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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 9148893" data-attributes="member: 1465">I can't stop thinking that this IS really about not wanting disabilities with equal opportunities in the game.Had a DM said "you walk into the dwarfen stronghold and see a coffee machine", most people would have considered it comic relief (which obviously is inappropriate on matters of disability), had a laugh and moved on. Many perhaps would have reacted with a simple eye-rolling and asked the DM to be more serious. But then this is because players would immediately picture a modern plastic coffee machine working with electricity, and would not be wrong to ask for a bit more technology consistency. The DM could narrate that dwarves are inventive enough to have built a coffee machine that in fact is a throughly mechanical contraption built on wood and metal, and working on coal. So why fixating on magic to explain a wheelchair in D&D, where there's lots of room for non-magical wonders?Back to the wheelchair, a player wants a character that moves on one, so what? Why your immediate concern is to "restore realism" by (of course) give penalties to such character? Do you do the same thing if a player ask for ANY OTHER narrative variation of "normality"? I can't help but having a feeling of deja-vu about those who wanted penalties on female characters (while at the same time happily ignore any concern of realism on such characters' chainmail bikinis). I wonder if these people ever objected to someone wanting to play a pirate with a band on one eye, or another character roleplayed at permanently semi-drunk on booze, do you always pick on those players and impose penalties to their roleplaying/cosmetic choices? Because then I expect you pretty much never have a pirate PC with a band on one eye in your game.On the other hand, you could just file all these requests under narrative fun and freedom of player's imagination. If the request of the player is not giving them any advantage, why do you so much want to impose a disadvantage? You can just keep playing everything as normal, and narrate around that, for example that old cranky pirate in a wheelchair kicks ass in battle because he's learn to maneuver just as well as everybody else can walk and dash and run, and is accustomed enough to sitting on the wheelchair that he can certainly pull herself up on a rope or even a wall by hands. OR you can work with the players to decide together if occasionally something cannot be done and everyone agrees, and maybe find another occasion to instead give them an advantage because of the wheelchair. If you don't even out the opportunities, it is not a fair game anymore, and if you disallow a narrative because you can't handle it, you are by all means a worse DM than you could be.</blockquote>

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