With the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons growing around the world, many players and Dungeon Masters are researching ways to make the game more inclusive and accessible to everyone. Some opt to create player characters from all kinds of backgrounds, including those who don't fit the mold of the average D&D adventurer. Players often seek to create diverse characters by crafting deep backstories and fleshed-out pasts. Characters with disabilities are becoming more common and are often acknowledged in official materials and sourcebooks, adding depth and realism to the worlds they inhabit.

For some, creating a disabled character may be a daunting process, especially if the player is not disabled themselves or knows very little about how people live with their various disabilities. However, when done in a sensitive and accurate manner, disabled characters can add depth, impacting their background, their daily lives, how they fight and the way they navigate the world around them. Though some disabled people will be happy to game with people who play disabled characters while not being disabled in real life, this may not be alright with others and should be discussed before the game starts in a Session Zero. Boundaries, expectations and triggers, among other things, should also be discussed beforehand.

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A Character Is Not Just Their Disability

A druid casting the Thorn Whip cantrip in DnD

Making flat, one-sided characters can happen during any creation process, but creating a concept purely based on the idea that the character has a certain disability is not the best way to write a disabled character. It may seem obvious to say, but people with disabilities are just that: people, with a disability. Creating the character's personality, beliefs, class and race first is always the best way to go with any character creation. Once the basics are completed, it's then a good idea to decide if the character is disabled and in what way.

By fully developing them in this way, the player will have a much better understanding of their character and can jump straight into the first session with a character that's interesting to roleplay, with more to their personality and history than just their disability. A good way to help this development is to decide how the character became disabled. If they became disabled later in life, then what was their life like beforehand? Did they keep the same job and personality, or did they have a big life change after becoming disabled?

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Avoiding Stereotypes Is Essential

Combat wheelchair in DnD

This point may seem obvious, but some stereotypes are easy to play into if players are not familiar with them. While some concepts can be highly offensive and are most often avoided during games, others may still be upsetting or offensive to disabled players without the table realizing the issue. Common tropes include the inspirational disabled person overcoming all their challenges with sheer willpower and motivation. This is problematic because it brushes over the real-life concerns and challenges of disabled people and encourages non-disabled people to believe that they can overcome real-life accessibility issues by being positive. A commonly used phrase to highlight this is "no amount of willpower will turn a flight of stairs into a ramp."

Another stereotype is that people with disabilities, namely mobility-based ones, are smart in place of possessing physical fitness. This can lead to players feeling like disabled characters have to play classes such as wizards or sorcerers instead of martial classes such as fighters or rangers. Combat wheelchairs and other mobility aids can be constructed and enable disabled fighters to enter the fray and destroy their enemies just as well as their non-disabled companions.

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Include Accessibility Issues and Challenges in the Game World

Tavern patrons watch a celebratory performance from Dungeons and Dragons

It can be very easy in systems that are highly magical in nature to overlook accessibility. It can feel awkward for non-disabled people to even discuss accessibility and barriers in their games. However, disabled people often encourage others to talk about this issue in order to highlight the importance of accessibility and awareness around the topic. If a character comes across a barrier within the game world, such as a flight of stairs leading to a ruined temple that contains treasure, have the character bring up the issue with their companions. By having a discussion on how to overcome the obstacle as a group, inventive thinking can often lead to new ways to overcome that obstacle as a team, and players will remember to look out for access issues in the future.

Also, consider how a character may react to such barriers and what their next actions would be. If accessibility is a common thing in this world, with ramps and lifts everywhere in place of stairs, finding an ancient ruin without such amenities may lead to annoyance at this culture's lack of forethought. It could also lead to gratefulness that their society has moved on or even astonishment that civilization used to be built like this.

On the other hand, a disabled character in a world with low accessibility and multiple barriers might feel angry that their community still hasn't moved forward in this sector in all these years. Or, they might just heave a sigh of inevitability and move forward. A strong, independent character may not wish to simply be carried up the stairs, while others may offer to use magic as a solution.

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Don't Use Magic to Cure Disabilities

storm sorcery D&D 5e

This is another topic that needs a lot of discussion in Session Zero, as opinions vary greatly. However, a good number of disabled people despise the trope of using magic to cure a person's disability as a "reward" or something similar. For many disabled people, their disability is a core part of their personality and life, and taking that away from them would feel like taking away a part of their identity. The world may be highly magical and have fantastic healers on hand, but some people choose to keep their character disabled for many reasons. They may choose to not get healed, or they may have disabilities that can't be healed. There are countless other reasons that players might choose to keep their disability intact even in high magic settings.

Another reason for this is realism. Many disabled people can't be cured even if they wanted to with normal medicine, let alone fictional magic powers. For some, this could be a cruel reminder of the fact they will not be cured even if they wish to be. It could also give some people a complicated mixture of feelings about how people may view them in the real world.

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It's natural for people to want to see others like themselves in the gaming world. A character is an extension of the player, so it makes sense that players would want to play as someone who lives a similar life as them in order to connect to them. While not always the case, having the option to play as a disabled character in a way that they feel connected to and seeing other disabled characters in the world will often make a disabled player feel more immersed and have a better gaming experience.

Playing disabled characters in D&D is not a new concept, with players creating such characters decades ago using the first edition, but it's often a hotly debated topic within the community. Recent sourcebooks and published material have gone to lengths to include pictures of disabled characters in battle and beyond, and they've even released the first fully wheelchair-accessible dungeon for adventurers to explore. However, it's important to note that not all disabled characters are wheelchair users. Characters who are Deaf, blind, missing limbs, dyslexic, autistic and more are all potential adventurers as are players with these disabilities.

The most important thing to remember when creating a disabled character is that all members of the table need to consent to everything. If a player doesn't have disabilities but wishes to play a character with one, they, where possible, should discuss the concept with an expert on that disability: a person who actually has that disability in real life.