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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 really don't understand what's wrong with people not "curing all illness and disability with magic™" in a world where magic exists and is a thing.
See, in most such fantasy settings, magic not only exists but it has an attitude. Sometimes, a conscience, and not a very ethically nice one (if it allows for eg.: necromancy!). Sometimes, magic even is a god (or gods). Even if they aren't, the people who use magic are still ultimately humans (with leafy ears etc but still ultimately humans with costumes, at worst) driven by greed, envy or a weird righteous idea of how should a woman dress and behave when in public.
Would you trust some rando nutjob, who claims to speak for Evelok the Eternal Coffee Mug of Satisfaction, to up and magically conjure you new eyes, new arms, whatever? To alter your body to such a fundamental level? Normal people in such settings are already afraid to death of werewolves and those are quite normal things. Compare: even in our magicless, relatively normal world, we have the power and the money to cure most illness and to treat disabled people adequately yet Obamacare is not universal and we can not trust that the people who give people implants and prosthetics haven't backdoored them to force those disabled people into corporate servitude.
Your player party may be the goodest bois, but they're only one. The various guilds and churches around quite likely aren't such goodies on aggregate either, or else there would simply be no plot.
There are deaf people in the real world with treatable deafness that opt not to because they don't view their deafness as a disability. In addition, not all neurodivergent folks view their conditions as disabilities and wouldn't change even if there was a "cure" for it.
So, I don't see how disabilities in a fantasy setting would be different. It's not even necessarily about trusting the cure, many times it's about how folks view the condition and themselves.
I agree. It's just that I've seen that angle tackled already by people who can express it much better than I can, so I went for a vector that I saw unexplored. Like, what happens if in a fantasy world magic itself doesn't want to cure people?