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Had this conversation with someone who chose to no longer be at my table after meeting a blind NPC
(files.catbox.moe)
Another player who was at the table during the incident sent me this meme after the problem player in question (they had a history) left the group chat.
Felt like sharing it here because I'm sure more people should keep this kind of thing in mind.
Why can't magic cure them though? In star trek, people don't cure Picards baldness because people don't care about it, they realise its nothing to mock. But that's just a "cosmetic" ailment.
Things like blindness, or being unable to walk should be curable by magic, right?
To continue with startrek: Geordie la forge.
He was added because they wanted to represent a blind person, and show how technology can help offset disabilities.
Picard was bald because they didn't care, and Geordie was blind because they couldn't cure him.
The inclusion of a blind person lets them tell the story of how this future society deals with a disability like blindness.
So you can use magic to tell the story of a disabled person. Why are they disabled? Why can't magic help them? How has their society reacted to this?
Maybe it's as simple as simple healing magic can't cure an injury you were born with, so they only have use of their legs through an advanced transformation spell. They live with the worry that a passing dogooder will cast a healing spell that will "restore" their condition and leave them stranded far from the magic that can actually help them. This makes them come across as brusque to people who are "only trying to help".
It's a story, so the magic only does what you want. The point is that we often choose to tell the stories that leave people out because it's more convenient.
To speak more to the point - Geordi is asked by his doctor a few times (by different doctors) why he didn't upgrade to a more modern prosthetic. He preferred the visor.
Eventually, in the movies, he did switch - presumably his new implants finally had feature parity with the visor. Or he got tired of the visor popping off...
The argument could be made that they did cure Geordi La Forge's blindness using technology by means of his visor and later ocular implants. When I think about disability in fantasy settings I think of golem/automaton prosthetics replacing limbs and the like, and that most disabilities could be helped in one way or another. So to me the simple answer of why would there be disability in a world where magic should be able to cure everything is that not everyone has enough gold to pay for that magic or skill to wield it themselves. In that sense it feels very relatable to our real world, people unable to afford the technology and services that could help them
Magic medicine means magic ailments. Just like the introduction of antibiotics produced bacteria like MRSA, the use of magic to cure wounds could produce MRSA. That is, magic resistant staphylococcus aureus, as opposed to methicillin.
Curses and other such primarily magical ailments could also be much more difficult to deal with than simple infections/wounds.
Because magic is a tool to tell stories, and you want your group to meet a blind person. Maybe you invent a kind of blindness that can't be healed by ordinary healing magic, or a social rule that doesn't allow for it to be healed, or a severe negative side effect, or whatever makes sense to explain it.
Not everyone views their differences as disabilities.
https://www.insider.com/why-deaf-people-turn-down-cochlear-implants-2016-12
I don't know why you're getting downvoted; it's a perfectly reasonable question.
consider a character where the one disability gives rise to a heightened ability in another form. For example, someone who is blind may have a heightened sense of hearing. That could would really well in a tabletop rpg in a scenario where the character could hear something before anyone else could sense it.
Daredevil.
We have a bat folk in our party and if they were blinded they can use use echo location