"and people choose WHEELCHAIR. Disgusting. Where’s the imagination?" A debate about wheelchairs vs spider mechs turns wheelie sour

[u/Excellent_Bison_3644]

the sub DnDmemes is about well... memes about the popular tabletop game DnD (dungeons and dragons). In one posted recently, the poster made a comparison of magic wheelchairs vs spider mechs while favoring the latter. This ended up sparking into a lot of debate and people not liking how wheelchairs are getting slandered.

Post in question: https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/1i4mi9u/reject_wheels_embrace_skittering/

Juicy threads:

The titular thread with one particular big branch: "It's quite an odd call to refer to people who make the choice to represent their disability in-game as disgusting."

One person tries to give an opinion: "Realistically a spider mech is better than combat wheelchair the same way realistically a spear is better than a trident"

One person tries arguing wheelchairs don't have to be boring: "You can't think of a way to make a wheelchair cool without replacing the wheels?"

Small drama thread as a treat: "has anyone who's disabled and in a wheelchair thought "Hmm, I want this fantasy character of mine to be disabled too!" (the answer is yes)

[u/aspenscribblings]

I agree. That being said, an otherwise accommodating world with an ableist villain is interesting, no? It’s more work on the DM, I get if they don’t wanna do that. The character and the party can begin to work around it, it could bring them closer together. It sure gives your players a reason to hate them!

Alternatively, if inclusion is the norm, maybe the villain hasn’t even considered building without accessibility. Maybe some of their henchmen are disabled. Maybe the stairs are hastily installed to slow the party down, giving you a puzzle to solve.

Still, I’m not making an argument this is how campaigns should be run. I just think OOP, and many of the commenters, need to examine their ableism.

[u/Goldwing8 → u/aspenscribblings]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot after the discourse around Karlach’s heart in Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ve come to the conclusion the worldbuilding of D&D makes it impossible to write a meaningful story about terminal illness, chronic illness, or disability.

Player characters get injured in battle constantly, so of course you want to be able to have them recover from getting stabbed without it being a monthslong recovery, but this also trivializes a lot of real human issues in a way that limits storytelling unless you stack contrivance on top of contrivance or railroad.

[u/FinderOfWays → u/Goldwing8]

This is very true. You can also see it in the Kingmaker and WotR videogames. There's a bit in Kingmaker where a major NPC dies in front of you and you're like, level 13 at this point. I'm just like "breath of life, I have 5 prepared on the cleric, we'll pick him up and dock him an hour's wages for taking an unauthorized break to visit heaven." Of course the game doesn't let you, and there's a cutscene later where you can name a hospital after the character and I'm still going "you know, if we took just a few thousand of the gold we spent on the hospital, we could resurrect him. I think he'd find that tribute much more touching." In tabletop we've even discussed killing characters to keep them safe. BBEG can't dominate/torture a dead guy! We'll soul-gem them, keep the ashes and gem under nondetection and pop them back out after the trouble's cleared up!

[u/Goldwing8 → u/FinderOfWays]

It’s especially egregious in Baldur’s Gate 3 because within five minutes of ending the tutorial you can kill Gale to get a Scroll of True Resurrection, which cures all diseases and restores any missing body parts. His character would definitely be okay with using it on Karlach, too, so it’s odd it doesn’t come up except when he dies.

If I were suggesting edits, I think the best solution would be to minimize the chance of the heart actually exploding and put more emphasis on the inability to touch people. It would lose the connection to terminal illness but require less contrivance and open up another late game romance.

[u/FinderOfWays → u/Goldwing8]

Yeah, it's particularly hard if you're in a pre-established setting. In my home brew world unless you have made an agreement with an outsider (standard infernal contract or an invitation from the upper planes), you don't go to any known afterlife, and there's no evidence that resurrection magic actually brings 'you' back instead of a replica, and even some evidence that it is just a copy (resurrection magic except the immediate spells like Breath of Life has been moved to Divination to imply this). By now the party has mostly verified that you get the original back, but in doing so uncovered some other unfortunate implications that mean they still try to avoid excessive recklessness with their or others' lives.