I am dming a dnd campaign and one of my player's characters is a mute sorcerer and she actually still works. Any spell that uses vocal components she can just cast them with subtle spell. She also uses sign language and has taught her party members some which they now can use to communicate silenty. A big advantage. Besides, shes also just a lovely character. :)
I'm playing a wizard in a game who's been cursed to not be able to speak for story reasons that are perfectly fair, and it's a situation that can only be resolved with a wish spell, so it's something that my character might never have the ability to cure. The GM is ruling that while they can still cast spells with verbal components, what comes out is more magical nonsense than words, and they specifically can't cast any spell that requires them to speak language to achieve the effect (like a suggestion spell or tasha's hideous laughter). The character knows Thieves' Cant, which in this game employs hand signals to communicate nonverbally, so he's started teaching that to other party members as a means of communication, but also uses minor illusion to mimic the sound of one word responses and/or create visual aids. He also started the game with a non-functional prosthetic left hand which he and and a party member helped to turn into the functional prosthetic limb magic item from Tasha's over the course of the game.
If your player doesn't want to have to use sorcery points, my DM decided my non-verbal artificer could make other kinds of noise for verbal components. She could snap her fingers, clap if she had both hands free, stomp her feet, whistle, anything like that. As long as it was her body making the noise, it counted. Not that how you're doing it is bad, but I just figured I'd mention an alternative way. Whatever works for your table. As long as everyone at a table is happy, there's no wrong way to play dnd
That's pretty neat! I have an idea for a mute warlock who uses bells with different tones as a replacement for the vocal components. Originally I thought of using sign language instead, but I read comments online discussing how that would completely circumvent things such as the silence spell, and that replacing the vocal component with something else that made sound could work better mechanically.
I actually have a deaf wood elf monk who also uses sign language to communicate and whenever someone doesn't use sign language she can usually just try to read their lips.
My current character, an artificer named Remi, lost their eye in a fight due to a direct hit from a necromancy spell. I changed my playstyle afterwards to me a close combat attacker and used the loss of my characters depth perception as an explanation. Later I was able to make a prosthetic eye, but that only works in the dark.
@@TheInfintyithGoofball @Patrick J Clancy Maybe because it provides such minimal amount of help that it's only noticeable when the functional eye is hindered
One of my npcs is a tiefling warlock who was kidnapped by a cult that needed a sacrifice to summon a demon. They placed her in the middle of her summoning circle and slit her throat. The demon that they summoned however turned out to be her father. Oddly enough he turned out to be a fairly loving father despite being a demon and slaughtered the cult members. While he managed to stop the bleeding she was left mute. So they set up a warlock pact where not only would she have the powers of a warlock to keep her safe but he would make whatever she wanted to express appear as subtitles made out of smoke.
ooh, that reminds me of Sandy from Rise of the Gaurdians, I Loved when he got Too excited and they couldn't keep up with the sand he used to explain things just like if someone was talking too fast and couldn't keep up, him being a mute character was a really nice touch to the movie
BABE WAKE UP NEW OAKWYRM VID DROPPED your points about disability vs. status effect and magical healing gave me much to think about for my campaign! love how thorough and relaxing ur vids are to watch❤️
This blew my mind because healing another character's disability is such an outlandish idea to me. That feels like wanting to "fix" their hair or eye color. The player created the character like that for a reason! We have a blind tiefling monk in our group who is handled a bit like Toph from ATLA. She can't *see*, so color and some detail is lost on her, but she can detect motion around a corner sometimes. Everyone's just like "oh yeah that's Heresy, our friend. Don't be rude, shake her hand, she can't see you wave."
I played exalted once (that is to say I played exalted a lot but in one particular game this happened And for reference aside from glasses and dyslexia I am not disabled.) and I was playing a dragon blooded sorcerer who had lost their leg and been heavily scarred with an accident at the Heptogram (his school). Limb regeneration does exist in that setting but it’s out of the reach of even the moderately powerful realm Dragon blooded we were playing. I intended to play him as an arrogant standoffish and socially superior character. He had purchased a golem purely for the purposes of carrying a pagoda to transport himself around. It was ludicrously impractical and the kind of over the top dramatic nonsense dynasts get up to. There exist in the setting magical artificial limbs. There lost technology and were never very common to begin with. We found one in more or less the first temple we had to explore for the campaign. The storyteller put it there because having a character who either had a 10 foot tall attendant carrying them or who moved half speed because of a crutch was viewed as “disruptive“. My argument was that the game was mostly social with the occasional tomb exploration where speed isn’t exactly key.
The problem comes if the disability is easy to "fix" with magic, it can be very inmersion breaking, if you had magic that could cure a blind person irl and one of your friends was blind, you would try to cure your friend, so that is not something that you can just ignore as it breaks the inmersion, there has to be some lore or reason that prevents it from being cured by the means of the party, like a curse or similar.
@@diablo.the.cheater See though, that's a part of the thinking abled people have about it. Plenty of disabled people do not want to be "cured", they don't see their disability as something to cure or fix in the first place. To a blind person, suddenly being able to see can be overwhelming and disorienting. Same to a deaf person with hearing. Imagine suddenly gaining a new sense and it's constantly bombarded with stimuli - that's not a process everyone would want to go through. I bet most physically disabled people find it more immersion breaking that the world contains magic that can make people fly or shape the elements, yet this world still doesn't accommodate for disabled people. Why would a world with artificers not have stairs that can accommodate for wheelchairs? Oakwyrm rightly tries to inspire this perspective change in us, from our ablebodied view of disabilities as flaws to fix towards them being a physical trait that every disabled person has their own individual relationship to.
Whenever it comes to magical/supernatural healing, whether it's campaigns I've DMed or stories I've written, I almost always go with the explanation that you're just speeding up the natural healing process. Small injuries like cuts and bruises will just fade away, but you should still apply pressure to deep wounds until any blood vessels have sealed. A broken bone can slowly fix itself, but it would need to be held in place while casting the spell. And if a bone is completely shattered, or a limb taken off, or nerves irreparably damaged, there's no magically fixing it - your body wouldn't be able to heal that, no matter how much time it has, so no amount of speeding up the healing process would help. Playing by those rules makes sure that grievous injuries still have consequences in a world where magical healers exist, and allows anyone who wants to give their character a disability to do so. It's also way more interesting to write about characters dealing with the consequences of accidents instead of just fixing it and moving on, so everyone wins.
And also, the remove blindness and deafness spells being a counter for magically inflicted blindness/deafness should be taken into account too! Just like even people with darkvision can't see in magical darkness, people who are not blind can be blinded through artificial means (whether by a spell or by pocket sand). The "remove blindness" spell can easily be applied EXCLUSIVELY to these artificial means and not to like. Regrow missing eyes or smthn lmao
Your videos actually really helped me write a disability focused plotline in my own DnD game that I run. One of my players lost an arm, and found a prosthetic that he liked. He chose it himself, made modifications to it to fit his uses, and it was valued by him. That prosthetic was lost in a fight and I had a doctor "heal" his lost arm while he was unconscious, without his consent. This was framed in the narrative as a BAD THING that this "doctor" did. In fact, this doctor was not really a healer so much as a mad scientist. The new arm was actually a grafted homunculus. A creature made from alchemy that had a partial mind of its own. The player was very engaged with how creepy and invasive the scientist had been. But of course, it didn't end there. During the same session, he went back to the scientist, and talked to him. The scientist was actually disabled in his own right, and had used this alchemic ability to enhance himself at great personal cost. His outlook was warped by the trauma of being ostracised and having to rely on himself alone for his own care. After talking with the scientist, the player made him see that his actions were wrong, and the scientist then apologized, and dutifully removed the foreign arm. The player got a new custom prosthetic back, and has continued to customize it to their heart's content. I wanted to thank you so much for giving so many a look into things so often unconsidered or forgotten. I'm doing what I can to recommend your words and advice and videos to others, and I can tell you they have already made an impact. Everyone at the table was super engaged and actually thrilled to see the player get the arm removed. And the scientist got to learn his lesson, and even went on to be an ally to the players, now only ever helping them with their consent of course!
I have a disabled character myself! He isnt physically disabled per se but I put neurodivergence into him by stating that he, a warforged intended to be research companion to a wizard who is now lost and has no memory of what happened, has some of the runes that keep his magical body together misinscribed- he's still fully functional, a kind being, and capable of strong magic but he is in essence autistic with the sensory issues and occasional meltdowns to go with it, as well as the passionate love for his special interests (magic research and observation of other magic users). He's a wild magic sorcerer and his misinscribed runes also cause physical malfunction reminiscent of some of the fine motor issues autistic people like my DM and I can have. He's beloved to me
That sounds so fun. I’ve come up with some autistic character ideas, mostly rangers since the favored enemy feature can easily be flavored as a special interest. Plus some ranger spells can be fun to rp with, like goodberry being an easy safe food or silence being good for avoiding sensory overload. One of those characters is obsessed with dragons and will take any opportunity to infodump about every single detail about every single type of dragon, I’d probably have to be careful about not annoying the other players, but I already annoy people by talking endlessly about my own special interests so if I get a group of friends willing to play dnd with me they’d probably already be used to it irl by the time I get around to playing that character. I haven’t ever played a game yet, but in exited to since dnd has definitely become a special interest of mine, and I take every opportunity to talk about it endlessly with my friend.
Your character sounds awesome! One of my characters is written as autistic too! He's a storm sorcerer kalashtar, who's special interest is space and the cosmos (in this campaign, kalashtar can acess people's dreams, and the "dream world" looks a lot like travelling in space, so when he goes there he often looks at the stars from a closer look and draws them in his sketchbook). He's really sweet and tries his best but he has a hard time understanding other's feelings, so he enters their dreams at night to help them out since there's more physical representations of how they're feeling. When he's overwhelmed, he by accident makes other people hear in their minds a loud noise (i don't know how to describe it, english isn't my first language, but it's similar to the sensation i feel when i'm overwhelmed by noise) cause of his kalashtar magic. When he gets overwhelmed, his thunder/lightning magic often gets out of control, so his arcane focus is a glove of sorts to keep his magic from getting out of control. I could go on about how he is, and i mainly just commented on how his autism is to him, but i'm getting way too excited. I'm glad other people are writing disabled characters (both has pcs and npcs), it brings a lot more diversity and possibilities to the table
My boyfriend is autistic and some of that has been bleeding into his character and it's just been very endearing. It's mostly in the department of completely missing social cues, which fits with his jolly barbarian character who is living in his own world very well. (He is also delusional and convinced he is a wizard, but regardless...very charming character)
I played a disabled character, she was an amputee who lost one of her arms from the elbow down during a war. One of the party members that was something of a protege of hers was capable of making a prosthetic that would basically give her the same functionality as her old arm, but she refused. Back when she had both arms she was misled into doing some awful things for the 'greater good'. The incident that injured her gave her pause and forced her to reconsider her life, and so saw her injury as the start of a better life instead of the end of her old one. In combat she was a beast. She couldnt use two handed weapons or a shield, so she stuck with a sabre and throwing knives, and had to get creative when she needed to climb something. She was good fun.
I love this! ^ I think that if a disability can be cured easily and without penalty it's something that should be done UNLESS there's character specific reasons like this. Otherwise it's just kind of silly to me. This is comming from a neurodivergent person. I wouldn't want my autism/adhd "cured" because I like the way I experience the world and how it allows me to see things differently. To use that to improve on things others struggle to see or don't understand. But physical and mental "disabilities" are a bit different in my opinion. But honestly if a character chooses to keep the disability for no reason. And their disability just decreases their quality of life despite the fact that it can easily be helped or removed entirely is completely outlandish to me. It feels like a dehydrated person refusing to drink or someone needlessly limiting themselves. I do think there should be more rep for disabled people. It's just that most magical worlds (especially with soft magic systems) aren't very suited for that kind of story. Mainly because often it just doesn't make narrative sense in the world
@@CrysPhoenix i respectfully disagree on your stance about physical disabilities, but that’s just me. (im on the spectrum myself as well lol so hey!! autism gang) my hip acts up meaning i have to use a cane, and you can pry my cane using artificer out of my cold dead hands lmao /lh
@@ARACHNIDPARTY Lmao! I wouldn't dare to try 😂. It's amazing that you're doing great though! I didn't mean to sound demeaning what I meant is that most people have spells for magic cures ect. There's tons of fantasy worlds where disabilities are definitely a very real thing that deserves more spotlight tbh. Soft magic systems leave more room for magic shenanigans so it's not that great for more traditional reps of disability (amputees, blindness ect). Someone else here made a comment about how disability could 100% work and be really interesting in a dnd setting. Like wild mages and magical effects, wounds that cannot be cured, curses ect ect. Not to mention characters that have there reasons for choosing to keep whatever they might be affected by. Also disabilities caused by aging. It's just that if there's no reason for them wanting to keep whatever they have (more so reffering to physical disabilities/injuries) then it's just contrived. There's no reason for them not to seek/accept help in those situations if it's affecting their life negatively in a major way. The only thing they'd be doing is inconveniencing themselves and lowering their autonomy/quality of life. (For bg I'm an author and psych student) But it's always fun to hear different viewpoints :D it's not often things like this are peaceful. Cool to talk to people who see things differently and are respectful about it!
@@CrysPhoenix haha, thank you!! and you didn’t sound demeaning at all, i would just like to see people like me even in fantasy settings :) and you’re so right about magic disabilities, they definitely deserve to be talked about ❤️ glad we can all be civil lol
This wasn't meant to be a D&D character concept, but here's my pitch: a blind warrior, or spellcaster, who uses a seeing-eye horse. It started as joke of a person instead of having a dog for aid, instead rides everywhere on horse going: "I am the MIGHTY CENTAUR!" The more I consider it the more I think it has a variety of applications and I see lots of good will in it. The idea lends it self to all kinds of character types: support, lancer, comic relief, it's endless!
@@twistedmyth5860 Size does matter in this scenario. Also, seeing-eye ponies lend themselves to blind dwarves or gnomes. Now that would be a cool concept.
Sometimes, we don't even realise that a character is handicaped. In the campaign we are playing, we have an old lady that don't walk and use a magic moving chair. Because no one is trying to cure her or what, the new players don't even bat an eye at her. They accommodate the character naturally, which, as a (non visible) disabled person, feel so nice 🥰
Magic grants an increased ability to have more varied disabilities, because magic can do a lot of things that can't happen in the real world. I think people don't often think of these things as disabilities, but if they're removing someone's ability to do things, then the term can fit. They're usually curses, madnesses, etc... and without them a lot of D&D would be missing. A Wild Magic Sorcerer, for example, can wind up casting a fireball centered on themselves almost any time they try to cast a spell. I'd consider randomly exploding when you don't want to to be a magical disability. Different species could also easily suffer from different issues. A human isn't going to be able to fully understand what a minotaur is going through who loses one of their horns, for example, and it can get a lot more complicated and internal than that. There could be completely different organ systems and blood chemistries that result in very different needs and very different kinds of issues, and humans aren't the only ones in society in these worlds. Also, I'd think most adventurers would wind up with some form of PTSD eventually, and even if everything around them is healed, there's no healing magic for mental stuff (except madness & frightened, but those are different). They go into a lot of extreme situations, and the stakes get higher and higher, putting a ton of pressure on them. People can't generally just brush that off. The new D&D One document has plenty of problems, but it adds a Common Sign Language to the list of languages, and that's a positive in my opinion. Everything below here is just various examples I can think of, mostly from my own games (as both a player and a DM). The party found a cult who'd been using a ritual to transform beings, painfully, into oozes. They'd all transformed themselves already. They were aggressive and doing this against the will of these creatures, so the party put a stop to it. Later, someone joined the party as one of these people who'd been transformed. It's a unique kind of disfigurement. It comes with certain abilities, but being acidic to the touch is a big downside in any kind of a society. I've created several characters that I haven't yet gotten to play yet that have their own issues. One has a form of lycanthropy (shark-based), and has learned to use it to help people, but he lives with the knowledge of some things he's done in the past, and that if he loses control, that it can happen again. (Built into his lycanthropy-based subclass is a Wisdom save whenever starting a turn below half health to possibly go berserk.) Another character I've made changed species while doing research, and is concerned that they couldn't return home now because of it (Human -> Yuan-Ti). In the game I'm DMing right now, one of the PCs is blind as a permanent condition, but he's adapted enough that it doesn't really effect him statswise. He can still succeed perception checks with his other senses. We just flavor things around it for roleplay purposes. So I wouldn't describe what something looks like to his character, because it doesn't, but I would still describe the other relevant senses, and he can still participate in the game as much as he wants to. If he wanted to be more limited I'd allow that too, of course. In another game I'm in with rotating DMs, when it was my turn to DM, one of the plots was about a kid who recently found out he's a sorcerer... But it's Wild Magic and he's quite often rolling on that failure table. His parents were trying to hide it with homeschooling and getting a magical demon pet that could remove his spells at the beginning of each day. He still managed to make the house explode (freeing the pet to cause problems, which the party then had to fight), and other people were blamed for it. Once they solved what really happened, the party connected the family with people who could actually train their kid how to use his magic properly, and how to handle the wildness of Wild Magic. I've also had players choose to keep items that give them drawbacks because they like the bonuses and/or roleplay opportunities. One of the players in my game rolls 1d100 on a list of madnesses at the start of each day because of how the pull of the Far Realm through her magic item effects her. Another character kept a magic item that turns anything they try to drink into sand, but allowed them to drain liquids from anything they crit on with a melee attack to hydrate themselves for the day. (This item used the "exhaustion" system.) These items are more self-imposed issues by the characters on the surface, as they fully understand what the items are doing and could stop using them at any time, technically... But that is also a potential thing of its own. Choosing to hold on to power that's actively harming them could be compared to some real world issues people experience, like addiction. The more that one character uses that one item, the more compelling the call from the Far Realm to her through it is, and one of the powers it grants her is Plane Shift, so she'll likely wind up there eventually, which can't end well.
The sections on PTSD, shark-lycanthropy, and a cult forcibly transforming people all remind me of a character I have! I used him to test a race I wrote. I can try and link the doc if you’re interested but I can’t guarantee youtube will let me. The race are called Sekoan, named after Sekolah, the shark god of the sahuagin. Their lore is that sahuagin- who are believed to take no prisoners- _do_ capture people. But they perform rituals and turn them into these monstrous part shark, part person creatures by literally combining a live prisoner and live shark. It’s very painful and traumatic. They then attempt to brainwash the sekoan into obedience, and this usually works- some resist, and they basically break their minds and turn them into these berserkers with no free will. Anyway, my character was one of the resilient ones. He wound up escaping partway through the process, leaving him with most of his free will intact, but intelligence and charisma are his dump stats (6 in each), and he can’t remember his past or even his name. The party named him Jared. We gave him the echoing soul gift from VRGR, and it works really well for him. It allows me to come up with little flickers of the past on the fly whenever it’s triggered, and it works really well for a character with PTSD. For example: After the party fought a bunch of stirges, he rolled a 1 and became frightened of one of the stirges. He ran off and wound up growling in a corner while the party came to calm him down. He said that he remembered a time when someone close to him was ambushed by some. More recently, our party was camping when we were attacked by bullywugs. The sorcerer/warlock was on watch, and contacted Jared with telepathy to wake him up, telling him to roar and scare the bullywugs. We rolled Initiative, and he got a nat 1, triggering the gift… I didn’t tell anyone what it did this time and nobody seemed to notice. He got a result where he was having a flashback to a different time and place, so he was considered blinded for a turn. In his head, he was reliving some similar event where his group was ambushed by bandits. Combat goes smoothly, Jared seems to be stumbling in his tent, then his turn comes. He flies into a rage, then charges at and attacks the last person to make a sound as his flashback attempts to make sense of his surroundings. He thinks he’s fighting an enemy- he attacks recklessly… and he’s attacking our sorcerer (not the sorlock, but a different sorcerer) and takes out half his HP in one hit. The next turn, the effect wears off and he actually has a look around. He has no idea what he did because he assumed he was fighting enemies the whole time.
Kind of as an example of species unique disabilities, one of my own characters is an Aarakocra who is missing one of his wings (an injury from a dragon attack, which happened when he was a young child). While it isn't too much of a disability mechanics wise, since most PCs can't fly anyways, it would certainly be considered a disability for a character from a race that relies heavily on flight. It's also forced him to adapt to a completely different combat style than he grew up with.
I once played a mute character who, in addition to sign language, would cast Minor Illusion to communicate with npcs who didn't know sign. Mechanically, they were a reskinned Kenku (we were playing a cyberpunk campaign), so they also had a tape player to play back sounds they'd recorded other people saying
I am currently playing a non-verbal autistic drow rogue named Lilith who I love to pieces. She was originally going to be an artificer (we were going to change "verbal" spell components to "auditory" components, since she doesn't speak, she could snap her fingers or stamp her foot to make noise) but then I realized thieves cant is canonically a sign language, and I love playing rogues, so I changed my mind during session one. We're not very far in, but she's one of my favorite characters I've ever played.
Theives cant does include hand signals but is really more like disguised conversation. (Like talking at length to someone about the weather, and then returning to your party like "Got it, he said the BBEG is headed to the main city in a few days. Let's go.") I really like the idea of thieves cant being sign language though of course if you aren't a rogue you'd be kinda stuck, huh?
I tend to reason that spells like regenerate can only heal fresh injuries. Any disability you're born with cannot be healed, and any lost limbs where the wound has healed cannot be regrown. On another note, in the new oneDnD/5.5e UA common sign language was added as an official language, which is pretty neat.
Regenerate does specify that it stimulates a creatures natural healing ability so unless the character can naturally regrow limbs they won’t grow em back
Severed parts are restored and no timefrme for healing to work is specified. I do agree that if one is born without a limb it would not regrow as the body didn't have that limb in the first place to be severed. Edit: also I don't think it was specified that the limbs are functional.
@@jomppuh413 Oh that's an interesting idea. Like it regrows the flesh and bone but the nerves don't work? Maybe it could give chronic pain to the pc too. My grandma's toes's nerves were damaged by her cancer treatments and give her the constant feeling of burning cold. At least she's alive and otherwise well, but it is something that can happen. What if the limb grew back (or was grafted back) but it didn't happen perfectly so the player has to deal with some other form of consequence? Maybe they can still use the limb, but they don't have the same coordination they did before, like when your arm is seriously asleep and you can flop it about but you can't feel anything from it properly. Like your proprioception isn't functionning the right way.
@@ViridianForests I mean yeah, though it is quite high level spell so someone could get pissy about it not working like they expect as at that level you can bring decapitated people back to life, but if everyone agrees, it can be a wonderfull way to roleplay disabilities.
@@jomppuh413 True, for a high level spell that's not the best. Though for flavour, maybe it could be like a series of treatments instead? Like you do the regenerate spell and it mends stuff back together, but then it takes several months of high level healing spells by specialized healers who know what they're doing and exercises to make sure the incremental healing works, the same way recovering from a really bad injury can go? Not sure how fun that would be from a player's perspective, but if its their choice or a consequence for their actions or timed with a timeskip it could work?
I would just like to shout into the void of the internet how excited I am to play my next, nurodivergant coded, PC. He's a natural born lycanthrope who insists on being called Hunter. Sensitive hearing and violent instincts make urban places extremely uncomfortable to exist in. He has a habit of saying everything he means and being confused when others dont do the same. When talking he stares directly at people's eyes which makes most humans nervous. Silver burns to the touch. Transforming hurts everytime it happens. And he would aggressively defend the value of his existence to anyone who questioned or pitied it. He loves hunting, nearly obsessed with it, he becomes giddy with each time the topic or challenge comes up. He feels completely at home in the temporate forests and could listen to the distant sounds of beasts for hours. He loves his moorhound (a hunting dog as large as a person). The guy is a shameless edgelord drenched in forgotten realms lore, but when push comes to shove any amount of compassion or understanding will make him into overgrown puppy.
The idea that a disability can be limiting in not only a rpg but specially in a fantasy setting shows a lack of imagination, imagine how being disable in a world full of magic and creatures would look like, a person has a prosthetic arm made of pure magic, a ranger uses a wolf as a mobility aid, a winged creature who was born without wings and how that affects them and their views of their culture, that’s not even counting mental disorders, disabilities can be an excellent character addiction to make them feel all more unique and real.
I’ve never understood being so keen to just magic away a character disability! If I give a character a disability or have them suffer a disability-inducing injury, I want to explore that development, not just make it disappear. I’ve played a few characters like that and thankfully the people I play with have been good about not doing that
Well as someone who isn't disabled I can see the thought process: "You literally don't have an arm or functioning eyes! *I'd freak out if that were me,* so let me magically fix it because this is a high fantasy world where that's possible in an instant! You're welcome! :D" Edit: This isn't an endorsement btw
Rule of thumb I would say, if the character was made to have the desability, just taking it away is a waste of plot, even in a world of high fantasy there are reasons for disabled people, maybe the one armed fighter takes the missing limb Has a reminder, I would not take the spells that regrow limbs away, but take the disabilities has a piece of the characters jorney, can they decide to magic the problem away? Sure, will they? Thats up to them. Anyone tries to force the spells on them? They dont work unless the target desires it to work
"Why would people still be disabled in a world where miraculous healing is common?" should be used as a starting point for world-building, not as a way to dismiss disabled people and characters.
I think in at least 1 story I wrote I decided my character still needed glasses because magic on the eyes is too risky and could cause the total loss of vision if something went wrong. Said character loves to read and would thus rather have the glasses than risk not being able to see at all.
as a new player who is still waiting to play my first game I've already made a character but in a future campaign I might make character autistic since I am and it would be interesting to see how they handle situations
As someone who’s played dnd a while now, I’ve noticed that even when it isn’t intended, a lot of my characters react to things in a nuerodivergent way because I can not for the life of me figure out how nuerotypicals function
"It doesn't *have* to be super serious all the time" YES. THIS. Being real about how hard being disabled/neurodivergent/etc. is is valid, but there's also incredible value in being able to joke about dark things! We have had so many funny, sad-but-sweet, and outright fluff fest moments because our characters got Real about their anxiety, or trauma, or the dream-curse everyone has to undergo if the party soulknife touches their mind. Y'know, normal D&D things :)
homebrew rule: spellcasters can replace verbal components with sign language if its one of the languages they are proficient in but that have to clap at the end of the hand signs to end the incantation thus making a noise on the level of verbal components this allows inclusivity for mute spellcasters while not making it verbal but better
My first character was a dwarf who suffered from claustrophobia due to backstory related ptsd. I still wish I'd been able to play into that character more.
I once played a drow who lost the use of his legs from a dungeon to get around the goliath piggybacked him around, His new goal in life was from then on becoming a drider and gaining spider legs to walk again
Thats a legitimately great character goal. Its whomesome, if i ignore the spider legs *shudder*, but it makes great sense as of why they would go out to adventure. Being a fan of kobolds, i often sit on other partymembers shoulders with a crossbow and spells on the ready, so you would be surprised to know how effective a kobold shoulder turret would be, plus constant pack tactics!
I remembered an old MMO that had an elf race that looked like their legs and 1 arm were prosthetics and since then I've been wanting to make a DnD character in the same vein, get some cool magic prosthesis in there, I love the idea of home brewing the effects incurred if you don't have your needed equipment/aides
Wow…I feel bad for the people who have had experiences where DM’s heal/cure the disabilities of people’s characters without even asking first, and I’m sorry to say I’ve heard a fair share of stories and vents about it. I myself am lucky enough to not have a problem with that, granted I haven’t been playing for very long and I haven’t yet introduced a disabled character to a campaign (though I do have an artificer with a mechanical eye and a prosthetic limb I’m currently workshopping before I do anything with her), but still. I’m glad I now have some advice and a few ideas on how to handle disability in D&D if/when I start DMing my own campaigns, and a better understanding of making characters with them in the future! (Also, the part where you said you got the chance to yeet a man across the battlefield by his axe? Literally had me in TEARS laughing!)
as a DM, I have some house rules that make disability more impactful. for example, there are different ways to handle limb loss, all of which have their own different side effects. Regenerate no longer regrows limbs if they aren't there to reattach (although some higher level spells can) but regrown or reattached limbs have complications like nerve misalignment, pain spikes, and increased threshold for critical fails (a natural roll of one or two on the die instead of just one). conversely, prosthetics have different limitations. magical prosthetics are the most precise, but stop working in areas of antimagic and their enchantments can be suppressed with a dispelling. mechanical prosthetics don't have this failing, but are less precise, resulting in disadvantage on checks that require fine motor control with that limb specifically. fusion mechanical and arcane prosthetics, the most difficult to make, function as well as a normal arm unless the enchantments are suppressed, at which point they function like a mechanical one. I also have different rules for blindness and deafness as permanent or long-lasting things, and I tend to see the spells and combat conditions as more of an obscuring effect than anything else, but my rules for those conditions as permanent disability are convoluted. once I made a kobold artificer who had lost the use of their legs, and used their steel defender (arcane robot companion) as a mobility aid using the rules for mounts. this resulted in some badass mounted combat that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, but also had a lot of complications
Yeah, i feel disability is something that should be included in worlds. Im currently dming a pirate campaign, and decided to add two disbaled npc crew members. One of them is a mute scarecrow, and because of them i decided to make it so sign language is just a common part of language basically everyone knows. Along with that i have an artificer who has a customized cannon with legs she uses as a mobility aid. Ive taken a lot of care to make magical sollutions work in a way so not a lot of people can use them, similar to like high grade prosthetics. So on the same crew theres a person with a full prosthetic arm, and someone with a peg leg cause thats a better alternative for them All in all disability really should be a part of the world, as i dont want my fantasy world to have eugenics
For some reason I saw your mute scarecrow and was like "Of course everyone in the crew should be able to fully understand them so that they can cooperate. What would be funny is if for some reason or other (disability caused by something not long before or after becoming a pirate rather than something they were born with or happened in childhood? family wasn't fluent in it and was too poor to have someone teach them?) they only knew more common signs before joining the crew, so less common signs are all things he/the crew came up with on their own. As such, any outsider who knows sign is in a situation of mostly knowing what is being said but occasionally going 'the f* does that mean???'" I have no idea if that would work out or actually be funny in context, but for some reason that is what popped into my head.
Combat wheelchairs give me very bad flashbacks (affectionate) to those old bastards with gatling guns in bloodborne If someone says a wheelchair can’t be effective in fighting, I’ll show them those
Inn betweens party has a member with an sevear generalised anxiety disorder and another with an phobia of getting buried alive. Both get the party into sevear trubble but get handled well by the party, after the first shock. They also have a nonbinary character and hints of a future romance on the ace spectrum. The podcast gives generous trigger warnings, like for body dysphoria before a body switching happens, even if the characters do not experience dysphoria themselfs .
I have had this idea for a character who was cursed at an early age so that their body was radioactive. This forced them to live in a abandoned mine for a while so as to keep the people around them safe. They made a suit of armour out of lead which allows them to leave the mine without anyone being in danger, but there is alot of work required to keep them comfortable. They often look for soft fabrics to line the inside of their suit for comfort, they have to use a special helmet attachment when eating, they are terrified of touching or being touched by anyone, if they want to do any maintenance on their armour or just want to move with it on they must first find a deep cave or abandoned mine. These were just some ideas to flesh out the character, but feel free to ask questions or make suggestions.
Actually with my most recent campaign I have a player who is deaf, after talking to the player who made it clear they didn’t want to be healed I made the justification that healing magic wouldn’t work on his hearing cause it wasn’t damaged it was nonexistent and you can’t heal something that isn’t there. Also have a half vampire NPC who is constantly under the effects of mercury poisoning cause lore so he has to take small amounts of blood daily to keep his healing factor up as essentially medication. Both the characters have had some really interesting bonding moments cause of their respective conditions (also cause they are both mischievous bastards)
i had a dnd character where i hard failed a save so many times in a row me and the dm agreed that it had adverse effects on him and he lost use of his legs and it was a cool story beat going from this roguish out there bastard suddenly having to fall back on his less used sorcerer abilities. and it was nice to sort of vent my own insecurities and such through him.
9:42 Jumping off of this point, the Eberron sourcebook for 5e (an official sourcebook published by Wizards of the Coast) actually has stats for magical prosthetic limbs, including a couple of combat-focused variants. Following that logic, a combat wheelchair is perfectly reasonable.
My main DND character is a rogue who is a zora (zelda-inspired fish person) who's missing a fin on his left forearm. On land he's fine but when swimming without his prosthetic he's got no balance or stability and takes disadvantage to anything dexy/a nerf to his swim speed. I love him :3
I've been hesitant to play a disabled character in the campaigns my group has been doing specifically because of the horror stories you alluded to, but the video inspires me to give it a shot in the next campaign I join
My favorite solution to having a wheelchair-using PC character in a difficult swamp campaign (where a wheelchair would obviously get stuck in the mud) was that the ogre barbarian would just put the disabled character on his head and carry them around the whole time. The thing became so casual and amusing that the disabled character now rides on the ogres head by default no matter the campaign they're in. It was also pretty funny to imagine how this would look since the disabled character wasn't of a particularly tiny species but a fully grown dragonborn.
It's not a dnd character but shout out to my werewolf the apocalypse glasswalker who's arm bones got tzimisce-ed into swords (world of darkness is wild).Love that man to death.
In my current campaign where I DM, my party is allies with a detective who is a mute sorcerer who gets around his spellcasting limitations by using the Subtle spell feature. He communicates by using the Minor Illusion cantrip to create subtitles. Its a bit of a challenge to portray him as we play DnD online but what I love is that my players (half of which I knew barely) all seem perfectly accepting of the character and show no desire or never ask if he wants his muteness 'cured' away. There's some hope after all for disabled characters to truly shine in d&d
the end reminded me of a situation I had a while ago Im a DM and in my homebrew world theres this culture of barbarians and fighters having one who is the strongest of them all. Whoever the "number 1" is is highly respected. the last one who was unbeaten for almost 40 years was an orc barbarian who was blind. I had one person tell me that thats unrealistic. All I could think of was "my guy youre a drow that uses magic and is sent to fight a 5m tall frog that breathes fire but a blind fighting champion is "too unrealistic" ?????" they werent allowed into the oneshot I hosted for that and other reasons and it still baffles me how there are people like this who really think their way of thinking makes sense
I honestly love including disability in my characters. My first character came from a setting where all elves had a natural connection to the magic of the world, but because of some unknown condition my rogue was born with he was cut off from this natural connection. my most recent character was an autistic artificer who would frequently get so hyper-fixated on her work that she would often not even notice that something was probably on fire behind her. I[m autistic myself so she was honestly a way to poke fun at my own conditions I also love playing kenku because I find their inability to speak normally fun and in the game I'm currently DMing we have a mute monk who communicates through written notes and the fact that as an ice elemental her body made of ice changes shape depending on her mood, she became this way when a cursed dagger stabbed her in the neck in her backstory meaning the wound would never heal, but also wouldn't kill her. Because of this just casting a "remove curse" spell on her would cause the injury to become lethal. On top of her, a recurring NPC is an old blind mage who uses their familiar as a service animal as he goes on his own adventures and the PCs bump into him from time to time. He's pretty fun too
The addition of Common Sign Language in One D&D has made me think of playing a deaf character and how to do that. It could be really interesting to see how they could interact with people like Warforged or Aarakocra whose lips couldn't be easily read, or maybe having only one other member of the party who can fully communicate with them
While I don't play D&D I do play various ttrpgs and am personally very thankful that none of my DMs have been against players playing disabled characters, and I don't have any stories of people trying to force cures or disability aids onto characters that don't want them (regardless of setting, disability, etc.). This also applies to characters who have some form of body/facial disfigurement that aren't disabling, no cures or treatment unless the character specifically wants it. And this is regarless of system. Some have had stats for disabilities baked in (Savage Worlds for example), while others were far more homebrew. Either way, am very thankful I don't have any horror stories of that.
I don’t have any DnD characters, but I do have two disabled Pokemon OCs that I use in RPs. Both being children to a Lucario and Manectric couple, the Manectric mother having had complications in the reproduction process due to backstory reasons. The first being Nova the Riolu, she is blind but her aura vision allows her to see in the same way as Toph (able to see objects but colour and images are lost on her), she is also fiercely independent where she hates anyone trying to “help” with stuff that she is perfectly capable of doing, but she does ask her close friends and family for help if she feels that she needs it. Second being Rey the Electrike, being an Electrike she isn’t able to use sign language so she expresses how she feels with her boundless energy, if she is feeling a certain way, she will make it clear.
Thank you for all of these I never really considered several of them, a lot I had already thought of in the back of my mind like the blindness/deafness spell or battle affect being caused by something separate from usual blindness or deafness and in my campaigns I run I always homebrew it where healing only heals what the person being healed wants to heal so like a missing arm, such as what one of my players has, doesn’t suddenly grow back through her not automail when a spell heals her
Thanks for the video! I’m trying to find a long term dnd group so I can play an artificer with a healing bent and having a reference point for some common pitfalls to avoid is really good. In my mind she’s more of a battlefield medic than a true cure all wounds type, so her physically stitching a wound closed with thread imbued with magically anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties would account for not being able to recover all hit points- there’s still an injury it’s just not as bad as it was earlier and they can still rip their stitches. And ongoing disability management without a quick cure could lead to more role play for a character deliberately written to be awkward around others but very excited about using their practical skills.
I honestly love watching Okwyrms (I hope I spelled that right) videos while working on my DnD campaign. Their voice is honestly so soothing and their videos are really informative. They also give me inspiration for my campaigns and do many good characters in my campaigns have sparked from their videos
Thanks for your perspective, I'm playing D&D at the moment, I was tempted to use a blind fighter with a owl familiar, but watching your videos made reconsider. It's not my tale to play a disabled character, which is something I have to understand. Heck I'm playing a lycanthrope campaign (were-folk) made me consider that the were folks were still human and not just exp. As context I'm playing a poetry writing construct, wanting to bring their lover back. A child character was a natural born were wolf in a town of anti were wolf with his mom being a undiagnosed were wolf that was cursed. I had a true, "Is it okay for me to heal you? You're still a sentient being."
There was actually a kickstarter a while back that I backed, which is going to basically give you book material to help with having disabilities worked into the system and since I have had DMs who wouldn't work with anything unless there was 'somewhere they could look it up', I'm very much looking forward to getting the book. At first when I saw it, I was a little taken aback and like 'Oh... Could this be... Bad?', but reading into the project and finding that the people writing it all had experience with disabilities and that there were people brought on to ensure things weren't based on stereotypes and prejudges, I was on board. If nothing else, I feel like I can use it as a guideline when building a character and know what to talk through with the DM beforehand. I know it will have both real life disabilities as well as some that are magical adjacent to something that might be hard to roleplay or fit into the fantasy setting, along with possible aids and how to work them into the world (stuff like price lists for aids, service animals and how one might work them into the system). It's called limitless heroes I think, but I am not sure if and how you can get it outside of the kickstarter that has ended a while ago now.
I've only played one long term dnd campaign and I played a druid who due to an event from their past is missing an eye and the dm and party were absolutely chill. it didn't effect gameplay much as I fight up close so their fucked depth perception doesn't effect their aim much but it's just nice having my character allowed to exist with their disability and not have anyone comment on it or try curing it
i played a blind tabaxi druid not too long ago with a toad familiar whose eyes she would see through (he sat on her head on top of a massive mushroom hat she had. her name was toadstool.) and the way we played it was that she had disadvantage on some checks without him but otherwise she had her base stats. to this day she is still one of my favourite characters i have ever played because of some of the funny moments i had with her, including when we tried to sneak into a room using her wild shape but she couldnt actually see anything in said room if she just snuck under the door so we had to find a large enough gap in the floorboards for her to travel underneath, as a cockroach, riding on top of her noble steed: a toad named bumble
I have a few characters I play that are disabled, one of them that is most like me, suffers from anaemia, which roleplay wise it acts similar to me, but mechanically it means I can’t make saving throws against exhaustion, as pushing herself is just not something she can handle. The other one possesses a difficulty in communicating which shows up in roleplay including things like having to stop in order to try and communicate what she wants to.
I am definitely showing my party and dm this video! They have been kinda rude to me lately, telling me that its unrealistic to have my character be Deaf, but also saying that because I am actually Deaf, I shouldn’t play a hearing character. It is so frustrating!!! Thanks for this video! Im hoping that the tips you gave will allow me to have a fun DnD experience lol
I have a character that was built to be a min maxed distance Archer, having been in the kings guard for some time. Just before the campaign however, his draw arm was disintegrated by an enemy's Eldritch Blast. Unable to help the Archer, his commander released him from duty. He now is on a quest to earn enough to pay for some fix to return to service. He fights with his off hand using the basic short sword training that he would have received in the army.
I'm playing a disabled druid character rn and she's really fun. Her backstory is that she's a doctor who lost her family to a deadly disease that killed all of them, and would have killed her had she not discovered a cure for it in time. But, by then, the damage was done and she was left with severe chronic pain in her leg and a limp. To reflect that in game, she has disadvantage on athletics and acrobatics checks and her movement speed is halved when she doesn't have a mobility aid like her cane. She's also autistic but that comes down to roleplay rather than mechanics
Oohhh! I haven't watched the video yet, but I play a lot of D&D and one of the MOST frustrating things is trying to play a disabled character rules-as-written, especially when trying to play them as having obtained that disability instead of being born with it (my common excuse. for example, for why regeneration doesn't regenerate the arm of someone who's never had it.) Especially at high levels, obtaining a disability tends not to matter anymore because there's always some magic or a spell that will fix it. Luckily, though it took a lot of work and rules/worldbuilding discussions, I found a way to play a lot of disabled characters and NPCs in a way which I'm happy with.
I had a character in TTRPG that ended up blind in one eye dude to an injury in combat. As someone who straight up doesn't have depth perception IRL anyway I wasn't phased by this change. She, as a character, was a bit bummed about it because *ow*, but it stayed. Another player character offered to try and surgically fix it but she preferred it not get infected...but thanks for the offer. That choice was respected. It was a fun time and she had disadvantage on ranged attacks from then on out which was interesting because she primarily used guns and learned to shift over to other weapons.
I haven't played DnD yet, as transportation isn't easy to come by where I live and the amount of players in my small town are slim anyhow. I fill in the time until I can live somewhere where I can find a group to play with by creating characters for future campaigns or one-shots. I have a mute gnome bard that I'm quite pleased with. She wears soft hide shoes, similar to moccasins, to feel the beat as she plays her instrument, most often a lyre. I also have her wear a scarf around her waist, quite similar to your character shown in the video, to hide her money pouch as she performs in the square. I've also thought of the discreet details like having her wear short hair to prevent her sight being hindered or, taking notes from her background as a bard, choosing to use dramatic charades to communicate. There's also a stray tabby that hangs around while she plays that may or may not end up becoming her companion, depending on the DM. I'm disabled myself but not deaf. If anyone has any advice on how to improve my rosy cheeked mischief maker, I'd gladly appreciate it.
Another amazing video! I have never gotten the chance to play dnd yet but it’s definitely become a special interest/hyperfixation of mine and I’ve made dozens of character concepts for whenever I actually get a chance to play. I’ve had a few disabled character ideas, mostly autistic characters (I’m autistic) since I realized that the rangers “favored enemy” feature can be easily flavored as a special interest, so I’ve made several autistic ranger characters. There’s a human ranger (subclass undecided) who’s obsessed with dragons and will take any opportunity to infodump everything about them (the different types, the average wingspans of each type, diet, habitat, number of teeth, etc.), an elven horizon walker who was raised and taught that fey were super cool and nice but when she researched them herself realized that the feywild and fey in general are way darker and more manipulative than she was lead to believe, and a kobold gloomstalker who’s selectively mute (I’d have to do more research on that before playing the character to make sure I do it well) and speaks mostly through sign language. Also I’ve been watching tons of dimension 20 (I was so happy when you mentioned fantasy high, I love that series to death, and they have some autistic rep and a minor character that uses a wheelchair in the second season on dropout if you didn’t already know) and I sometimes come up with oc’s in the campaigns settings as if I were a player making a pc, and when watching “a crown of candy” I had the idea of making a blind monk (this was before cumulus’ introduction) character who’s made of Jello, he can sense vibrations very similarly to Toph in reference to how any tiny movement or vibration can make Jello wiggle and shake. I don’t see why fantasy worlds can’t have disability in them, if anything the addition of magic just adds more ways for a character to be disabled or more ways for disability to effect people. A character can easily be injured or cursed in some way, or a character could end up with ADHD when a fey asks them “can I have your attention”, or a wild magic sorcerer with chronic pain can have their wild magic surges go off when their pain disrupts their focus on a spell, or a character who hallucinates but is convinced that they’re cursed by demons because they live in a world where demons are proven to be real so it’s not even that absurd of an assumption to make. Also, as a side note, if you’re looking for recommendations on content to review I recommend Epithet Erased. It’s a web series that has the first (and currently only, they’re still working on it) season for free on RUclips, and it’s only 7 episodes. There’s a character who has a magical ability that effects them in debilitating ways, similar to a chronic pain disorder, and there’s a mention of misophonia and implied/possible PTSD and autistic characters. I’d love to see your thoughts on it, I’ve already made a few comments recommending it but I don’t think those were noticed, sorry if it’s annoying that I keep suggesting it.
One rpg I’ve seen handle this pretty well is pathfinder 2e. There’s a whole item category for disability aids, including versions that add bonuses like a wheelchair that can jump, but also basic things like corrective lenses, as well as rules written in the player hand book on how to play disabled characters sensibly, along with suggestions for mechanical effects of them, such as taking a penalty to perception when not wearing glasses
5:15 Thanks. I am an old guard DM who has had to deal with a lot of yuppies going on about Crawford... I really needed to hear that from someone on your side of this whole divide.
I run a campaign, most of it is more serious and toes into a lot of important and big subjects…. And this campaign, one of the players had their hand cut off but sewed it back on and healed it… so when their plan went up in flames and an ally had his leg vaporized he told the guy to just grow it back…. The NPC then shouted “You can fix your wound, I can’t fix this, I can’t just grow it back! You fucked up and walked away, but because of you I will never walk away from this, I won’t ever walk again because of you!” The players spent a while helping the npc and asking what needs they could help with… they even went as far as making the town more accommodating and tried to even make them crutches to help them. Like I genuinely was smiling cause… they cared, they saw him as a person, and they tried their best only doing what he asked for and not pushing anything on him. Now one of my players after sat down and spent time learning from me (disabled and jobless) and our rogue (disabled) about how he can help us when we need help, without being disrespectful. It was kinda a wonderful little side story tbh
i love this video, the thing about not being able to cure preexisting blindness/deafness makes sooo much sense esp when you explain that can be temporary in combat, thank you!! i have a fighter who lost his arm during a session (our palabard got corrupted and cut it off…) so my gm and i came up with a lot for him and his prosthetic-for example, he’ll take damage if it’s like underwater or really hot or really cold etc and it’ll stop working for a bit, but also because it’s a metal arm it does an extra point of damage for unarmed strikes as of now it’s been in game a lot more serious of a topic-mostly because the palabard feels uh REALLY BAD abt the whole situation obviously, but in game that was less than a month ago so we’ll give it some time side note your art is GORGEOUS i love watching you do the coloring and shading omggggg
i also have a ranger who’s been half blind since birth and uses an enchanted ribbon on their bow to help with their aiming (the decision that they would be half blind happened AFTER i made them a ranger; luckily the person who suggested it was the dm and she. is half blind herself. so she already had a few ideas for disability aids in regards to that) same setting different campaign from the ranger, i have a wild magic sorcerer with anxiety and mood regulation issues-her abusive mentor basically made her be under the calm emotions spell for like twelve years but after finally getting away from him (killed him before her now evil ex girlfriend could bc he was awful to her too, it’s a *wild* campaign yall) she instead like. has a ring that helps absorb the magic, has a cloak that helps with temp stuff since it’s like fire and ice magic, and also just takes good ol potion of zoloft (also said ex girlfriend cut off our fighter’s arm for this game. unfortunately after the thing with my fighter fighters losing arms has just kept coming up with my friend groups and this one absolutely isn’t a coincidence bc the person who plays this fighter is the dm for the game with MY fighter)
unfortunately for everyone but me this video has activated my autism beam and i’m now just infodumping about my dnd campaigns. although hey i guess it’s fitting!
the artificer lady i play (a rakshasa tiefling) has flexion issues in her hands (on account of they’re supposed to be backwards); her power armor includes hydraulic rehabilitation braces that… also shoot lightning. disability can be a character trait like any other that is important in its own way to a character’s identity or sense of self; and as a disabled person myself who often has to turn to *the undead* to relate to a character in fantasy, it’s refreshing to see other folks- especially abled folks- including some rep in their stories and worlds!!
of my characters with disability, the most interesting is likely my albino rogue assassin with nystagmus. because his vision can act up, he’s learned to become an expert in fighting in the dead of night- operating in the dark on touch and sound. like anyone, he can fight better when he can see, but he has a permanent disadvantage in long range fighting, and usually an advantage at night where he has more experience.
Oh, I don't know if you have seen or heard of it, but there is this fantasy anime called Ranking of Kings with a disabled protagonist (a small for a human child of giants who was born deaf and mute), and honestly it might be right up your alley. The story is surprisingly dark for the art style used in it, and several characters have to deal with disability in one form or another. Many of the antagonists do so by forging dark bargains with forces that end up making them into inhuman monsters, which is contrasted against the protagonist's disabilities giving him skills he would otherwise not have, and his journey to hone those to find his own strength. I should note that my opinion here is from that of a neurodivergent but not disabled person, and would appreciate getting your take if you find the first season compelling and heartwarming enough to watch through. ^_^ It certainly left an impression on me!
It wasn't DnD but we had a small LARP event. The local alchemist and secret cult leader was played by a guy with disability. He was mostly wheelchair bound. If he managed to assassinate another player he could bring them back but with amnesia. Then he tried to indovtrinate them. Lets just say we had a significant amount of amnesiac cultists by the end of the game. No one expected the benign looking disabled guy to pull a dagger on them. 😅
My first DnD character was an elven knight who had his dominant hand torn off and eaten by a warg during a battle mid-campaign. Since the party had been fighting to protect a group of NPC dwarfs, their leader engineered a gauntlet for my PC to wear in the meantime, and promised that when the party entered the dwarf kingdom later on, he'd have a proper prosthetic made. Unfortunately the campaign ended before we reached that point, but it was still a lot of fun.
One of my fellow party members is a disabled Aaracokra. His wings were permanently injured while he was learning how to fly. He can still use them to slow his fall, but he can't actually fly. Also my elven ranger that I played in Tomb of Annihilation has since become an NPC in a homebrew campaign I'm creating. At the end of the campaign her character arc wasn't finished (the DM was kinda new at his job so I didn't blame him too much), so I decided in the time between the end of that campaign and the beginning of Tomb of Annihilation she became paralyzed in her attempts to get revenge on the clan of giants that destroyed her homeland, along with the half-orc warlord who led them. So she retired from adventuring and rode her pet triceratops to a city of predominantly wood elves, where she settled down, marrying a half-elf named Thalin and adopting two children. She now is in a wheelchair, and has a shield guardian who pushes her around in it. Still a formidable foe when push comes to shove, but since her wheelchair doesn't have very good traction it can't really handle difficult terrain very well. So she mostly fights in defending her new home and family. Whenever she needs something outside the city, she instead hires adventurers to retrieve it for her.
One of my favorite TTRPGs surprised me when I was learning about - despite being a game where healing to full ability can be very easy, they create ways in which disabled characters are not only possible but ENCOURAGED by the rules in some cases. They have Flaws for blindness, deafness, missing limbs, and lameness. They can be reflavored in so many wonderful ways and can be used in such creative ways as well. Our DM made one character use a sword as a cane for it's political meaning, and even outside of it he does not forget that she needs that cane, that she is disabled. As a disabled person, it made me feel so seen. He mentioned that he wanted to add all kinds of people in it and after we met her I cried. She's still one of my favorite NPCs, and it is the longest-running game I play. White Wolf TTRPGs are great for that reason. Please go check them out! The one I'm referencing here is Vampire: The Masquerade V5, but most White Wolf games have these merits/flaws.
I am a dm running an inclusive campaign, and I have a story to share that I personally find interesting that this video reminds me off. It's of when I got a new player who is a trans woman, and she asked to play a trans woman, so we had a long conversation about how that would work, what inworld magics could help her character transition, which ended up being druids, which makes sense to us because hey transformation and which fitted her into the heavy druid lore of the nation the campaign was set in, with druids being hunted. Also, it gave us the term genderdruid, which is now my worlds equivelant of genderfluid, which I love. We discussed discrimination and level of transition, and I was surprised that she preferred to play someone who didn't transition fully. Her character was a woman, but she was infertile due to imperfect rituals, not flawed per say but not perfected. I of course would have let her transition in full, but she chose this, and I supported it. I wouldn't have expected it, but I understand that sometimes in our fantasy worlds, we want heroes who share our burdens. Additionally, she requested that, since this nation has a lot of laws and paperwork, she'd be misgendered on paperwork, and gave a full thumbs up for shitty nobles who misgendered her so she could beat them up, because everybody loves beating up nobles. It was uncomfortable for me to misgender her on purpose when playing those npc's, but we agreed to it, to this imperfect world where she could be a hero who could work to fix these societal issues. I don't know if there's a lesson in here, but it did help me see dnd as more than escapism, and I hope I can make my players smile by letting them beat up bigots and save this nation from corruption and dark ideologies. I also hope this story could have made someone go 'huh, interesting' whilst reading this. Bonus details, the goddess of death in my world likes to take souls with identity issues of any kind and show them a mirror, as everyone is their truest self in her domain. By truest self I don't mean some arbitrary "best self", I mean true self. It confirms things like gender identity, it helped someone who was forcibly turned into a changeling see who they truly are, but it does NOT remove disability, because fuck that. I just felt like sharing that incase anyone else wants to use the imagery of a goddess of death with a mirror so the dead may see themselves and find inner peace trough confirmation. PS watching your videos helped me figure out how to best write disabled characters, so thank you!
I'd love to share about some of my disabled PCs and NPCs in the campaign I run ❤ I run three campaigns but since one of them is in a preset world, I'll talk only about my homebrew games For PCs, one party has a character who is an amputee that had his leg lost in an accident years before the campaign started. We decided that the only mechanical adjustment for him would be that he can't do long-distance walking (so instead of the party traveling 8 hours a day, they can only do 7 maximum). He experiences chronic pain on occasion and takes potions to help and act as pain medication when on the road As for NPCs, I have two that stand out to me that I've made (there are others of course but I am most proud of these two regarding disability in game). One is a wizard named Liv who experienced a spinal injury from an assassination attempt that left her struggling to walk. She uses a wheelchair often due to pain but she does walk on occasion. I also struggle with walking and serious pain from spinal surgery that left me disabled and numb down the entirety of my right leg so it was easy to implement fantasy equivalents for her. The other character I have is a tiefling named Radiance who was deaf from birth that the party met when escaping a city. It was a pleasure to introduce her and for one of my PCs who had sign language as one of his known languages to surprise the party by communicating with her and teaching another party member sign language ❤ I don't do any actual play series but I still think appropriate representation is good. If not for other people then for my own understanding and knowledge ❤
Thank you for this video. This was very good advice! As an intellectually and neurologically disabled woman, I made my healer oc abled but since she's a medic i.e. doesn't/can't use magic, the idea that she can somehow heal other characters' disabilities is impossible. Whilst she is a dnd oc, I've never played her, mainly bc I haven't got an opportunity to play her yet, and she is quite young (she's 16). However, I hope to play my 22-year-old warlock oc at some point. So glad I decided to make her dyspraxic. Thank you again for this video and I hope you have a wonderful week ❤️
Thank you for making this. A little while ago I wanted to create a deaf character but there’s not much on how to make disabled characters in dnd. This video was very helpful, especially because in the future I want to make a character that has chronic pain like I do. I also shared this with a one of my dnd groups because I feel that it’s very useful. Thank you again for this. The disabled dnd nerd greatly appreciates it.
I really love this video, thank you! I've also watched many others but wanted to comment on a recent video that your colouring is absolutely my favourite.
One time I played a nonverbal Rogue who mainly communicated by writing, though the character xe ended up getting the closest to was the party's other Rogue, since they could communicate with Thieves' Kant
This reminds me of the first DND character I ever wrote: a celestial warlock with no arms and injured vocal cords. Their arms had been blown off in a magic accident in their younger years which also damaged their voice, so they just learned to adapt, and he eventually got an enchanted scarf from his patron that acts as pseudo arms and a casting focus. Still waiting to play him but he will always have a special place in my heart.
It'd be really cool to see more fantasy settings explore disabilities unique to that world. Kind of like how that Barbie fairy princess movie did. Of course in addition to real world disabilities.
I have a selectively mute bard, and I'm always nervous to bring up that fact for feat of judgement. She sings as a form of self-soothing and empowerment, but outside of that has a mental block of sorts for actually speaking. She was inspired by my own occasional bouts of having difficulty speaking during certain times of stress. I don't have those moments often at all, but they have happened, and it's always frustrating to feel like I can't communicate. So, Buttercup doesn't really talk, but singing is a different category for her. When she isn't preforming/casting, she uses sign language with her brother acting as her interpreter. This makes it so she can communicate most of the time, but still faces some challenges (as she isn't going to sing everything she says).
Honestly I agree with everything here except for one thing: nerfing the spell "Regenerate", the only spell that I know that can regrow body parts. (Besides OP Wish.) This 7th level spell sits right next to spells that can: teleport, raise someone from the actual dead in a way that makes them not undead, shift people into a literal alternate dimension, and summon a storm of fire. It is understandable if you made the knowledge of the spell rare, expensive, and very painful to actually experience. However, without that feature, Regeneration is just another healing spell. A good healing spell, but *just* a healing spell. Edit: I just reminded myself that the Resurrection spells do the exact same thing, but I don't think people pick that spell for the "grow back body parts" effect.
So this is one of the reasons I love kobolds. They’re the only race that has a workable, mechanical flaw (that actually has a significant impact and isn’t problematic). They have sunlight sensitivity, so they can’t see very well in sunlight. It can be worked around, but it’s the only base game disability that isn’t just magically fixed with an item. Also grungs (little frog people) are one of the most mechanically unique official races and have two disabilities. Both are good in that they can be worked around, but never “fixed.” They need to submerge in water for 1 hour every day, which can be an interesting extra step in finding a safe spot, and they have touch poison, which is both a power and a flaw, since it applies to anyone a grung touches. Both are things that need to be worked with, but not fixed.
I love including disabilities in the campaigns I write. The groups I'm in don't believe in "fixing" being that most of us have experience, be it physical, mental, or both. My favorite npc so far is my old Spellthief PC. A bit of a mix of races. She lost her hand after being caught stealing and had it mummified so it could be buried with her.... Untill she stole an ancient cursed Vase that cursed her to become a lich. Now her hand is her first and only thrall and she runs a shady mysticism shop with bargain price potions that just might harm more than heal.
Over the years I've seen a lot of disabled PCs and NPCs, and tbh they're some of my favorite, my top 2 being Kallia, a Tiefling Fighter who was born without most of her left arm and Skelaris, a 60 year old man who's trying to become a lich in order to live forever and no longer have to deal with his chronic illness
Personally, I find it really fun to write inventive ways that disability works in a setting. In my current world that I'm building, many disabilities are considered sacred. Prosthetics are magical by nature, being a sort of focus that projects the missing limb. The blind are given candles with various enchantments that help guide them based on how the holder best functions (whether the candle serves as direct sight or the flame points in different directions, which can be felt by the holder, etc). Deaf and mute people are taught light psychic communication abilities which they can choose to expand, as well as their written language(s) as well as a sort of universal magical language which all sentient people know to speak, but not necessarily write. There's so much customization in the setting that is available to the players and used by many NPCs, such as the holy warriors of the civilization that were brought back to life by their deity. They usually have multiple missing limbs and come back blind and/or deaf due to the damage caused by whatever evil entity took them down originally.
My first D&D character is a gold dragonborn barbarian and is missing one of his arms (it was amputated). I'd been watching alot of The Owl House at the time so I was learning more about the Do s and Don't s when it comes to designing disabled characters.
An interesting way to do this would be to have one of your characters take a vow of silence. While it isn't a disability per say having a character who will die if they speak who uses asl to communicate would be a great motivator to learn asl and teach the rest of your party!
Hello! A fellow fin here :D just wanted to leave a comment that I've been watching your videos for a while and I really appreciate them a lot! I'm starting my first ever dnd sessions with my friends and just starting to make a character so this video is great.
i cant remember which video specifically but it was in the comments of one of Umbreon Libris' videos i think? but the comment was about pokemon and dnd and honestly a pokemon campaign would be a really fun way to have aids for disabled characters in dnd o: the comment was talking about using deerling as a mount pokemon with a sadde that could support the character who couldnt use their legs. EDIT: OH WAIT NO SHIT LMAOOO. it was on ur video 💀😭😭😭 im so dumb, you literally just had a pokenon video BXHXBSHXHSXH
One of my favorite characters of all time that I've played is a one-armed fighter named Melthaea. Her missing right arm (which ended just above where an elbow would be) is a birth defect, so it's not really a wound that can be regenerated. I built Mel from the ground up with the intention of figuring out a good build for an amputee character who didn't have access to prosthetics or magic to compensate. So I wound up building a STR fighter focusing on thrown weapons, of all things. She used a slightly-modified kite shield that she strapped to her nub (with the shield straps held to her torso via a couple of belts so it wouldn't just pop off her nub easily), and would mainly focus on knife/javelin spam, diving into melee to tank for her friends when necessary. A lot of her personality kind of grew organically out of that thought experiment. Not only was I trying to find a good voice for her in my head (eventually settled on Texas/Mississippi 'good ole gal') but I was trying to figure out her perspective. Most of the time, Mel fell into the "cool older sister" role of the party; at one point she helped the cleric, who was scared of the dark, come down from a panic attack by giving them a whiff of a bottle of malt vinegar from a fish-and-chip shop, of all things. And she was a genuine badass when combat started to happen. But she also wound up a bit on the ornery side, particularly regarding her disability. One of the things that was guaranteed to piss Mel off was the idea that her disability made her inferior or 'lesser than'. Or the idea that she was something broken that needed fixing.
nice art :) also; entirey besides the good representation: I would say that disabilities or adjacent difficultys make for way more interesting mecanics as if they are balanced(of course in cooperation or at least with the approval of the player) at least somewhat, such that the PC who has some kind of a condition which makes them struggle with cirtain things doesnt always feel useless (which should neither be the case if sb builds a suboptimal character nore if they choose to build such a condition into their character, unless they specifically want it). this is just the basis of creating an interresting character. they should be good at some things and less good at others, such that every member of the group gets to shine occasionally and all are uniquely interresting
I am dming a dnd campaign and one of my player's characters is a mute sorcerer and she actually still works. Any spell that uses vocal components she can just cast them with subtle spell. She also uses sign language and has taught her party members some which they now can use to communicate silenty. A big advantage. Besides, shes also just a lovely character. :)
I'm playing a wizard in a game who's been cursed to not be able to speak for story reasons that are perfectly fair, and it's a situation that can only be resolved with a wish spell, so it's something that my character might never have the ability to cure.
The GM is ruling that while they can still cast spells with verbal components, what comes out is more magical nonsense than words, and they specifically can't cast any spell that requires them to speak language to achieve the effect (like a suggestion spell or tasha's hideous laughter). The character knows Thieves' Cant, which in this game employs hand signals to communicate nonverbally, so he's started teaching that to other party members as a means of communication, but also uses minor illusion to mimic the sound of one word responses and/or create visual aids.
He also started the game with a non-functional prosthetic left hand which he and and a party member helped to turn into the functional prosthetic limb magic item from Tasha's over the course of the game.
An aberrant mind sorcerer would be quite effective for this in particular because of their psychic spellcasting. Neato
If your player doesn't want to have to use sorcery points, my DM decided my non-verbal artificer could make other kinds of noise for verbal components. She could snap her fingers, clap if she had both hands free, stomp her feet, whistle, anything like that. As long as it was her body making the noise, it counted. Not that how you're doing it is bad, but I just figured I'd mention an alternative way. Whatever works for your table. As long as everyone at a table is happy, there's no wrong way to play dnd
That's pretty neat! I have an idea for a mute warlock who uses bells with different tones as a replacement for the vocal components. Originally I thought of using sign language instead, but I read comments online discussing how that would completely circumvent things such as the silence spell, and that replacing the vocal component with something else that made sound could work better mechanically.
I actually have a deaf wood elf monk who also uses sign language to communicate and whenever someone doesn't use sign language she can usually just try to read their lips.
My current character, an artificer named Remi, lost their eye in a fight due to a direct hit from a necromancy spell. I changed my playstyle afterwards to me a close combat attacker and used the loss of my characters depth perception as an explanation. Later I was able to make a prosthetic eye, but that only works in the dark.
Why/how does it only work in the dark?
@@TheInfintyithGoofball @Patrick J Clancy Maybe because it provides such minimal amount of help that it's only noticeable when the functional eye is hindered
@Patrick J Clancy Did I get that right?
ah, so you shift the eye patch to the other eye in darkness pirate style?
One of my npcs is a tiefling warlock who was kidnapped by a cult that needed a sacrifice to summon a demon. They placed her in the middle of her summoning circle and slit her throat. The demon that they summoned however turned out to be her father. Oddly enough he turned out to be a fairly loving father despite being a demon and slaughtered the cult members. While he managed to stop the bleeding she was left mute. So they set up a warlock pact where not only would she have the powers of a warlock to keep her safe but he would make whatever she wanted to express appear as subtitles made out of smoke.
ooh, that reminds me of Sandy from Rise of the Gaurdians, I Loved when he got Too excited and they couldn't keep up with the sand he used to explain things just like if someone was talking too fast and couldn't keep up, him being a mute character was a really nice touch to the movie
That's very cool
That is surprisingly wholesome, I love that.
I kinda love that
This is surprisingly cool and interesting
BABE WAKE UP NEW OAKWYRM VID DROPPED
your points about disability vs. status effect and magical healing gave me much to think about for my campaign! love how thorough and relaxing ur vids are to watch❤️
This blew my mind because healing another character's disability is such an outlandish idea to me.
That feels like wanting to "fix" their hair or eye color. The player created the character like that for a reason!
We have a blind tiefling monk in our group who is handled a bit like Toph from ATLA. She can't *see*, so color and some detail is lost on her, but she can detect motion around a corner sometimes. Everyone's just like "oh yeah that's Heresy, our friend. Don't be rude, shake her hand, she can't see you wave."
Reminds me of conversion camps. . .
That's a good way to go about it ^^
I played exalted once (that is to say I played exalted a lot but in one particular game this happened And for reference aside from glasses and dyslexia I am not disabled.) and I was playing a dragon blooded sorcerer who had lost their leg and been heavily scarred with an accident at the Heptogram (his school). Limb regeneration does exist in that setting but it’s out of the reach of even the moderately powerful realm Dragon blooded we were playing. I intended to play him as an arrogant standoffish and socially superior character. He had purchased a golem purely for the purposes of carrying a pagoda to transport himself around. It was ludicrously impractical and the kind of over the top dramatic nonsense dynasts get up to.
There exist in the setting magical artificial limbs. There lost technology and were never very common to begin with. We found one in more or less the first temple we had to explore for the campaign. The storyteller put it there because having a character who either had a 10 foot tall attendant carrying them or who moved half speed because of a crutch was viewed as “disruptive“. My argument was that the game was mostly social with the occasional tomb exploration where speed isn’t exactly key.
I didn't even know it was actually such a big thing that happened in the DnD community I was shook
The problem comes if the disability is easy to "fix" with magic, it can be very inmersion breaking, if you had magic that could cure a blind person irl and one of your friends was blind, you would try to cure your friend, so that is not something that you can just ignore as it breaks the inmersion, there has to be some lore or reason that prevents it from being cured by the means of the party, like a curse or similar.
@@diablo.the.cheater See though, that's a part of the thinking abled people have about it. Plenty of disabled people do not want to be "cured", they don't see their disability as something to cure or fix in the first place. To a blind person, suddenly being able to see can be overwhelming and disorienting. Same to a deaf person with hearing. Imagine suddenly gaining a new sense and it's constantly bombarded with stimuli - that's not a process everyone would want to go through.
I bet most physically disabled people find it more immersion breaking that the world contains magic that can make people fly or shape the elements, yet this world still doesn't accommodate for disabled people. Why would a world with artificers not have stairs that can accommodate for wheelchairs?
Oakwyrm rightly tries to inspire this perspective change in us, from our ablebodied view of disabilities as flaws to fix towards them being a physical trait that every disabled person has their own individual relationship to.
Whenever it comes to magical/supernatural healing, whether it's campaigns I've DMed or stories I've written, I almost always go with the explanation that you're just speeding up the natural healing process.
Small injuries like cuts and bruises will just fade away, but you should still apply pressure to deep wounds until any blood vessels have sealed. A broken bone can slowly fix itself, but it would need to be held in place while casting the spell. And if a bone is completely shattered, or a limb taken off, or nerves irreparably damaged, there's no magically fixing it - your body wouldn't be able to heal that, no matter how much time it has, so no amount of speeding up the healing process would help.
Playing by those rules makes sure that grievous injuries still have consequences in a world where magical healers exist, and allows anyone who wants to give their character a disability to do so. It's also way more interesting to write about characters dealing with the consequences of accidents instead of just fixing it and moving on, so everyone wins.
THANK YOU this is the logic Ive been needing behind healing magic this will make things so much better
And also, the remove blindness and deafness spells being a counter for magically inflicted blindness/deafness should be taken into account too!
Just like even people with darkvision can't see in magical darkness, people who are not blind can be blinded through artificial means (whether by a spell or by pocket sand).
The "remove blindness" spell can easily be applied EXCLUSIVELY to these artificial means and not to like. Regrow missing eyes or smthn lmao
Your videos actually really helped me write a disability focused plotline in my own DnD game that I run. One of my players lost an arm, and found a prosthetic that he liked. He chose it himself, made modifications to it to fit his uses, and it was valued by him.
That prosthetic was lost in a fight and I had a doctor "heal" his lost arm while he was unconscious, without his consent.
This was framed in the narrative as a BAD THING that this "doctor" did. In fact, this doctor was not really a healer so much as a mad scientist. The new arm was actually a grafted homunculus. A creature made from alchemy that had a partial mind of its own. The player was very engaged with how creepy and invasive the scientist had been.
But of course, it didn't end there. During the same session, he went back to the scientist, and talked to him. The scientist was actually disabled in his own right, and had used this alchemic ability to enhance himself at great personal cost. His outlook was warped by the trauma of being ostracised and having to rely on himself alone for his own care. After talking with the scientist, the player made him see that his actions were wrong, and the scientist then apologized, and dutifully removed the foreign arm.
The player got a new custom prosthetic back, and has continued to customize it to their heart's content.
I wanted to thank you so much for giving so many a look into things so often unconsidered or forgotten. I'm doing what I can to recommend your words and advice and videos to others, and I can tell you they have already made an impact. Everyone at the table was super engaged and actually thrilled to see the player get the arm removed. And the scientist got to learn his lesson, and even went on to be an ally to the players, now only ever helping them with their consent of course!
that’s so cool omg!!!
I have a disabled character myself! He isnt physically disabled per se but I put neurodivergence into him by stating that he, a warforged intended to be research companion to a wizard who is now lost and has no memory of what happened, has some of the runes that keep his magical body together misinscribed- he's still fully functional, a kind being, and capable of strong magic but he is in essence autistic with the sensory issues and occasional meltdowns to go with it, as well as the passionate love for his special interests (magic research and observation of other magic users). He's a wild magic sorcerer and his misinscribed runes also cause physical malfunction reminiscent of some of the fine motor issues autistic people like my DM and I can have. He's beloved to me
That sounds so fun. I’ve come up with some autistic character ideas, mostly rangers since the favored enemy feature can easily be flavored as a special interest. Plus some ranger spells can be fun to rp with, like goodberry being an easy safe food or silence being good for avoiding sensory overload. One of those characters is obsessed with dragons and will take any opportunity to infodump about every single detail about every single type of dragon, I’d probably have to be careful about not annoying the other players, but I already annoy people by talking endlessly about my own special interests so if I get a group of friends willing to play dnd with me they’d probably already be used to it irl by the time I get around to playing that character. I haven’t ever played a game yet, but in exited to since dnd has definitely become a special interest of mine, and I take every opportunity to talk about it endlessly with my friend.
Your character sounds awesome! One of my characters is written as autistic too! He's a storm sorcerer kalashtar, who's special interest is space and the cosmos (in this campaign, kalashtar can acess people's dreams, and the "dream world" looks a lot like travelling in space, so when he goes there he often looks at the stars from a closer look and draws them in his sketchbook). He's really sweet and tries his best but he has a hard time understanding other's feelings, so he enters their dreams at night to help them out since there's more physical representations of how they're feeling. When he's overwhelmed, he by accident makes other people hear in their minds a loud noise (i don't know how to describe it, english isn't my first language, but it's similar to the sensation i feel when i'm overwhelmed by noise) cause of his kalashtar magic. When he gets overwhelmed, his thunder/lightning magic often gets out of control, so his arcane focus is a glove of sorts to keep his magic from getting out of control. I could go on about how he is, and i mainly just commented on how his autism is to him, but i'm getting way too excited. I'm glad other people are writing disabled characters (both has pcs and npcs), it brings a lot more diversity and possibilities to the table
My boyfriend is autistic and some of that has been bleeding into his character and it's just been very endearing. It's mostly in the department of completely missing social cues, which fits with his jolly barbarian character who is living in his own world very well. (He is also delusional and convinced he is a wizard, but regardless...very charming character)
That sounds so cool! :O
Hello, Autistic person here, they sound real cool! (love you profile pic btw)
I played a disabled character, she was an amputee who lost one of her arms from the elbow down during a war.
One of the party members that was something of a protege of hers was capable of making a prosthetic that would basically give her the same functionality as her old arm, but she refused. Back when she had both arms she was misled into doing some awful things for the 'greater good'. The incident that injured her gave her pause and forced her to reconsider her life, and so saw her injury as the start of a better life instead of the end of her old one.
In combat she was a beast. She couldnt use two handed weapons or a shield, so she stuck with a sabre and throwing knives, and had to get creative when she needed to climb something. She was good fun.
Sculptor from Sekiro
I love this! ^
I think that if a disability can be cured easily and without penalty it's something that should be done UNLESS there's character specific reasons like this. Otherwise it's just kind of silly to me.
This is comming from a neurodivergent person. I wouldn't want my autism/adhd "cured" because I like the way I experience the world and how it allows me to see things differently. To use that to improve on things others struggle to see or don't understand. But physical and mental "disabilities" are a bit different in my opinion.
But honestly if a character chooses to keep the disability for no reason. And their disability just decreases their quality of life despite the fact that it can easily be helped or removed entirely is completely outlandish to me. It feels like a dehydrated person refusing to drink or someone needlessly limiting themselves.
I do think there should be more rep for disabled people. It's just that most magical worlds (especially with soft magic systems) aren't very suited for that kind of story. Mainly because often it just doesn't make narrative sense in the world
@@CrysPhoenix i respectfully disagree on your stance about physical disabilities, but that’s just me. (im on the spectrum myself as well lol so hey!! autism gang) my hip acts up meaning i have to use a cane, and you can pry my cane using artificer out of my cold dead hands lmao /lh
@@ARACHNIDPARTY
Lmao! I wouldn't dare to try 😂. It's amazing that you're doing great though! I didn't mean to sound demeaning what I meant is that most people have spells for magic cures ect.
There's tons of fantasy worlds where disabilities are definitely a very real thing that deserves more spotlight tbh. Soft magic systems leave more room for magic shenanigans so it's not that great for more traditional reps of disability (amputees, blindness ect). Someone else here made a comment about how disability could 100% work and be really interesting in a dnd setting. Like wild mages and magical effects, wounds that cannot be cured, curses ect ect. Not to mention characters that have there reasons for choosing to keep whatever they might be affected by. Also disabilities caused by aging.
It's just that if there's no reason for them wanting to keep whatever they have (more so reffering to physical disabilities/injuries) then it's just contrived. There's no reason for them not to seek/accept help in those situations if it's affecting their life negatively in a major way. The only thing they'd be doing is inconveniencing themselves and lowering their autonomy/quality of life.
(For bg I'm an author and psych student)
But it's always fun to hear different viewpoints :D it's not often things like this are peaceful. Cool to talk to people who see things differently and are respectful about it!
@@CrysPhoenix haha, thank you!! and you didn’t sound demeaning at all, i would just like to see people like me even in fantasy settings :) and you’re so right about magic disabilities, they definitely deserve to be talked about ❤️ glad we can all be civil lol
This wasn't meant to be a D&D character concept, but here's my pitch: a blind warrior, or spellcaster, who uses a seeing-eye horse. It started as joke of a person instead of having a dog for aid, instead rides everywhere on horse going: "I am the MIGHTY CENTAUR!" The more I consider it the more I think it has a variety of applications and I see lots of good will in it. The idea lends it self to all kinds of character types: support, lancer, comic relief, it's endless!
I mean, there are seeing eye ponies irl so I don't see why a seeing eye horse couldn't work.
@@twistedmyth5860 Size does matter in this scenario. Also, seeing-eye ponies lend themselves to blind dwarves or gnomes. Now that would be a cool concept.
Sometimes, we don't even realise that a character is handicaped. In the campaign we are playing, we have an old lady that don't walk and use a magic moving chair. Because no one is trying to cure her or what, the new players don't even bat an eye at her. They accommodate the character naturally, which, as a (non visible) disabled person, feel so nice 🥰
Magic grants an increased ability to have more varied disabilities, because magic can do a lot of things that can't happen in the real world. I think people don't often think of these things as disabilities, but if they're removing someone's ability to do things, then the term can fit. They're usually curses, madnesses, etc... and without them a lot of D&D would be missing. A Wild Magic Sorcerer, for example, can wind up casting a fireball centered on themselves almost any time they try to cast a spell. I'd consider randomly exploding when you don't want to to be a magical disability.
Different species could also easily suffer from different issues. A human isn't going to be able to fully understand what a minotaur is going through who loses one of their horns, for example, and it can get a lot more complicated and internal than that. There could be completely different organ systems and blood chemistries that result in very different needs and very different kinds of issues, and humans aren't the only ones in society in these worlds.
Also, I'd think most adventurers would wind up with some form of PTSD eventually, and even if everything around them is healed, there's no healing magic for mental stuff (except madness & frightened, but those are different). They go into a lot of extreme situations, and the stakes get higher and higher, putting a ton of pressure on them. People can't generally just brush that off.
The new D&D One document has plenty of problems, but it adds a Common Sign Language to the list of languages, and that's a positive in my opinion.
Everything below here is just various examples I can think of, mostly from my own games (as both a player and a DM).
The party found a cult who'd been using a ritual to transform beings, painfully, into oozes. They'd all transformed themselves already. They were aggressive and doing this against the will of these creatures, so the party put a stop to it. Later, someone joined the party as one of these people who'd been transformed. It's a unique kind of disfigurement. It comes with certain abilities, but being acidic to the touch is a big downside in any kind of a society.
I've created several characters that I haven't yet gotten to play yet that have their own issues. One has a form of lycanthropy (shark-based), and has learned to use it to help people, but he lives with the knowledge of some things he's done in the past, and that if he loses control, that it can happen again. (Built into his lycanthropy-based subclass is a Wisdom save whenever starting a turn below half health to possibly go berserk.) Another character I've made changed species while doing research, and is concerned that they couldn't return home now because of it (Human -> Yuan-Ti).
In the game I'm DMing right now, one of the PCs is blind as a permanent condition, but he's adapted enough that it doesn't really effect him statswise. He can still succeed perception checks with his other senses. We just flavor things around it for roleplay purposes. So I wouldn't describe what something looks like to his character, because it doesn't, but I would still describe the other relevant senses, and he can still participate in the game as much as he wants to. If he wanted to be more limited I'd allow that too, of course.
In another game I'm in with rotating DMs, when it was my turn to DM, one of the plots was about a kid who recently found out he's a sorcerer... But it's Wild Magic and he's quite often rolling on that failure table. His parents were trying to hide it with homeschooling and getting a magical demon pet that could remove his spells at the beginning of each day. He still managed to make the house explode (freeing the pet to cause problems, which the party then had to fight), and other people were blamed for it. Once they solved what really happened, the party connected the family with people who could actually train their kid how to use his magic properly, and how to handle the wildness of Wild Magic.
I've also had players choose to keep items that give them drawbacks because they like the bonuses and/or roleplay opportunities. One of the players in my game rolls 1d100 on a list of madnesses at the start of each day because of how the pull of the Far Realm through her magic item effects her. Another character kept a magic item that turns anything they try to drink into sand, but allowed them to drain liquids from anything they crit on with a melee attack to hydrate themselves for the day. (This item used the "exhaustion" system.)
These items are more self-imposed issues by the characters on the surface, as they fully understand what the items are doing and could stop using them at any time, technically... But that is also a potential thing of its own. Choosing to hold on to power that's actively harming them could be compared to some real world issues people experience, like addiction. The more that one character uses that one item, the more compelling the call from the Far Realm to her through it is, and one of the powers it grants her is Plane Shift, so she'll likely wind up there eventually, which can't end well.
YES
The sections on PTSD, shark-lycanthropy, and a cult forcibly transforming people all remind me of a character I have! I used him to test a race I wrote. I can try and link the doc if you’re interested but I can’t guarantee youtube will let me.
The race are called Sekoan, named after Sekolah, the shark god of the sahuagin. Their lore is that sahuagin- who are believed to take no prisoners- _do_ capture people. But they perform rituals and turn them into these monstrous part shark, part person creatures by literally combining a live prisoner and live shark. It’s very painful and traumatic. They then attempt to brainwash the sekoan into obedience, and this usually works- some resist, and they basically break their minds and turn them into these berserkers with no free will.
Anyway, my character was one of the resilient ones. He wound up escaping partway through the process, leaving him with most of his free will intact, but intelligence and charisma are his dump stats (6 in each), and he can’t remember his past or even his name. The party named him Jared.
We gave him the echoing soul gift from VRGR, and it works really well for him. It allows me to come up with little flickers of the past on the fly whenever it’s triggered, and it works really well for a character with PTSD. For example:
After the party fought a bunch of stirges, he rolled a 1 and became frightened of one of the stirges. He ran off and wound up growling in a corner while the party came to calm him down. He said that he remembered a time when someone close to him was ambushed by some.
More recently, our party was camping when we were attacked by bullywugs. The sorcerer/warlock was on watch, and contacted Jared with telepathy to wake him up, telling him to roar and scare the bullywugs. We rolled Initiative, and he got a nat 1, triggering the gift… I didn’t tell anyone what it did this time and nobody seemed to notice. He got a result where he was having a flashback to a different time and place, so he was considered blinded for a turn. In his head, he was reliving some similar event where his group was ambushed by bandits.
Combat goes smoothly, Jared seems to be stumbling in his tent, then his turn comes. He flies into a rage, then charges at and attacks the last person to make a sound as his flashback attempts to make sense of his surroundings. He thinks he’s fighting an enemy- he attacks recklessly… and he’s attacking our sorcerer (not the sorlock, but a different sorcerer) and takes out half his HP in one hit.
The next turn, the effect wears off and he actually has a look around. He has no idea what he did because he assumed he was fighting enemies the whole time.
Quite literally the longest comment I've ever read, but totally worth it!
Kind of as an example of species unique disabilities, one of my own characters is an Aarakocra who is missing one of his wings (an injury from a dragon attack, which happened when he was a young child). While it isn't too much of a disability mechanics wise, since most PCs can't fly anyways, it would certainly be considered a disability for a character from a race that relies heavily on flight. It's also forced him to adapt to a completely different combat style than he grew up with.
I once played a mute character who, in addition to sign language, would cast Minor Illusion to communicate with npcs who didn't know sign. Mechanically, they were a reskinned Kenku (we were playing a cyberpunk campaign), so they also had a tape player to play back sounds they'd recorded other people saying
That's amazing!
Kenku Reeves? *bs dun tss* (I'll see myself out.)
I love that
I am currently playing a non-verbal autistic drow rogue named Lilith who I love to pieces. She was originally going to be an artificer (we were going to change "verbal" spell components to "auditory" components, since she doesn't speak, she could snap her fingers or stamp her foot to make noise) but then I realized thieves cant is canonically a sign language, and I love playing rogues, so I changed my mind during session one. We're not very far in, but she's one of my favorite characters I've ever played.
Theives cant does include hand signals but is really more like disguised conversation. (Like talking at length to someone about the weather, and then returning to your party like "Got it, he said the BBEG is headed to the main city in a few days. Let's go.")
I really like the idea of thieves cant being sign language though of course if you aren't a rogue you'd be kinda stuck, huh?
@@baydiac I mean certain backgrounds will also let you speak thieves cant as well
I tend to reason that spells like regenerate can only heal fresh injuries. Any disability you're born with cannot be healed, and any lost limbs where the wound has healed cannot be regrown.
On another note, in the new oneDnD/5.5e UA common sign language was added as an official language, which is pretty neat.
Regenerate does specify that it stimulates a creatures natural healing ability so unless the character can naturally regrow limbs they won’t grow em back
Severed parts are restored and no timefrme for healing to work is specified. I do agree that if one is born without a limb it would not regrow as the body didn't have that limb in the first place to be severed.
Edit: also I don't think it was specified that the limbs are functional.
@@jomppuh413 Oh that's an interesting idea. Like it regrows the flesh and bone but the nerves don't work? Maybe it could give chronic pain to the pc too. My grandma's toes's nerves were damaged by her cancer treatments and give her the constant feeling of burning cold. At least she's alive and otherwise well, but it is something that can happen.
What if the limb grew back (or was grafted back) but it didn't happen perfectly so the player has to deal with some other form of consequence? Maybe they can still use the limb, but they don't have the same coordination they did before, like when your arm is seriously asleep and you can flop it about but you can't feel anything from it properly. Like your proprioception isn't functionning the right way.
@@ViridianForests I mean yeah, though it is quite high level spell so someone could get pissy about it not working like they expect as at that level you can bring decapitated people back to life, but if everyone agrees, it can be a wonderfull way to roleplay disabilities.
@@jomppuh413 True, for a high level spell that's not the best.
Though for flavour, maybe it could be like a series of treatments instead? Like you do the regenerate spell and it mends stuff back together, but then it takes several months of high level healing spells by specialized healers who know what they're doing and exercises to make sure the incremental healing works, the same way recovering from a really bad injury can go?
Not sure how fun that would be from a player's perspective, but if its their choice or a consequence for their actions or timed with a timeskip it could work?
I would just like to shout into the void of the internet how excited I am to play my next, nurodivergant coded, PC.
He's a natural born lycanthrope who insists on being called Hunter. Sensitive hearing and violent instincts make urban places extremely uncomfortable to exist in. He has a habit of saying everything he means and being confused when others dont do the same. When talking he stares directly at people's eyes which makes most humans nervous. Silver burns to the touch. Transforming hurts everytime it happens. And he would aggressively defend the value of his existence to anyone who questioned or pitied it.
He loves hunting, nearly obsessed with it, he becomes giddy with each time the topic or challenge comes up. He feels completely at home in the temporate forests and could listen to the distant sounds of beasts for hours. He loves his moorhound (a hunting dog as large as a person).
The guy is a shameless edgelord drenched in forgotten realms lore, but when push comes to shove any amount of compassion or understanding will make him into overgrown puppy.
Man I would love to be in a campaign with your character! I adore the story and personality of them already!
i feel like if i saw this guy in some form of media, he would immediately become my comfort character
The idea that a disability can be limiting in not only a rpg but specially in a fantasy setting shows a lack of imagination, imagine how being disable in a world full of magic and creatures would look like, a person has a prosthetic arm made of pure magic, a ranger uses a wolf as a mobility aid, a winged creature who was born without wings and how that affects them and their views of their culture, that’s not even counting mental disorders, disabilities can be an excellent character addiction to make them feel all more unique and real.
I’ve never understood being so keen to just magic away a character disability! If I give a character a disability or have them suffer a disability-inducing injury, I want to explore that development, not just make it disappear. I’ve played a few characters like that and thankfully the people I play with have been good about not doing that
Well as someone who isn't disabled I can see the thought process: "You literally don't have an arm or functioning eyes! *I'd freak out if that were me,* so let me magically fix it because this is a high fantasy world where that's possible in an instant! You're welcome! :D"
Edit: This isn't an endorsement btw
Rule of thumb I would say, if the character was made to have the desability, just taking it away is a waste of plot, even in a world of high fantasy there are reasons for disabled people, maybe the one armed fighter takes the missing limb Has a reminder, I would not take the spells that regrow limbs away, but take the disabilities has a piece of the characters jorney, can they decide to magic the problem away? Sure, will they? Thats up to them. Anyone tries to force the spells on them? They dont work unless the target desires it to work
"Why would people still be disabled in a world where miraculous healing is common?" should be used as a starting point for world-building, not as a way to dismiss disabled people and characters.
I think in at least 1 story I wrote I decided my character still needed glasses because magic on the eyes is too risky and could cause the total loss of vision if something went wrong. Said character loves to read and would thus rather have the glasses than risk not being able to see at all.
as a new player who is still waiting to play my first game I've already made a character but in a future campaign I might make character autistic since I am and it would be interesting to see how they handle situations
Saaaaame
As someone who’s played dnd a while now, I’ve noticed that even when it isn’t intended, a lot of my characters react to things in a nuerodivergent way because I can not for the life of me figure out how nuerotypicals function
@@anabsolutebuffoon same
"It doesn't *have* to be super serious all the time" YES. THIS. Being real about how hard being disabled/neurodivergent/etc. is is valid, but there's also incredible value in being able to joke about dark things! We have had so many funny, sad-but-sweet, and outright fluff fest moments because our characters got Real about their anxiety, or trauma, or the dream-curse everyone has to undergo if the party soulknife touches their mind. Y'know, normal D&D things :)
homebrew rule: spellcasters can replace verbal components with sign language if its one of the languages they are proficient in but that have to clap at the end of the hand signs to end the incantation thus making a noise on the level of verbal components
this allows inclusivity for mute spellcasters while not making it verbal but better
I actually like that idea.
My first character was a dwarf who suffered from claustrophobia due to backstory related ptsd. I still wish I'd been able to play into that character more.
I once played a drow who lost the use of his legs from a dungeon to get around the goliath piggybacked him around,
His new goal in life was from then on becoming a drider and gaining spider legs to walk again
Thats a legitimately great character goal. Its whomesome, if i ignore the spider legs *shudder*, but it makes great sense as of why they would go out to adventure. Being a fan of kobolds, i often sit on other partymembers shoulders with a crossbow and spells on the ready, so you would be surprised to know how effective a kobold shoulder turret would be, plus constant pack tactics!
@@wrath-2187 I did that once with a halfling cavalier, you know how a minotaur can do a horn charge? Well add a D12 lance
lmao,i love that ,we can make you a wheelchair " , "no i wanna be a drider :D"
I remembered an old MMO that had an elf race that looked like their legs and 1 arm were prosthetics and since then I've been wanting to make a DnD character in the same vein, get some cool magic prosthesis in there, I love the idea of home brewing the effects incurred if you don't have your needed equipment/aides
Wow…I feel bad for the people who have had experiences where DM’s heal/cure the disabilities of people’s characters without even asking first, and I’m sorry to say I’ve heard a fair share of stories and vents about it. I myself am lucky enough to not have a problem with that, granted I haven’t been playing for very long and I haven’t yet introduced a disabled character to a campaign (though I do have an artificer with a mechanical eye and a prosthetic limb I’m currently workshopping before I do anything with her), but still. I’m glad I now have some advice and a few ideas on how to handle disability in D&D if/when I start DMing my own campaigns, and a better understanding of making characters with them in the future!
(Also, the part where you said you got the chance to yeet a man across the battlefield by his axe? Literally had me in TEARS laughing!)
as a DM, I have some house rules that make disability more impactful. for example, there are different ways to handle limb loss, all of which have their own different side effects. Regenerate no longer regrows limbs if they aren't there to reattach (although some higher level spells can) but regrown or reattached limbs have complications like nerve misalignment, pain spikes, and increased threshold for critical fails (a natural roll of one or two on the die instead of just one). conversely, prosthetics have different limitations. magical prosthetics are the most precise, but stop working in areas of antimagic and their enchantments can be suppressed with a dispelling. mechanical prosthetics don't have this failing, but are less precise, resulting in disadvantage on checks that require fine motor control with that limb specifically. fusion mechanical and arcane prosthetics, the most difficult to make, function as well as a normal arm unless the enchantments are suppressed, at which point they function like a mechanical one.
I also have different rules for blindness and deafness as permanent or long-lasting things, and I tend to see the spells and combat conditions as more of an obscuring effect than anything else, but my rules for those conditions as permanent disability are convoluted.
once I made a kobold artificer who had lost the use of their legs, and used their steel defender (arcane robot companion) as a mobility aid using the rules for mounts. this resulted in some badass mounted combat that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, but also had a lot of complications
Yeah, i feel disability is something that should be included in worlds. Im currently dming a pirate campaign, and decided to add two disbaled npc crew members. One of them is a mute scarecrow, and because of them i decided to make it so sign language is just a common part of language basically everyone knows. Along with that i have an artificer who has a customized cannon with legs she uses as a mobility aid.
Ive taken a lot of care to make magical sollutions work in a way so not a lot of people can use them, similar to like high grade prosthetics. So on the same crew theres a person with a full prosthetic arm, and someone with a peg leg cause thats a better alternative for them
All in all disability really should be a part of the world, as i dont want my fantasy world to have eugenics
For some reason I saw your mute scarecrow and was like "Of course everyone in the crew should be able to fully understand them so that they can cooperate. What would be funny is if for some reason or other (disability caused by something not long before or after becoming a pirate rather than something they were born with or happened in childhood? family wasn't fluent in it and was too poor to have someone teach them?) they only knew more common signs before joining the crew, so less common signs are all things he/the crew came up with on their own. As such, any outsider who knows sign is in a situation of mostly knowing what is being said but occasionally going 'the f* does that mean???'"
I have no idea if that would work out or actually be funny in context, but for some reason that is what popped into my head.
Combat wheelchairs give me very bad flashbacks (affectionate) to those old bastards with gatling guns in bloodborne
If someone says a wheelchair can’t be effective in fighting, I’ll show them those
Lmfao 🤣🤣🤣 I can beat up a guy on a wheelchair trust me I am not even a trained fighter. 😆
@@GolDFish-if1ov you are not immune to gatling gun wheelchair
@@kaelang12 True tho guns will beat fist 👊
Inn betweens party has a member with an sevear generalised anxiety disorder and another with an phobia of getting buried alive. Both get the party into sevear trubble but get handled well by the party, after the first shock.
They also have a nonbinary character and hints of a future romance on the ace spectrum.
The podcast gives generous trigger warnings, like for body dysphoria before a body switching happens, even if the characters do not experience dysphoria themselfs .
I have had this idea for a character who was cursed at an early age so that their body was radioactive. This forced them to live in a abandoned mine for a while so as to keep the people around them safe. They made a suit of armour out of lead which allows them to leave the mine without anyone being in danger, but there is alot of work required to keep them comfortable. They often look for soft fabrics to line the inside of their suit for comfort, they have to use a special helmet attachment when eating, they are terrified of touching or being touched by anyone, if they want to do any maintenance on their armour or just want to move with it on they must first find a deep cave or abandoned mine.
These were just some ideas to flesh out the character, but feel free to ask questions or make suggestions.
Actually with my most recent campaign I have a player who is deaf, after talking to the player who made it clear they didn’t want to be healed I made the justification that healing magic wouldn’t work on his hearing cause it wasn’t damaged it was nonexistent and you can’t heal something that isn’t there. Also have a half vampire NPC who is constantly under the effects of mercury poisoning cause lore so he has to take small amounts of blood daily to keep his healing factor up as essentially medication. Both the characters have had some really interesting bonding moments cause of their respective conditions (also cause they are both mischievous bastards)
i had a dnd character where i hard failed a save so many times in a row me and the dm agreed that it had adverse effects on him and he lost use of his legs and it was a cool story beat going from this roguish out there bastard suddenly having to fall back on his less used sorcerer abilities. and it was nice to sort of vent my own insecurities and such through him.
9:42 Jumping off of this point, the Eberron sourcebook for 5e (an official sourcebook published by Wizards of the Coast) actually has stats for magical prosthetic limbs, including a couple of combat-focused variants. Following that logic, a combat wheelchair is perfectly reasonable.
my dad once played a teifling artificer who was missing an arm, and i'm going to play a blind oracle (I play both DND and pathfinder)
My main DND character is a rogue who is a zora (zelda-inspired fish person) who's missing a fin on his left forearm. On land he's fine but when swimming without his prosthetic he's got no balance or stability and takes disadvantage to anything dexy/a nerf to his swim speed. I love him :3
I've been hesitant to play a disabled character in the campaigns my group has been doing specifically because of the horror stories you alluded to, but the video inspires me to give it a shot in the next campaign I join
My favorite solution to having a wheelchair-using PC character in a difficult swamp campaign (where a wheelchair would obviously get stuck in the mud) was that the ogre barbarian would just put the disabled character on his head and carry them around the whole time.
The thing became so casual and amusing that the disabled character now rides on the ogres head by default no matter the campaign they're in.
It was also pretty funny to imagine how this would look since the disabled character wasn't of a particularly tiny species but a fully grown dragonborn.
It's not a dnd character but shout out to my werewolf the apocalypse glasswalker who's arm bones got tzimisce-ed into swords (world of darkness is wild).Love that man to death.
In my current campaign where I DM, my party is allies with a detective who is a mute sorcerer who gets around his spellcasting limitations by using the Subtle spell feature.
He communicates by using the Minor Illusion cantrip to create subtitles.
Its a bit of a challenge to portray him as we play DnD online but what I love is that my players (half of which I knew barely) all seem perfectly accepting of the character and show no desire or never ask if he wants his muteness 'cured' away.
There's some hope after all for disabled characters to truly shine in d&d
the end reminded me of a situation I had a while ago
Im a DM and in my homebrew world theres this culture of barbarians and fighters having one who is the strongest of them all. Whoever the "number 1" is is highly respected. the last one who was unbeaten for almost 40 years was an orc barbarian who was blind.
I had one person tell me that thats unrealistic. All I could think of was "my guy youre a drow that uses magic and is sent to fight a 5m tall frog that breathes fire but a blind fighting champion is "too unrealistic" ?????" they werent allowed into the oneshot I hosted for that and other reasons and it still baffles me how there are people like this who really think their way of thinking makes sense
I honestly love including disability in my characters. My first character came from a setting where all elves had a natural connection to the magic of the world, but because of some unknown condition my rogue was born with he was cut off from this natural connection.
my most recent character was an autistic artificer who would frequently get so hyper-fixated on her work that she would often not even notice that something was probably on fire behind her. I[m autistic myself so she was honestly a way to poke fun at my own conditions
I also love playing kenku because I find their inability to speak normally fun
and in the game I'm currently DMing we have a mute monk who communicates through written notes and the fact that as an ice elemental her body made of ice changes shape depending on her mood, she became this way when a cursed dagger stabbed her in the neck in her backstory meaning the wound would never heal, but also wouldn't kill her. Because of this just casting a "remove curse" spell on her would cause the injury to become lethal.
On top of her, a recurring NPC is an old blind mage who uses their familiar as a service animal as he goes on his own adventures and the PCs bump into him from time to time. He's pretty fun too
The addition of Common Sign Language in One D&D has made me think of playing a deaf character and how to do that. It could be really interesting to see how they could interact with people like Warforged or Aarakocra whose lips couldn't be easily read, or maybe having only one other member of the party who can fully communicate with them
While I don't play D&D I do play various ttrpgs and am personally very thankful that none of my DMs have been against players playing disabled characters, and I don't have any stories of people trying to force cures or disability aids onto characters that don't want them (regardless of setting, disability, etc.). This also applies to characters who have some form of body/facial disfigurement that aren't disabling, no cures or treatment unless the character specifically wants it.
And this is regarless of system. Some have had stats for disabilities baked in (Savage Worlds for example), while others were far more homebrew. Either way, am very thankful I don't have any horror stories of that.
I don’t have any DnD characters, but I do have two disabled Pokemon OCs that I use in RPs.
Both being children to a Lucario and Manectric couple, the Manectric mother having had complications in the reproduction process due to backstory reasons.
The first being Nova the Riolu, she is blind but her aura vision allows her to see in the same way as Toph (able to see objects but colour and images are lost on her), she is also fiercely independent where she hates anyone trying to “help” with stuff that she is perfectly capable of doing, but she does ask her close friends and family for help if she feels that she needs it.
Second being Rey the Electrike, being an Electrike she isn’t able to use sign language so she expresses how she feels with her boundless energy, if she is feeling a certain way, she will make it clear.
Thank you for all of these I never really considered several of them, a lot I had already thought of in the back of my mind like the blindness/deafness spell or battle affect being caused by something separate from usual blindness or deafness and in my campaigns I run I always homebrew it where healing only heals what the person being healed wants to heal so like a missing arm, such as what one of my players has, doesn’t suddenly grow back through her not automail when a spell heals her
Thanks for the video! I’m trying to find a long term dnd group so I can play an artificer with a healing bent and having a reference point for some common pitfalls to avoid is really good. In my mind she’s more of a battlefield medic than a true cure all wounds type, so her physically stitching a wound closed with thread imbued with magically anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties would account for not being able to recover all hit points- there’s still an injury it’s just not as bad as it was earlier and they can still rip their stitches. And ongoing disability management without a quick cure could lead to more role play for a character deliberately written to be awkward around others but very excited about using their practical skills.
I honestly love watching Okwyrms (I hope I spelled that right) videos while working on my DnD campaign. Their voice is honestly so soothing and their videos are really informative. They also give me inspiration for my campaigns and do many good characters in my campaigns have sparked from their videos
I remember playing a blind warlock, he had a flying frog to see with but he kinda died from the fact he walked into a spike pit on 1hp
Thanks for your perspective, I'm playing D&D at the moment, I was tempted to use a blind fighter with a owl familiar, but watching your videos made reconsider. It's not my tale to play a disabled character, which is something I have to understand.
Heck I'm playing a lycanthrope campaign (were-folk) made me consider that the were folks were still human and not just exp. As context I'm playing a poetry writing construct, wanting to bring their lover back. A child character was a natural born were wolf in a town of anti were wolf with his mom being a undiagnosed were wolf that was cursed. I had a true, "Is it okay for me to heal you? You're still a sentient being."
There was actually a kickstarter a while back that I backed, which is going to basically give you book material to help with having disabilities worked into the system and since I have had DMs who wouldn't work with anything unless there was 'somewhere they could look it up', I'm very much looking forward to getting the book. At first when I saw it, I was a little taken aback and like 'Oh... Could this be... Bad?', but reading into the project and finding that the people writing it all had experience with disabilities and that there were people brought on to ensure things weren't based on stereotypes and prejudges, I was on board.
If nothing else, I feel like I can use it as a guideline when building a character and know what to talk through with the DM beforehand. I know it will have both real life disabilities as well as some that are magical adjacent to something that might be hard to roleplay or fit into the fantasy setting, along with possible aids and how to work them into the world (stuff like price lists for aids, service animals and how one might work them into the system).
It's called limitless heroes I think, but I am not sure if and how you can get it outside of the kickstarter that has ended a while ago now.
I've only played one long term dnd campaign and I played a druid who due to an event from their past is missing an eye and the dm and party were absolutely chill. it didn't effect gameplay much as I fight up close so their fucked depth perception doesn't effect their aim much but it's just nice having my character allowed to exist with their disability and not have anyone comment on it or try curing it
The real magic is how you do hands, they look so good!!
i played a blind tabaxi druid not too long ago with a toad familiar whose eyes she would see through (he sat on her head on top of a massive mushroom hat she had. her name was toadstool.) and the way we played it was that she had disadvantage on some checks without him but otherwise she had her base stats. to this day she is still one of my favourite characters i have ever played because of some of the funny moments i had with her, including when we tried to sneak into a room using her wild shape but she couldnt actually see anything in said room if she just snuck under the door so we had to find a large enough gap in the floorboards for her to travel underneath, as a cockroach, riding on top of her noble steed: a toad named bumble
I have a few characters I play that are disabled, one of them that is most like me, suffers from anaemia, which roleplay wise it acts similar to me, but mechanically it means I can’t make saving throws against exhaustion, as pushing herself is just not something she can handle. The other one possesses a difficulty in communicating which shows up in roleplay including things like having to stop in order to try and communicate what she wants to.
I am definitely showing my party and dm this video! They have been kinda rude to me lately, telling me that its unrealistic to have my character be Deaf, but also saying that because I am actually Deaf, I shouldn’t play a hearing character. It is so frustrating!!!
Thanks for this video! Im hoping that the tips you gave will allow me to have a fun DnD experience lol
I have a character that was built to be a min maxed distance Archer, having been in the kings guard for some time. Just before the campaign however, his draw arm was disintegrated by an enemy's Eldritch Blast. Unable to help the Archer, his commander released him from duty. He now is on a quest to earn enough to pay for some fix to return to service. He fights with his off hand using the basic short sword training that he would have received in the army.
What kind of tech or magic exists in that universe? Is he like, gathering funds for a prosthetic?
Pretty much, yeah
I'm playing a disabled druid character rn and she's really fun. Her backstory is that she's a doctor who lost her family to a deadly disease that killed all of them, and would have killed her had she not discovered a cure for it in time. But, by then, the damage was done and she was left with severe chronic pain in her leg and a limp. To reflect that in game, she has disadvantage on athletics and acrobatics checks and her movement speed is halved when she doesn't have a mobility aid like her cane. She's also autistic but that comes down to roleplay rather than mechanics
Oohhh! I haven't watched the video yet, but I play a lot of D&D and one of the MOST frustrating things is trying to play a disabled character rules-as-written, especially when trying to play them as having obtained that disability instead of being born with it (my common excuse. for example, for why regeneration doesn't regenerate the arm of someone who's never had it.) Especially at high levels, obtaining a disability tends not to matter anymore because there's always some magic or a spell that will fix it. Luckily, though it took a lot of work and rules/worldbuilding discussions, I found a way to play a lot of disabled characters and NPCs in a way which I'm happy with.
I had a character in TTRPG that ended up blind in one eye dude to an injury in combat. As someone who straight up doesn't have depth perception IRL anyway I wasn't phased by this change. She, as a character, was a bit bummed about it because *ow*, but it stayed. Another player character offered to try and surgically fix it but she preferred it not get infected...but thanks for the offer. That choice was respected. It was a fun time and she had disadvantage on ranged attacks from then on out which was interesting because she primarily used guns and learned to shift over to other weapons.
Been waiting for this one for a while, very relieved to see that my current DM style regarding the subject doesn't need much adjustment
Man I love that you’re posting more regularly, I love your channel.
I haven't played DnD yet, as transportation isn't easy to come by where I live and the amount of players in my small town are slim anyhow. I fill in the time until I can live somewhere where I can find a group to play with by creating characters for future campaigns or one-shots. I have a mute gnome bard that I'm quite pleased with. She wears soft hide shoes, similar to moccasins, to feel the beat as she plays her instrument, most often a lyre. I also have her wear a scarf around her waist, quite similar to your character shown in the video, to hide her money pouch as she performs in the square. I've also thought of the discreet details like having her wear short hair to prevent her sight being hindered or, taking notes from her background as a bard, choosing to use dramatic charades to communicate. There's also a stray tabby that hangs around while she plays that may or may not end up becoming her companion, depending on the DM.
I'm disabled myself but not deaf. If anyone has any advice on how to improve my rosy cheeked mischief maker, I'd gladly appreciate it.
Another amazing video! I have never gotten the chance to play dnd yet but it’s definitely become a special interest/hyperfixation of mine and I’ve made dozens of character concepts for whenever I actually get a chance to play. I’ve had a few disabled character ideas, mostly autistic characters (I’m autistic) since I realized that the rangers “favored enemy” feature can be easily flavored as a special interest, so I’ve made several autistic ranger characters.
There’s a human ranger (subclass undecided) who’s obsessed with dragons and will take any opportunity to infodump everything about them (the different types, the average wingspans of each type, diet, habitat, number of teeth, etc.), an elven horizon walker who was raised and taught that fey were super cool and nice but when she researched them herself realized that the feywild and fey in general are way darker and more manipulative than she was lead to believe, and a kobold gloomstalker who’s selectively mute (I’d have to do more research on that before playing the character to make sure I do it well) and speaks mostly through sign language.
Also I’ve been watching tons of dimension 20 (I was so happy when you mentioned fantasy high, I love that series to death, and they have some autistic rep and a minor character that uses a wheelchair in the second season on dropout if you didn’t already know) and I sometimes come up with oc’s in the campaigns settings as if I were a player making a pc, and when watching “a crown of candy” I had the idea of making a blind monk (this was before cumulus’ introduction) character who’s made of Jello, he can sense vibrations very similarly to Toph in reference to how any tiny movement or vibration can make Jello wiggle and shake.
I don’t see why fantasy worlds can’t have disability in them, if anything the addition of magic just adds more ways for a character to be disabled or more ways for disability to effect people. A character can easily be injured or cursed in some way, or a character could end up with ADHD when a fey asks them “can I have your attention”, or a wild magic sorcerer with chronic pain can have their wild magic surges go off when their pain disrupts their focus on a spell, or a character who hallucinates but is convinced that they’re cursed by demons because they live in a world where demons are proven to be real so it’s not even that absurd of an assumption to make.
Also, as a side note, if you’re looking for recommendations on content to review I recommend Epithet Erased. It’s a web series that has the first (and currently only, they’re still working on it) season for free on RUclips, and it’s only 7 episodes. There’s a character who has a magical ability that effects them in debilitating ways, similar to a chronic pain disorder, and there’s a mention of misophonia and implied/possible PTSD and autistic characters. I’d love to see your thoughts on it, I’ve already made a few comments recommending it but I don’t think those were noticed, sorry if it’s annoying that I keep suggesting it.
One rpg I’ve seen handle this pretty well is pathfinder 2e. There’s a whole item category for disability aids, including versions that add bonuses like a wheelchair that can jump, but also basic things like corrective lenses, as well as rules written in the player hand book on how to play disabled characters sensibly, along with suggestions for mechanical effects of them, such as taking a penalty to perception when not wearing glasses
5:15
Thanks. I am an old guard DM who has had to deal with a lot of yuppies going on about Crawford... I really needed to hear that from someone on your side of this whole divide.
My god, I love watching your drawings, they're exellent
I run a campaign, most of it is more serious and toes into a lot of important and big subjects…. And this campaign, one of the players had their hand cut off but sewed it back on and healed it… so when their plan went up in flames and an ally had his leg vaporized he told the guy to just grow it back…. The NPC then shouted “You can fix your wound, I can’t fix this, I can’t just grow it back! You fucked up and walked away, but because of you I will never walk away from this, I won’t ever walk again because of you!”
The players spent a while helping the npc and asking what needs they could help with… they even went as far as making the town more accommodating and tried to even make them crutches to help them. Like I genuinely was smiling cause… they cared, they saw him as a person, and they tried their best only doing what he asked for and not pushing anything on him. Now one of my players after sat down and spent time learning from me (disabled and jobless) and our rogue (disabled) about how he can help us when we need help, without being disrespectful. It was kinda a wonderful little side story tbh
i love this video, the thing about not being able to cure preexisting blindness/deafness makes sooo much sense esp when you explain that can be temporary in combat, thank you!!
i have a fighter who lost his arm during a session (our palabard got corrupted and cut it off…) so my gm and i came up with a lot for him and his prosthetic-for example, he’ll take damage if it’s like underwater or really hot or really cold etc and it’ll stop working for a bit, but also because it’s a metal arm it does an extra point of damage for unarmed strikes
as of now it’s been in game a lot more serious of a topic-mostly because the palabard feels uh REALLY BAD abt the whole situation obviously, but in game that was less than a month ago so we’ll give it some time
side note your art is GORGEOUS i love watching you do the coloring and shading omggggg
i also have a ranger who’s been half blind since birth and uses an enchanted ribbon on their bow to help with their aiming (the decision that they would be half blind happened AFTER i made them a ranger; luckily the person who suggested it was the dm and she. is half blind herself. so she already had a few ideas for disability aids in regards to that)
same setting different campaign from the ranger, i have a wild magic sorcerer with anxiety and mood regulation issues-her abusive mentor basically made her be under the calm emotions spell for like twelve years but after finally getting away from him (killed him before her now evil ex girlfriend could bc he was awful to her too, it’s a *wild* campaign yall) she instead like. has a ring that helps absorb the magic, has a cloak that helps with temp stuff since it’s like fire and ice magic, and also just takes good ol potion of zoloft
(also said ex girlfriend cut off our fighter’s arm for this game. unfortunately after the thing with my fighter fighters losing arms has just kept coming up with my friend groups and this one absolutely isn’t a coincidence bc the person who plays this fighter is the dm for the game with MY fighter)
unfortunately for everyone but me this video has activated my autism beam and i’m now just infodumping about my dnd campaigns. although hey i guess it’s fitting!
the artificer lady i play (a rakshasa tiefling) has flexion issues in her hands (on account of they’re supposed to be backwards); her power armor includes hydraulic rehabilitation braces that… also shoot lightning. disability can be a character trait like any other that is important in its own way to a character’s identity or sense of self; and as a disabled person myself who often has to turn to *the undead* to relate to a character in fantasy, it’s refreshing to see other folks- especially abled folks- including some rep in their stories and worlds!!
of my characters with disability, the most interesting is likely my albino rogue assassin with nystagmus. because his vision can act up, he’s learned to become an expert in fighting in the dead of night- operating in the dark on touch and sound. like anyone, he can fight better when he can see, but he has a permanent disadvantage in long range fighting, and usually an advantage at night where he has more experience.
Oh, I don't know if you have seen or heard of it, but there is this fantasy anime called Ranking of Kings with a disabled protagonist (a small for a human child of giants who was born deaf and mute), and honestly it might be right up your alley. The story is surprisingly dark for the art style used in it, and several characters have to deal with disability in one form or another. Many of the antagonists do so by forging dark bargains with forces that end up making them into inhuman monsters, which is contrasted against the protagonist's disabilities giving him skills he would otherwise not have, and his journey to hone those to find his own strength.
I should note that my opinion here is from that of a neurodivergent but not disabled person, and would appreciate getting your take if you find the first season compelling and heartwarming enough to watch through. ^_^ It certainly left an impression on me!
It wasn't DnD but we had a small LARP event. The local alchemist and secret cult leader was played by a guy with disability. He was mostly wheelchair bound. If he managed to assassinate another player he could bring them back but with amnesia. Then he tried to indovtrinate them. Lets just say we had a significant amount of amnesiac cultists by the end of the game. No one expected the benign looking disabled guy to pull a dagger on them. 😅
My first DnD character was an elven knight who had his dominant hand torn off and eaten by a warg during a battle mid-campaign. Since the party had been fighting to protect a group of NPC dwarfs, their leader engineered a gauntlet for my PC to wear in the meantime, and promised that when the party entered the dwarf kingdom later on, he'd have a proper prosthetic made. Unfortunately the campaign ended before we reached that point, but it was still a lot of fun.
This paired with your Encanto video is just an amazing combo because of the example being used in existing media
One of my fellow party members is a disabled Aaracokra. His wings were permanently injured while he was learning how to fly. He can still use them to slow his fall, but he can't actually fly.
Also my elven ranger that I played in Tomb of Annihilation has since become an NPC in a homebrew campaign I'm creating. At the end of the campaign her character arc wasn't finished (the DM was kinda new at his job so I didn't blame him too much), so I decided in the time between the end of that campaign and the beginning of Tomb of Annihilation she became paralyzed in her attempts to get revenge on the clan of giants that destroyed her homeland, along with the half-orc warlord who led them. So she retired from adventuring and rode her pet triceratops to a city of predominantly wood elves, where she settled down, marrying a half-elf named Thalin and adopting two children. She now is in a wheelchair, and has a shield guardian who pushes her around in it. Still a formidable foe when push comes to shove, but since her wheelchair doesn't have very good traction it can't really handle difficult terrain very well. So she mostly fights in defending her new home and family. Whenever she needs something outside the city, she instead hires adventurers to retrieve it for her.
One of my favorite TTRPGs surprised me when I was learning about - despite being a game where healing to full ability can be very easy, they create ways in which disabled characters are not only possible but ENCOURAGED by the rules in some cases. They have Flaws for blindness, deafness, missing limbs, and lameness. They can be reflavored in so many wonderful ways and can be used in such creative ways as well. Our DM made one character use a sword as a cane for it's political meaning, and even outside of it he does not forget that she needs that cane, that she is disabled. As a disabled person, it made me feel so seen. He mentioned that he wanted to add all kinds of people in it and after we met her I cried. She's still one of my favorite NPCs, and it is the longest-running game I play. White Wolf TTRPGs are great for that reason. Please go check them out! The one I'm referencing here is Vampire: The Masquerade V5, but most White Wolf games have these merits/flaws.
I am a dm running an inclusive campaign, and I have a story to share that I personally find interesting that this video reminds me off. It's of when I got a new player who is a trans woman, and she asked to play a trans woman, so we had a long conversation about how that would work, what inworld magics could help her character transition, which ended up being druids, which makes sense to us because hey transformation and which fitted her into the heavy druid lore of the nation the campaign was set in, with druids being hunted. Also, it gave us the term genderdruid, which is now my worlds equivelant of genderfluid, which I love. We discussed discrimination and level of transition, and I was surprised that she preferred to play someone who didn't transition fully. Her character was a woman, but she was infertile due to imperfect rituals, not flawed per say but not perfected. I of course would have let her transition in full, but she chose this, and I supported it. I wouldn't have expected it, but I understand that sometimes in our fantasy worlds, we want heroes who share our burdens. Additionally, she requested that, since this nation has a lot of laws and paperwork, she'd be misgendered on paperwork, and gave a full thumbs up for shitty nobles who misgendered her so she could beat them up, because everybody loves beating up nobles. It was uncomfortable for me to misgender her on purpose when playing those npc's, but we agreed to it, to this imperfect world where she could be a hero who could work to fix these societal issues. I don't know if there's a lesson in here, but it did help me see dnd as more than escapism, and I hope I can make my players smile by letting them beat up bigots and save this nation from corruption and dark ideologies. I also hope this story could have made someone go 'huh, interesting' whilst reading this.
Bonus details, the goddess of death in my world likes to take souls with identity issues of any kind and show them a mirror, as everyone is their truest self in her domain. By truest self I don't mean some arbitrary "best self", I mean true self. It confirms things like gender identity, it helped someone who was forcibly turned into a changeling see who they truly are, but it does NOT remove disability, because fuck that. I just felt like sharing that incase anyone else wants to use the imagery of a goddess of death with a mirror so the dead may see themselves and find inner peace trough confirmation.
PS watching your videos helped me figure out how to best write disabled characters, so thank you!
I'd love to share about some of my disabled PCs and NPCs in the campaign I run ❤ I run three campaigns but since one of them is in a preset world, I'll talk only about my homebrew games
For PCs, one party has a character who is an amputee that had his leg lost in an accident years before the campaign started. We decided that the only mechanical adjustment for him would be that he can't do long-distance walking (so instead of the party traveling 8 hours a day, they can only do 7 maximum). He experiences chronic pain on occasion and takes potions to help and act as pain medication when on the road
As for NPCs, I have two that stand out to me that I've made (there are others of course but I am most proud of these two regarding disability in game). One is a wizard named Liv who experienced a spinal injury from an assassination attempt that left her struggling to walk. She uses a wheelchair often due to pain but she does walk on occasion. I also struggle with walking and serious pain from spinal surgery that left me disabled and numb down the entirety of my right leg so it was easy to implement fantasy equivalents for her. The other character I have is a tiefling named Radiance who was deaf from birth that the party met when escaping a city. It was a pleasure to introduce her and for one of my PCs who had sign language as one of his known languages to surprise the party by communicating with her and teaching another party member sign language ❤
I don't do any actual play series but I still think appropriate representation is good. If not for other people then for my own understanding and knowledge ❤
Thank you for this video. This was very good advice!
As an intellectually and neurologically disabled woman, I made my healer oc abled but since she's a medic i.e. doesn't/can't use magic, the idea that she can somehow heal other characters' disabilities is impossible. Whilst she is a dnd oc, I've never played her, mainly bc I haven't got an opportunity to play her yet, and she is quite young (she's 16). However, I hope to play my 22-year-old warlock oc at some point. So glad I decided to make her dyspraxic. Thank you again for this video and I hope you have a wonderful week ❤️
Thank you for making this. A little while ago I wanted to create a deaf character but there’s not much on how to make disabled characters in dnd. This video was very helpful, especially because in the future I want to make a character that has chronic pain like I do. I also shared this with a one of my dnd groups because I feel that it’s very useful. Thank you again for this. The disabled dnd nerd greatly appreciates it.
I really love this video, thank you! I've also watched many others but wanted to comment on a recent video that your colouring is absolutely my favourite.
One time I played a nonverbal Rogue who mainly communicated by writing, though the character xe ended up getting the closest to was the party's other Rogue, since they could communicate with Thieves' Kant
This sounds awesome!
This reminds me of the first DND character I ever wrote: a celestial warlock with no arms and injured vocal cords. Their arms had been blown off in a magic accident in their younger years which also damaged their voice, so they just learned to adapt, and he eventually got an enchanted scarf from his patron that acts as pseudo arms and a casting focus. Still waiting to play him but he will always have a special place in my heart.
It'd be really cool to see more fantasy settings explore disabilities unique to that world. Kind of like how that Barbie fairy princess movie did.
Of course in addition to real world disabilities.
I have a selectively mute bard, and I'm always nervous to bring up that fact for feat of judgement. She sings as a form of self-soothing and empowerment, but outside of that has a mental block of sorts for actually speaking. She was inspired by my own occasional bouts of having difficulty speaking during certain times of stress. I don't have those moments often at all, but they have happened, and it's always frustrating to feel like I can't communicate. So, Buttercup doesn't really talk, but singing is a different category for her. When she isn't preforming/casting, she uses sign language with her brother acting as her interpreter. This makes it so she can communicate most of the time, but still faces some challenges (as she isn't going to sing everything she says).
I'm grateful that the group I play with is mindful about communicating and offering "cures".
Honestly I agree with everything here except for one thing: nerfing the spell "Regenerate", the only spell that I know that can regrow body parts. (Besides OP Wish.)
This 7th level spell sits right next to spells that can: teleport, raise someone from the actual dead in a way that makes them not undead, shift people into a literal alternate dimension, and summon a storm of fire.
It is understandable if you made the knowledge of the spell rare, expensive, and very painful to actually experience. However, without that feature, Regeneration is just another healing spell. A good healing spell, but *just* a healing spell.
Edit: I just reminded myself that the Resurrection spells do the exact same thing, but I don't think people pick that spell for the "grow back body parts" effect.
So this is one of the reasons I love kobolds. They’re the only race that has a workable, mechanical flaw (that actually has a significant impact and isn’t problematic). They have sunlight sensitivity, so they can’t see very well in sunlight. It can be worked around, but it’s the only base game disability that isn’t just magically fixed with an item.
Also grungs (little frog people) are one of the most mechanically unique official races and have two disabilities. Both are good in that they can be worked around, but never “fixed.” They need to submerge in water for 1 hour every day, which can be an interesting extra step in finding a safe spot, and they have touch poison, which is both a power and a flaw, since it applies to anyone a grung touches. Both are things that need to be worked with, but not fixed.
I love including disabilities in the campaigns I write. The groups I'm in don't believe in "fixing" being that most of us have experience, be it physical, mental, or both.
My favorite npc so far is my old Spellthief PC. A bit of a mix of races. She lost her hand after being caught stealing and had it mummified so it could be buried with her.... Untill she stole an ancient cursed Vase that cursed her to become a lich. Now her hand is her first and only thrall and she runs a shady mysticism shop with bargain price potions that just might harm more than heal.
My friends and I started playing dungeon world. It was very fun. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it.
Over the years I've seen a lot of disabled PCs and NPCs, and tbh they're some of my favorite, my top 2 being Kallia, a Tiefling Fighter who was born without most of her left arm and Skelaris, a 60 year old man who's trying to become a lich in order to live forever and no longer have to deal with his chronic illness
Personally, I find it really fun to write inventive ways that disability works in a setting. In my current world that I'm building, many disabilities are considered sacred. Prosthetics are magical by nature, being a sort of focus that projects the missing limb. The blind are given candles with various enchantments that help guide them based on how the holder best functions (whether the candle serves as direct sight or the flame points in different directions, which can be felt by the holder, etc). Deaf and mute people are taught light psychic communication abilities which they can choose to expand, as well as their written language(s) as well as a sort of universal magical language which all sentient people know to speak, but not necessarily write. There's so much customization in the setting that is available to the players and used by many NPCs, such as the holy warriors of the civilization that were brought back to life by their deity. They usually have multiple missing limbs and come back blind and/or deaf due to the damage caused by whatever evil entity took them down originally.
My first D&D character is a gold dragonborn barbarian and is missing one of his arms (it was amputated). I'd been watching alot of The Owl House at the time so I was learning more about the Do s and Don't s when it comes to designing disabled characters.
An interesting way to do this would be to have one of your characters take a vow of silence. While it isn't a disability per say having a character who will die if they speak who uses asl to communicate would be a great motivator to learn asl and teach the rest of your party!
Hello! A fellow fin here :D just wanted to leave a comment that I've been watching your videos for a while and I really appreciate them a lot! I'm starting my first ever dnd sessions with my friends and just starting to make a character so this video is great.
i cant remember which video specifically but it was in the comments of one of Umbreon Libris' videos i think? but the comment was about pokemon and dnd and honestly a pokemon campaign would be a really fun way to have aids for disabled characters in dnd o: the comment was talking about using deerling as a mount pokemon with a sadde that could support the character who couldnt use their legs.
EDIT: OH WAIT NO SHIT LMAOOO. it was on ur video 💀😭😭😭 im so dumb, you literally just had a pokenon video BXHXBSHXHSXH
One of my favorite characters of all time that I've played is a one-armed fighter named Melthaea. Her missing right arm (which ended just above where an elbow would be) is a birth defect, so it's not really a wound that can be regenerated.
I built Mel from the ground up with the intention of figuring out a good build for an amputee character who didn't have access to prosthetics or magic to compensate. So I wound up building a STR fighter focusing on thrown weapons, of all things. She used a slightly-modified kite shield that she strapped to her nub (with the shield straps held to her torso via a couple of belts so it wouldn't just pop off her nub easily), and would mainly focus on knife/javelin spam, diving into melee to tank for her friends when necessary.
A lot of her personality kind of grew organically out of that thought experiment. Not only was I trying to find a good voice for her in my head (eventually settled on Texas/Mississippi 'good ole gal') but I was trying to figure out her perspective. Most of the time, Mel fell into the "cool older sister" role of the party; at one point she helped the cleric, who was scared of the dark, come down from a panic attack by giving them a whiff of a bottle of malt vinegar from a fish-and-chip shop, of all things. And she was a genuine badass when combat started to happen.
But she also wound up a bit on the ornery side, particularly regarding her disability. One of the things that was guaranteed to piss Mel off was the idea that her disability made her inferior or 'lesser than'. Or the idea that she was something broken that needed fixing.
as a longtime player first time dm, this video inspires me to include more disabled npcs to my setting
nice art :)
also; entirey besides the good representation: I would say that disabilities or adjacent difficultys make for way more interesting mecanics as if they are balanced(of course in cooperation or at least with the approval of the player) at least somewhat, such that the PC who has some kind of a condition which makes them struggle with cirtain things doesnt always feel useless (which should neither be the case if sb builds a suboptimal character nore if they choose to build such a condition into their character, unless they specifically want it). this is just the basis of creating an interresting character. they should be good at some things and less good at others, such that every member of the group gets to shine occasionally and all are uniquely interresting