.
Then let people make characters without disabilities if they want (which is already the case). But what if someone wants to play a character, or see characters, that face similar challenges to the ones they do? And then get to play them overcoming those challenges!
This is not exactly equivalent, and I’m not asserting that you meant this, but imagine in a different time someone saying, “I don’t understand why anyone would want to play a non-white race, since it just opens them up to racism, when they could just fit in and be normal.” I consider that to be along the same class of argument as the one we’re discussing here.
why would a person want to fantasize about having a disability
To imagine a world where they are the same, but their disability is not an impediment. A more perfect world, rather than imagining themselves as other than they are.
I really don’t understand what’s wrong with people not “curing all illness and disability with magic™” in a world where magic exists and is a thing.
See, in most such fantasy settings, magic not only exists but it has an attitude. Sometimes, a conscience, and not a very ethically nice one (if it allows for eg.: necromancy!). Sometimes, magic even is a god (or gods). Even if they aren’t, the people who use magic are still ultimately humans (with leafy ears etc but still ultimately humans with costumes, at worst) driven by greed, envy or a weird righteous idea of how should a woman dress and behave when in public.
Would you trust some rando nutjob, who claims to speak for Evelok the Eternal Coffee Mug of Satisfaction, to up and magically conjure you new eyes, new arms, whatever? To alter your body to such a fundamental level? Normal people in such settings are already afraid to death of werewolves and those are quite normal things. Compare: even in our magicless, relatively normal world, we have the power and the money to cure most illness and to treat disabled people adequately yet Obamacare is not universal and we can not trust that the people who give people implants and prosthetics haven’t backdoored them to force those disabled people into corporate servitude.
Your player party may be the goodest bois, but they’re only one. The various guilds and churches around quite likely aren’t such goodies on aggregate either, or else there would simply be no plot.
There are deaf people in the real world with treatable deafness that opt not to because they don’t view their deafness as a disability. In addition, not all neurodivergent folks view their conditions as disabilities and wouldn’t change even if there was a “cure” for it.
So, I don’t see how disabilities in a fantasy setting would be different. It’s not even necessarily about trusting the cure, many times it’s about how folks view the condition and themselves.
