Okay, let’s talk for a minute about ableism. Specifically, I want to talk about how it’s baked into D&D and has been ingrained in the “old school” conception about characters for decades.

From very early, D&D (or rather, AD&D) held limitless the male human character. Humans were unlimited in what levels they could reach in every class; all other races had caps on levels, and some classes they couldn’t pursue at all.

If you had lower than ideal ability scores, your maximum level could be limited even further. If you had higher ability scores, you got a bonus to earned experience in specific classes.

The game punished you for pursuing classes that you were not naturally inclined towards. You didn’t just have lower stats and harder encounters as a result, but those encounters were *less rewarding* as a result of your lower stats.

Characters were also affected by their gender, with specific limits on Strength scores for female characters of all races. For humans and half-orcs, this was only for classes with percentile Strength, but for everyone else it was universal.

So here you have a system that explicitly penalizes everything that isn’t the “baseline”: a human male. Ability scores reflect what the body and mind can do in a mechanical sense, which implicitly points at an able-bodied human male.

Then you get to spell effects, like blindness and deafness and paralysis, that down the years have been mechanized as conditions, and flagged as maladies to be cured with an opposing spell.

D&D players have been taught that for every permanent disability, there is a spell that will easily make the disabled person “whole.”

Whether someone may be deaf or blind or an amputee or have a connective tissue condition or respiratory disorder or any number of congenital conditions, there’s this idea that “magic can fix it.” There are many problems with this thinking:

The first is access. The magics that can reverse many of these conditions are higher level, and clerics that can cast those spells are normally off fighting monsters or getting killed by them. Few are in communities serving civilians.

The second is understanding the conditions. Congenital conditions in persons who are otherwise perfectly healthy can’t be “cured” if they weren’t “inflicted.”

The third, and most important, is dehumanization. Not every person with a disability craves to have that disability reversed or removed.

The longer we've played D&D, the more we've been exposed to these ideas. That people need to be 'fixed.' That higher scores are 'better' people. That what is Other is to be penalized.

I’m not the person to talk about disability in games. There are people out there doing much more and better and with more knowledge and understanding than I could ever have. But I’m trying to acknowledge the problems in the game’s history.

There are ways to improve the game and improve the lore, to make better sense of the stats we're given and how they attach to characters. But nothing gets better if we pretend that the game wasn't constructed the way it was.