Thrakor the barbarian kicked down the door, greatsword at the ready. He knew it was safe because Sarinia the thief, that foxy little elf, had scouted ahead and reported back using her sending stone. It also helped that Chang the wizard hadn’t detected any traps, magical or otherwise, in the room. It was time to strike
“Taste my blade, fiends!” yelled Thrakor. They’d been pursued by the drow for the better part of the three days they’d been in this stinking pit, and it felt good to finally turn the tables, ambushing them in their cavernous headquarters.
They caught the drow by surprise, plotting their next slaving raid in the village of Forstheim. No more. Thrakor beheaded the one with his back to their party, dishonorable perhaps but since when did slave-trading drow deserve the courtesy?
A fireball whizzed by Thrakor’s shoulder into the corner of the room, catching an approaching group head-on. By the gods, Chang had good aim, but that was close enough to feel the heat against his skin. And from the shadows on the other side of this large chamber, Sarinia caught a drow spellcaster by surprise, slitting his throat before he could cast something nasty.
The battle was going well. They still had some tricks at their disposal: their Cleric, Donni, was behind with Chang, ready to charge in and attack with her mace if needed, but preferring to stay on healing duty. And the fighter Joe Sweet, from a strange land called Brooqlyn, had gone ahead with Sarinia, leading his troop of hired soldiers on a cleanup operation in the dungeon’s east side. Soon, he would sweep in, and smash the drow, finally ending the menace . . .
Thrakor did not sense the large drow sneak up on him, nor did he register Sarinia’s warning until it was too late. Bitter pain in his legs, and then . . . nothing. He fell, only just keeping his face from smashing on the slimy stone floor by dropping his sword and using his arms to cushion the blow.
He did not want to look down, but he had to. Oh gods, there was nothing below his knees. Or knee, rather—his left leg now terminated somewhere mid-thigh. And he was bleeding, so much blood . . . “Help!” he called. “Donni! Anybody! I’ve been hit!”
Light filled the room, and there was Chang standing over the charred bodies of drow fighters. The room was full of battle, Joe Sweet and his men smashing into the drow’s flank, mopping up the last vestiges of resistance. Though enraged, Thrakor could not stop the bleeding by himself.
Donni came. “I’ve never been happier to see you!” Thrakor bellowed, almost kissing her. She was a particularly homely dwarf, but right know looked the sweetest thing in the world.
Donni closed her eyes and uttered the words of her cure wounds spell. The bleeding stopped, and the warmth of life surged through Thrakor’s body. “You’re going to make it, you big brute,” Donni said with a smile.
“With you as friends, how could I not?”
“That’s what I like to hear! Now, I know this sounds grisly, but let me find your legs. Let me get my prayer wheel and I’ll cast a Regenerate spell to reattach your legs, and you’ll be, I don’t know, wrestling storm giants or whatever it is you barbarians do in no time. I always carry a few with me just for times like this.”
Thrakor looked down at his now cauterized stumps, his severed legs lying some five yards away, and then back at Donni. “Nah, I’m good.”
Donni blinked. “You’re good?”
Throkar nodded. “Yes. Just get me a chair, perhaps one with wheels, and—”
“I can just cast Tenser’s Floating Disk,” Chang offered.
“No, I want a wheelchair, thanks.”
“Now wait.” Donni stood and gathered Thrakor’s legs, examining them in the gloom, thankful, no doubt, for her dark vision. “It takes literally two minutes for them to grow back, but if I have the missing limbs, they’re instantly attached. Like, literally in the blink of an eye. There’s no need for floating disks or wheel chairs.
“I told you Donni, I want a wheelchair. Now cut it out or I’m not playing anymore.”
Magic battles! Exciting combat! Dragons! Quasi-medieval warfare! Wheelchairs?
There is nothing wrong with requiring the use of a wheelchair, or any other device, for mobility. Some people lose the use of their legs through injury, others are born with a condition that makes them unable to walk. Wheelchairs and other machines are wonderful things that allow the disabled to move by themselves and not be always at the whim of being carried around. Nobody is disputing this.
But we’re talking Dungeons & Dragons here. You’re not going to see many ADA compliant dungeons—dark lords and ladies aren’t all that big on making their lairs and strongholds accessible. In fact, they try to make them inaccessible. And deadly. And yet, the current D&D IP holders are really leaning into making sure all dungeons, caverns, caves, castles, towers, and presumably taverns have wheelchair accessible ramps. And anyway, how responsible would it be to bring someone into a wheelchair into a place called The Tomb of Unspeakable Horrors?
This is an odd demographic for the current D&D IP holders to be hitting so hard.1 I get wanting to be inclusive and not turning anyone away from your game, which is, to overuse a phrase ruined by the internet, common human decency, the thing about D&D though is that it takes place in a fantasy world filled with magic.
Fantasy aficionados know that there are different types of fantasy. Some are more mythic, your “high fantasy,” while others are grittier. Some have extensive use of magic, while in others, magic is rare. Some might not have magic at all! But D&D as written by its designers most definitely fits into the “Tons and tons of magic” camp.
So D&D is, obviously, fantastical. But even in fantastical tabletop role playing games, you want to create, as the designer of Adventure Conquerer King System (ACKS) Alexander Macris2 says, a sense of verisimilitude in the game.3 Put simply, your game world should be diegetic, that is, it should run on its own internal logic and rules without external forces acting upon it. External forces like thoroughly modern 21st century concerns about being wheelchair accessible, or making sure 21st century identities are superimposed into a quasi-medieval fantasy world.4 So, in a fantasy world with healing magic that can literally resurrect the dead, it makes no sense that physical handicaps wouldn’t be cured by characters with access to sufficiently high-level magic. And to reiterate: if you had a friend who was, say, a monk or a druid in a wheelchair, are you really going to be bringing them to The Temple of Elemental Evil?
But the D&D IP holders are leaning hard into the wheelchair demographic. The picture I posted at the top of this piece comes from the new revised Player’s Handbook, which is not 6th Edition D&D, thank you very much.5 And the picture of the wheelchair-bound cleric minis were sent to me by
.6 I guess the prior PHB was offensive to wheelchair-bound players, who felt like a lack of representation kept them from enjoying D&D with friends? Or who insist on only playing wheelchair-bound characters?Look at the picture on the top of this post again: how’s that guy going to get down those stairs?
If representation was really an issue, I could point out that I saw maybe one unambiguously white male in the book as I perused it, other than the sort-of white guy in the picture above. Guess I can’t play D&D now because I’m not represented! I think that might be the point, but anyway.
We play games like this to do things we can’t in our everyday life. We want to transcend the mundane, and sometimes that might mean transcending physical limitations. I’m not a legendary sword fighter, but I like playing one when I engage in a TTRPG. Or a super spy. Or a superhero. Or a wizard . . . or a non-human wizard. I don’t make a carbon-copy self-insert of me. But people in wheelchairs are supposed to?
Would an amputee exclusively play one-armed characters? A blind person only blind characters? A black player only playing black characters? A white player only playing white characters? Oh, wait, there’s also stupid controversy about this very idea. Sorry, Korean-American friends: you can only play Asian-coded characters, or you ain’t playing.
There’s already nothing in the rules preventing anyone from playing any kind of character, but depending on who you’re playing with, there might be some unwritten limitations. Friends, don’t let some super-sensitive “politically active” HR type invade your gaming table.
Blind fighting monks or mystics are staples of fantasy literature. Perhaps there’s a crippled individual with other powers, or who refuses to let their handicap get in the way. That’s awesome and a cool idea and provides grist for the roleplaying mill! But would a D&D character who is going to explore the wilderness, climb mountains, or delve deep into dungeons, desire to remain in a wheelchair? There are ways around this, of course, magic spells and items, but most importantly, in the world of D&D, such conditions can be cured, something cartoons like the below miss the point entirely:
Nobody is saying that disabled people don’t exist in a fantasy world, but in D&D specifically, there’s no real reason why disabilities wouldn’t be cured. It doesn’t jibe with the game world.
Comic books have characters like Silhouette and Oracle, two characters I just named off the top of my head, who are handicapped but don’t let it stop their ability to be a hero. However, they don’t live in worlds where paralysis can be cured, so it makes sense in their worlds. Diegesis in action.
But we’re talking the world of D&D where, again, death itself is a minor inconvenience, especially in the current edition. You can regrow limbs, eyes, restore senses, heal nerve damage, trade bodies, and resurrect the dead.7 It just doesn’t make sense to be hitting this demographic so hard in this particular genre. It’s trying to graft the Burger King Kids Club into a fantasy world of high magic. It is the epitome of another overused term, virtue signaling: “Look how good we are, we have everybody in our artwork!”
Except the Burger King Kids Club was aimed at kids in the real world where paralysis or the loss of limbs isn’t curable by magic.8
I’m banging on this so much because I’m a writer, and this just offends me from a storytelling perspective.
I know that D&D isn’t the real world. But the storyteller in me realizes that there are so many things things savvy game masters can do with the idea of people being amputees or having other physical handicaps or being, yes, wheelchair bound. It can be a story hook, or a springboard for a quest: a character loses their legs, as in my fictional example, and maybe nobody in their party knows the Regenerate spell, so they go on a quest to find a high-enough level spellcaster to regrow the lost limbs. Or maybe there’s a character who is unable to walk that needs to travers a mountain pass on an urgent mission: how do you do that? That sort of thing. It doesn’t take much imagination. It is not, contra the facile cartoon, refusing to think that physically disabled people exist in a fantasy world with magic, but correctly pointing out that, according to D&D’s own rules, physically disabled people in a fantasy world with magic probably wouldn’t stay disabled for long. Or at least would find some alternate method of getting around in a dungeon.
But no. Instead, we have a game designed by people who apparently think that any player in a wheelchair is going to create a self-insert character. As if there is One True Character that a player is bound to for life! Better thinkers in the TTRPG realm, such as the aforementioned Alexander Macris, Jon Mollison of The Joy of Wargaming, prolific blogger
, BDubs of BDubs and Dragons, and Jeffro Johnson, author of How to Win at D&D have pointed out that character death has been baked into the game from the getgo. Don’t get too attached to your wood elf druid; they may not make it past the first encounter. And if they don’t, just roll up another character and try to keep that one alive!Again I ask, Who is this for? The “trans-abled”? No, I did not make that up—there’s a thing called body integrity disorder (BID), where people who wish they were disabled deliberately identify as such and so cover their eyes or sit in wheelchairs to will their wished-for disability into existence. In extreme cases, people willingly get limbs amputated.
How is this not insulting to people who are actually disabled?
I have a theory, and given the types of people who have infiltrated the world of TTRPGs, and all hobbies, in the last few decades, it makes sense. You know the type: the kind who unironically say they want to “decolonize” spaces, particularly those that are typically occupied by white people, men, and white men. The ones who will with a straight face call you “ableist” if you think going into a dungeon with a wheelchair is kind of goofy and wonder why the character doesn’t have someone cast a Regenerate spell on them. These entryists didn’t care about this hobby or that until five minutes ago, but now claim as their own.
Picture this sort of person in your head. Now, even the Wikipedia page about BID notes that “there does seem to be a correlation with BID and a person having a paraphilia.” The New York Times also noted that:
The disorder has been known by several names. In 1977, Dr. John Money, an expert on sexuality at Johns Hopkins University, named it apotemnophilia (literally, love of amputation). He considered it a form of paraphilia—that is, a sexual deviation.
In 1997, Dr. Richard Bruno of Englewood Hospital in New Jersey proposed the name factitious disability disorder, which he grouped into three types: people who are sexually aroused by amputees (“devotees”), those who use wheelchairs and crutches to make it seem as if they are amputees (“pretenders”) and those who want to get amputations themselves (“wannabes”). In Dr. Bruno's taxonomy, those who manage to obtain amputations continue to be known as wannabes.
That people are sexually attracted to amputees is an actual thing. I guess this all might play into the desire to then become an amputee. It’s not conclusive in any way, and I have not surveyed all of the literature, but it’s similar to how not everybody with gender dysphoria is an autogynephilic. But given how bizarre a lot of stuff that goes on in what is commonly called “nerd culture,” it wouldn’t surprise me if sex is what’s driving this push. At the very least, looking at this most charitably, it’s just well-meaning, suspension-of-disbelief-destroying goofiness that doesn’t hold up to the merest scrutiny, and where its proponents call anyone who points out the silliness of it all all sorts of nasty names. At worst, it’s just more bizarre weirdness being shoved everywhere it’s not needed.
Anyway, gatekeep your hobbies.
- Alexander
Thank you for reading this post, even if you don’t care about Dungeons & Dragons or what I’m talking about. I’m also aware, in researching for this post, that I’m late to the party, and that this discussion has been going on for a while. So this is my two cents on the matter. If you’d like to support my writing, you can check out my books on Amazon or toss a few drachmas into the tip jar over at Buy Me A Coffee. Your readership is always appreciated, so once again, thank you and God Bless.
Let’s not even get into the so-called “Mexican orcs.”
Any game master, aspiring or veteran, really owes it to himself to check out Alexander’s YouTube channel, Arbiter of Worlds.
It’s always one way, though: for example, a fantasy realm based on Viking-era Scandinavia will have blacks, Asians, and so on, but you’ll never see white people running around in a fantasy realm based on ancient China or Egypt or Mali.
I differ with some of my bros in that I don’t find 5th edition D&D a bad set of rules at all, and some of the new tweaks in this 2024 revision make a lot of sense.
I can’t make this point enough.
I’m not knocking the Burger King Kids Club at all for having a wheelchair-bound member. Being in a wheelchair is a normal thing that, as I said earlier in this post, helps people get around. And it’s okay to get kids used to the idea that people in wheelchairs aren’t lesser because of their handicap. And they also have good senses of humor: the kid’s name is Wheels, for crying out loud.
As a Forever DM, I will fully allow and support the decision of anyone who wants to come to my table and play a wheelchair character. That said, you are treated as any other player at that same table. The DM has enough to do without modifying multiple aspects of the campaign environment for a single PC. If you've chosen to play such a character, you can live with the consequences of that choice. Because the castle ruins definitely has stairs, rubble to climb over, and collapsed sections of the upper hallways, and that isn't about to change.
I'm going to cast a bet before reading: it's for the ever elusive Modern Audience.
Which is to say, it's for a mythical subset of the population that doesn't actually exist, and is the natural result of stuffing a company full of people living squarely within their Seattle-based echo chamber, then placing former tech execs who know nothing of hobby spaces in charge of a hobby company.
I will absolutely be reading this, given that I've played D&D for many, many years and am always curious to gather the thoughts of others who are watching its rapid decline in real time, but this is the answer I predict will be reached here. Now to see if that bet pans out!