The Combat Wheelchair, and why gatekeeping is for town guards

Earlier this year, a disability consultant working in the TTRPG industry called Sara, (@mustangsart on Twitter) self-published a combat wheelchair for DnD. A homebrewed magic item which allowed a character with a physical disability to join an adventuring party and take part in a DnD adventure without being disadvantaged by their disability. It’s a really robust piece of design, based on the kind of wheelchairs used by athletes with disabilities to participate in sports like wheelchair rugby or wheelchair basketball. There’s probably a whole blog post discussing why the combat wheelchair is incredibly well designed, but that’s not the point of this post.

In this post, I want to address the response to the Combat Wheelchair. Let me first start with the caveat that the overwhelming majority of the responses to Sara’s work were positive. The Combat Wheelchair has garnered a significant amount of attention within the community; It is currently being featured on Critical Roll, and it doesn’t get much bigger in DnD than that. However, there is a small subset of the community who have been vocally critical of the Combat Wheelchair.

It is not my intention here to address their arguments directly. Partly because the community on twitter (myself included) have spent plenty of time doing that already. Instead I want to present my take on the real reason why people are so resistant to the idea of a Combat Wheelchair, and why the thinking that underwrites these views are toxic. In short, I want to address the problem of gatekeeping.

Broadly speaking, Gatekeeping is attempting to control who has the right to access a certain identity or culture. In this context, it is the believe that a person who is physically disabled does not have a place in a DnD adventuring party, and by extension, the table. That last part might seem like a jump in logic, so let’s dig into what I mean.

Fundamental to this is the question of why we play DnD, and TTRPGs in general. This is an incredibly complex topic, and the answer is different for everyone, but I think a fundamental reason that most of us play TTRPGs is to put ourselves in the positions of heroes in a story. There is no medium which allows you to do this quite as completely as a TTRPG (except probably LARPing). Even in a video game, how we as players interact with the world of the game is restricted by the parameters written into the code of the game. In a roleplaying game, the rules and the setting can always be flexed to accommodate what the players want to do (even if that does sometimes leave the GM scrambling - see my previous post!). The only limit to what you can do or who you can be is yours and the GM’s imagination (and the dice).

It’s a bit of a cliche that the first character you ever make in DnD is basically just an idealised version of yourself. Personally, I’ve not found that, because the first character that I played was a queer female musician, and I am none of those things, however it is true of pretty much everyone else I’ve ever introduced to the game. Some people never really stop making characters that are some reflection of themselves, and that’s fine. The reason we do this is because we want to imagine someone who resembles us doing the kind of cool stuff that you get to do in DnD, like fight dragons and go on adventures.

I think the reason I don’t typically make characters who resemble myself is that I have experienced characters that resemble myself doing cool stuff basically my entire life. I am an able-bodied, cis-het, white man. I am the default for pretty much every hero in every story told in western media since the Iliad. I don’t need to imagine myself fighting dragons and going on adventures because I can just watch The Hobbit (not that I’d want to, once was enough!).

Now, let’s take a moment to put ourselves in the shoes of a wheelchair user. Let’s think of the times in popular culture that a person in a wheelchair gets to be the hero. I can think of one off the top of my head - Professor X from X-men. Even in this example, Professor X gets to do lots of cool stuff, but he is limited by his disability. His powers are largely mental rather than physical and he does not generally go off with the X-men on their cool adventures.

Now, let’s think about other portrayals of characters in wheelchairs in popular culture. Think about all the times being in a wheelchair was short-hand for being evil - think Davros from Doctor Who or Lord Harkonnen from Dune. Think about times that being disabled made a character the butt of a joke - think about that awful character from Little Britain. Lastly, think about all those times you’ve watched a film, played a video game or read a book and not seen a character with a disability portrayed at all, because it’s most of them.

We could do a similar exercise for lots of different groups. We could talk about the ways in which people of colour, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and women are hugely under-represented in popular culture. This is not news. The point, however, needs reiterating. Anyone who is not an able-bodied, cis-het, white man has gone through thier entire life experiencing the majority of the media they consume through the perspective of able-bodied, cit-het, white men. They have seen people who do not resemble them fight dragons and go on adventures.

So why do we play DnD? It’s to see ourselves as heroes. It’s to fight dragons and go on adventures where the only limit to what we can do and who we can be is our imagination. This is why the Combat Wheelchair is so important. It allows a wheelchair user to play a character who resembles them. It allows them to fight dragons and go on adventures in a way that doesn’t simply erase their disability (by playing a non-disabled character), but makes it part of their character in a way that does not limit their ability to do the cool stuff that makes playing DnD so much fun.

I said above that in this case I define gatekeeping as “the believe that a person who is physically disabled does not have a place in a DnD adventuring party”. If you don’t think that it is ok for someone to use the Combat Wheelchair (or some other similar item), you are fundamentally saying that you cannot play as a character with a disability, or at least that the character’s disability is going to significantly disadvantage them in the game. You are saying to a player with a disability that you can play the game, but only if you either erase your disability, or it will give you a set of in-game disadvantages.

What you are saying in that situation, is that disability is not allowed in DnD. That a person with a disability does not have the same right to access the culture or identity of DnD as a person without a disability. You are gatekeeping.

This is incredibly toxic because it excludes from the hobby a whole sub-set of humanity because of some preconceived notion of what a hero is or should be. MAny of the criticisms of the Combat Wheelchair essentially boiled down to this. The substance of the arguments were around the practicality or the realism of the item, but the subtext to these arguments was that the idea of someone in a wheelchair and the idea of a hero are fundamentally incompatible. This is obviously nonsense.

The only limit to DnD is your imagination. No-one has the right to say what a person can and cannot imagine. The combat wheelchair belongs in DnD, because everyone and everything belongs in DnD. If you cannot imagine a person in a wheelchair being a hero, then, to quote one of my favourite films to nearly exclusively feature able-bodied, cit-het, white men, “you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger.”