this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Makes me wanna link the thread where people were making the argument that wheelchair users and deaf people wouldn't exist in fantasy settings.
Just because there is magic doesn’t mean everyone can afford it.
Also interesting to think about, if a deaf person has a magic amulet that grants different hearing, are they no longer a deaf person or are they a deaf person with a magical aid?
I think they'd still identify as deaf for community purposes.
I think they would do the exact opposite for community purposes. In a medieval fantasy world they might be the only deaf person in their small town, so they don't wanna be ostrasized for being different and weird.
Sure, until they found their people, and then they'd start a community.
That’s basically hearing aids or cochlear implants and the thing is sound is uncomfortable if you’re used to not sound.
Are they naturally deaf or just hard of hearing? A deaf person would get a zero to sound checks no matter what.
I remember seeing the same for trans people, but in granblue fantasy some people still weaponized how Cagliostro was a born a man to make her mad, doesn't matter how she looks or what she has down there, bigots will exist even in fantasy.
Fantasy worlds really often have sex as something one may select. It doesn't serve the non-binary folk all that well, but there are several ways to pick either of the binary options
Another problem is that in order to have magic that is capable of fully transitioning someone, you basically need to enable full body modification for other purposes as well, so transhumanism becomes something you need to represent in your story (unless you just add arbitrary and meaningless restrictions to the magic).
They can totally exist in fantasy settings, but there has to be a reason why magic "doesn't work" to heal that. "It's a curse" or "there's a powerful magical will" or whatever.
If it's DnD, it can easily escalate into whether Reincarnation "fixes" that, since the person is getting a new body of a possibly different race.
There are deaf people in our world that refuse cochlear implants. Why the hell does magic need a reason to "not work" when people IRL prefer to stay the way they are?
Heal in both D&D5e and Pathfinder heals, among other things, Blinded and Deafened statuses. Your deaf character is the target of a heal spell. Rules as written, your character can hear again, whether you'd like to or not, end of story.
For the same reason any D&D story dealing with an actual disease epidemic needs a deus ex for Lesser Restoration, Heal or other spells to fail to cure said disease.
And some would rather be cured IRL. Your point is completely irrelevant because it's not about choice, the question is "why the people wanting to be cured haven't been cured yet?"
The funny thing is that in low fantasy settings where magical healing is very limited, this whole discussion doesn't exist.
My dude, people exist IN OUR WORLD with EASILY TREATABLE CONDITIONS that for a variety of reasons HAVE NOT BEEN TREATED. It's not a head scratcher.
Nope. Stop with the fucking ableist erasure of differently abled individuals. It's just a fun little game to play with friends. It doesn't need fucking massive essays of world building.
Yep, it's fine to roleplay a character who can't be cured, or just prefers it that way. Just as it's also fine to have a tabaxi be a vegan, because it's a fantasy and players are allowed to express themselves however they wish and the lore is always secondary to player enjoyment.
Even in a setting where having your head chopped off is a minor inconvenience for anyone who has 1000g, there would still be people who choose not to have an amputation healed for any number of reasons, and thay choice should be up to them.
Imagine walking into a lemmy board on the internet and trying to tell people something doesn't need fucking massive essays of worldbuilding...
Essays of world building are basically the bread and butter of D&D.
I'm saying you don't need that to explain the existence of differently abled individuals in a fantasy setting when there are curable conditions people have in the real world that go uncured.
That's a v fair point.