Back in 2020, game designer and disability advocate Sara Thompson published a home-brew set of rules introducing the concept of the "Combat Wheelchair" to other tabletop RPGs, while also challenging the industry as a whole to take a hard look at how they represent – or fail to represent – disabled people in their fictional worlds.
When Sara Thompson designed her Combat Wheelchair – a rugged, splay-wheeled chair with multiple accessories of both mundane and magical persuasion for an enterprising adventurer's needs, she drew inspiration from her own experience using a wheelchair and from the rough and rowdy sports of wheelchair rugby and wheelchair basketball. With the rules and features Sara drew up for D&D 5e (and for the pen-and-paper RPG adaptation of The Witcher), a player character with physical impairments can use the Combat Wheelchair and its "gadgets" to perform sick stunts, ram enemies, and magically "hover up stairs."
Disability rights activists like to use the "impairment" and "disability" in parallel to talk about the challenges disabled people face in their lives. "Impairments" are the physical and mental disadvantages people have – blindness, deformities, learning difficulties, etc. "Disability" is when a person's physical or mental impairments clash with the society they live in – having to board a bus without a wheel-chair ramp, being shouted at for bringing their seeing-eye dog into a store, etc. "Impairments" are rarely something people can control, but "disabilities" are something that can and should be addressed by societies to create fairness and accessibility for all, whether through making real-life buildings more accessible or introducing tools like Combat Wheelchairs to tabletop RPG settings.
Neither "Tech" or "Magic" Justifies Erasing Disabled People From RPG Narratives
In science fiction and fantasy stories with advanced technology or powerful magic, writers and RPG designers who get careless with their world-building can thoughtlessly wind up "erasing" disabled people from their narratives, declaring that cybernetics, genetic engineering, clerical healing magic, or mystical enchantments can be used to "fix" disabled people. There are two big problems with this viewpoint: first, there are a wide range of physical and mental impairments people can have, not all of which can be changed. Second, many disabled people don't want to be "fixed," seeing their impairments as an essential part of the lives they lead. For them, the idea of "curing" all disabled people smacks of prejudice and eugenics, a toxic mindset valuing people only for how "strong," "useful," or "normal" they are to their societies.
The presence of the Combat Wheelchair in Dungeons & Dragons or other fantasy RPGs doesn't stop player characters from choosing to get cybernetic enhancements, using restorative magics to re-grow their legs, or other such "ability enhancements." What the Combat Wheelchair and other similar tools do is give player characters an actual choice between varying degrees of self-augmentation or affirming their flaws as a positive, meaningful aspect of their identity. It goes without saying that the Combat Wheelchair also lets player with real-life disabilities create PCs who truly represent them.
The Combat Wheelchair Challenges RPG Developers To Improve Their Representation Of Disabled People
As detailed on Dicebreaker, Sara Thompson created the Combat Wheelchair supplement so players and GMs could include characters with lower-body paralysis and other physical impairment in the dungeon-crawling antics so iconic to tabletop RPGs. The Combat Wheelchair supplement is also a gauntlet thrown down at players, GMs, and RPG designers, challenging them to make people with different kinds of disabilities present and relevant in their imagined worlds.
Whether they have missing limbs, blindness, or a chronic stammer, disabled people (real disabled people, not "inspirationally disadvantaged" or "tragic" stereotypes) have stories worth telling, and rules for assistive technologies, animals, and other empowering systems make it possible for games like Dungeons & Dragons to tell these stories. With Candlekeep Mysteries featuring a wheelchair-compatible adventure, and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft having characters in wheelchairs, it's becoming more common even in official Dungeons & Dragons content, and is perhaps a sign that this stigma is dwindling.
Source: Dicebreaker
