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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.
I'm gonna devil's advocate this for a second.
Unless you're very poor (which is fair in most fantasy settings there's always poor people) magic kinda negates disabilities.
Like is there no spell that can cure these disabilities?
With that said to have that big of an issue with it just makes you an ass
Modern medical aid negates many diseases and disabilities including some blindnesses. But we still have people with these problems.
This is an opportunity for worldbuilding and comments about society. You'd be a fool to look at any fantasy setting and think it's an equal society.
Yeah, but I suspect OP did zero world building with blindness in mind.
You don't have to, you don't have to work up to the revelation that a society might be unjust. We all know and live that, we recognise what someone being disenfranchised in a world that apparently had fixes for the problem means.
Here's a thought:
For someone with a congenital defect, maybe the healing spell 'heals' their body back to the way it was naturally-with the defect.
See that was the point of the shitpost I mentioned. The joke was that it was gonna regrow the victims foreskin.
But that's still a really neat idea
Regenerate is a 7th level spell. A cleric would need to be 13th level or higher to use this spell. They are not that common, and they likely have more important things to do.
Lesser restoration (5e 2nd lvl) can cure blindness, but I'm not sure if it can restore destroyed or removed eyes. So it would depend on the kind of blindness, and if it was at all magical in nature. That and from a few threads the estimate for its cost is around 40 gold. For a lot of "commoners" their income is anywhere from poor (60sp) to well off(1gp) per month. So I can easily see many mid tier peasants not having the money to have lesser restoration cast on them. Especially if they live in some tiny village where there isn't a temple in town, like you would have in a city.
Even in a city if the head priest is high level, and has say, 4 other actual clerics in the building not just priests, thats 18 casts of lesser restoration (wasting high lvl slots on a lvl 20 cleric) and maybe 5 per 5th level cleric. So 38 a day. In a city with tens of thousands of citizens with many myriad medical issues. Sure maybe there are 4 or 5 temples, but its still just a numbers issue at some point.
The dnd economy is a bit wonky and its magic system is difficult to match with the world sometimes, esp high magic settings, but I think the sheer scale of the population of commoners and non magic users sort of makes it pretty understandable that disabilities would still exist everywhere except the very wealthy or capable(adventurers themselves).
This of course all depends on what level of magic you have in your world. If it's very high magic then maybe there are a lot less disabilities, but those that exist are less "im blind from basic eye deterioriation" and more "goblins tore my eyes out as a child and it'll take a decently capable cleric to fix this, and also I'm blind so I make very little money so I'm SoL"
Another thing to consider here: the player characters are absolute heroes in most campaigns, not just the average rando peasant. So the stuff they have access to (magic skills, potions, money, ...) is not at all an indication of what the average person has access to. Maybe that bias causes some players to lose touch with ingame reality.
TIL billionaires are IRL PCs and the rest of us are lowly NPC peasants.
In 5e, even poor people still get 2sp a day. It's not clear how much it costs to hire someone to cast spells, but it's either something they could reasonably pay for to cure blindness, or it's so much that players can make enough money casting spells that money becomes a non-issue even at fairly low levels. Also, that's not going to work if you want an NPC that is blind instead of was blind until they met a PC who had a spare second-level spell slot.
I'm no Dungeon Master but when a PC has their limb ripped off, isn't the magic that is required to restore the limb kept behind quite a high spellcasting level? And the cost of the materials might be out of reach to more like "Michigan poor" than just "Dharavi poor".
7th level spells, yes. Most people who get to a high enough level to use those spells are busy with politics or preventing world ending horrors.
Level 7 spell (regenerate)
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Regenerate#content
Depends on the world, maybe some magic systems dont allow for healing or performing certain tasks?
A great example is the spell "Regenerate" in DnD
It's a 7th level spell so not many people will have access to it. And given the nature of wizards being super secretive about their spells it's no surprise it's not more common.
Also at my table I ruled that someone having such spells used on them can have the complexity of the idea of "self" play a role on what is healed. ie they may be willing but after a long time ones idea of self will play a role in what one sees as "complete" and what gets regenerated
That is fascinating, do you mind elaborating? I'm reminded a little of the "ship of Theseus" concept. Like, would the initial regeneration of a limb affect the quality of future healing and/or regeneration, or is it more of a long-term psychological effect like "my arm is back, but I don't 'feel' like this is my real arm"?
Not the person you asked, but I think the idea of “self” in this case is “how do you picture yourself when you imagine yourself whole/healed.”
Born without a limb 30 years ago? You likely can’t regenerate it, because when you picture who you are, you’re a one limbed person.
But it plays in other ways as well. For instance, while regenerate may technically have the ability to regenerate problems such as the example from a meme a while back where a person had their appendix removed, the idea of self would inherently include their appendix being removed as that’s the only way they could see themselves as whole/healed.
Exactly, how one sees themselves as complete and whole plays a role in it.
Plus there's the whole "if you were born without, that's at most your complete state."
So if someone was born without an arm they'd need a lot more than Regenerate to get that arm, it's take a True Polymorph to get it.
See that would be the defining information.
To what extent to the healing spells heal?
But I'm reminded of that dnd shitpost about revivify and how it even regrows lost limbs and I feel like something like a spinal cord or ocular nerve would be fixed by that.
Hell you could make a hospital where they just kill you if your sick or wounded then revivify your ass back to full health lmao
Revivify doesn't regrow lost limbs. That's explicitly stated. You're thinking of resurrection, which is 7th level and costs a diamond worth 1000 gp.
Yeah tbh I don't know much about dnd other than what I've gathered through memes and shitposts
Just seemed like something magic should easily be able to take care of
There's a lot of lower level magic that would make stealing a diamond easy.
I haven't checked how this is presented in 5E, but I remember in 2E that the costs of the stronger healing spells that operated on more than hit points, and especially the Raise Dead and Resurrection spells had a very high cost in material components, and took their toll on the caster. In other words, not to be used lightly and all the time. Which means finding someone to cast it for you would come at a correspondingly high cost.
In a well-designed campaign world, that should be reflected in either a high monetary cost for the casting of such spells (a church requesting a sizable donation, for example) or some kind of demonstration that the target is worthy in the eyes of the church or its god.
This can actually turn into a storytelling and role-playing opportunity. Imagine you're blind, and you and your party need to prove that you're a worthy person while blind before they'll restore your sight. Or the whole party is made totally blind for the duration of a test or short quest that you have to complete together before the restoration spell can be cast.
All this sufficiently explains the existence of blind people. Lack of imagination is not an excuse for bigotry.
Also, a character may be unable to get their sight restored, and that can and should be explored for its role-playing potential.
I think it boils down to what table you’re at. If you want to have strictly defined rules, then you build out a table with players that has strictly defined rules that the world and players must adhere to. If you’re all kind of OK with “rule of cool” or hand waving away some things within reason (not so much that you’re just completely going Calvinball with the sessions though I’m sure some people like that as well!) that’s totally fine too.
Ultimately you are all just telling a story together. Anyone who is so angry about someone with a disability in their fantasy world that they are willing to leave the table - to the surprise of the DM and another player who clearly are not on that wavelength - is probably not somebody who is a good fit anyway.
The only critique I could possibly give the DM here is for them to reflect on whether or not they set proper expectations at the table. But frankly (barring critical info that has been left out) this is incredibly petty and a player with any emotional maturity should be able to talk through this and move forward with the group. What a strange hill to die on.