Earlier this week, a young woman named Sara, who describes herself as “a writer, disability consultant, sensitivity reader, and advocate for better disability representation in tabletop role-playing games,” released a mechanic for Dungeons & Dragons to provide players with a “Combat Wheelchair.” Many in the D&D Twitter-verse did not approve.
Written as a seven-page supplement, the Combat Wheelchair allows disabled characters in the Forgotten Realms to live a life of adventure.
The wheelchair “takes its design from the chair used in sports such as wheelchair basketball and rugby.” Its slanted wheels allow for easy passage over most terrains; its side pockets allow for easy access to water, swords, and other weapons; its seat-tilt level makes it easy to get in and get out of the chair; its seat belts ensure secure and correct positioning in the chair; and magical Beacon Stones provide the energy to power the chair with the push of a button and give it the magical boost it needs to hover two feet in the air and glide up and down a short flight of stairs — long flights are more difficult, however, because the stones require a 30 second break for every 25 feet of hovering movement (in D&D, 30 seconds can equal five rounds(!) of combat).
There’s a lot more to the Combat Wheelchair.
Sara has developed a suite of upgrades that characters can use as they level up. Along with affixing weapons to various parts of the chair (a battering ram, knives coming out of the sides of the tires, etc.), players can upgrade their wheels to Suppression Tyres, which “absorb the sounds the wheels typically make when moving across certain terrains (e.g., crunching stone/gravel/puddles, etc.).” From a mechanical standpoint, this means the wheelchair-bound player now receives advantage on their Stealth checks. Other upgrades include Shin Shredders, a Mounted Sniper (a crossbow mounted on the armrest), Scatter Tacks, and more.
As is typical, many folks used Twitter to decry the idea of disabilities in the Forgotten Realms. It got to the point where Sara had to take a break from marketing her free mechanic because “today has been…a lot.” She later added, “I’ve only had one breakdown so I consider this as ‘I’m doing okay,’ I guess?”
I don’t want to provide a survey of everything the trolls spewed up in response to the Sara’s release of herCombat Wheelchair, but the general response was “In a world with magical healing, why would anyone be disabled?”
It’s a fair question, I think (outside of the ableist ideology at its root that assumes disabled people require “fixing”).
After all, the multiverse of D&D includes magical spells such as the seventh-level spell Regenerate, which allows a spell caster to touch another creature to “stimulate its natural healing ability” and fuse its severed body parts back into its healthy body, which would, of course, allow leg amputees to walk again. It also includes a second-level spell named Lesser Restoration, which allows spell casters to end another creature’s paralysis, and I imagine, could allow for the curing of a spinal cord injury that caused a character to require a wheelchair in the first place.
Sara’s response to her critics make it clear that she has thought about these facets of the multiverse. First, she points to Banak Brawnanvil, a disabled character in a series of novels canonical to the Forgotten Realms, to highlight the previous existence of wheelchairs in the multiverse. Brawnanvil lost the use of his legs when a goblin’s spear broke his spine. Thankfully, he knew a gnome alchemist named Nanfoodle Buswilligan (how great a name is that!). Buswillingan possessed the tinkering skills to build Brawnanvil a wheelchair.
So if wheelchairs are already canonical in the Realms, why should a specialized Combat Wheelchair designed for disabled adventurers be a problem?
Second, Sara highlights the high costs associated with magical spells. A scroll containing a seventh-level spell such as Regenerate could cost a character anywhere between 5,000 and 50,000 gold pieces. The Wizards of the Coast (the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons) wrote back in 2006 that a gold piece in the Forgotten Realms contains approximately a quarter ounce of gold. Using today’s prices (which are near record highs, by the way), a single gold coin in the realms is worth roughly US$500, which means the cost of a seventh-level spell scroll equates to (at minimum) US$2.5 million.
With those kinds of prices, methinks the Realms might need a Universal Spellcare policy.
The point, of course, is that a typical adventurer won’t have the coin to regenerate or heal herself, if we even assume she wants to heal herself. As Sara writes to her critics, “Some of us? Well, we don’t want to be ‘fixed’.”
For myself, I think the mechanic adds a lovely sense of diversity to the potential for adventuring parties, and if my character gets killed by the three night hags and dracolich whom we have to fight in our game tomorrow night, I may just roll up a new character whose lived experience requires the assistance of a Combat Wheelchair.
Thank you, Sara, for expanding my vision for what is possible in the Realms.
Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.