A disability advocate’s homebrew D&D wheelchair is getting a lot of flack from people with full use of their limbs.
Dungeons & Dragons is on a mission to reform itself. Last June, Wizards of the Coast announced plans to revamp the way they handle player races going forward by removing blanket statements and global descriptions like labeling all Orcs as "evil." They might even stop using the term "race" altogether, going with something more like Pathfinder's "ancestry."
While this is a great first step, disability advocate Sara Thompson thinks that Wizards of the Coast could do more to make disabled gamers feel included. That's why she homebrewed her own wheelchair that anyone can use in their D&D 5e games.
It's called the Combat Wheelchair v2.0, which features "new upgrades, cleaner rules, sleeker design, FAQs and more - and still completely free!" That is free to download from the provided Google Drive link. The Combat Wheelchair itself costs about the same as an adventurer's pack (25 gp).
The accompanying 19-page PDF describes everything a player and DM need to know about the Combat Wheelchair. "Made with the adventurer in mind, the Combat Wheelchair is supportive and intuitive, designed for both daily activity and the pressures of combat during one's adventures," writes Thompson.
In general, the Combat Wheelchair allows a disabled adventurer to do anything that an abled adventurer could do. It floats upstairs, lets them carry things in attached saddlebags, and even folds away for easy storage. It counts as the user for the purposes of magic spells and Druidic abilities like Wild Shape, and even comes with optional upgrades like all-terrain tyres, spider legs, or a mount for your crossbow.
The design was met with wild approval from Dan Dillon, D&D designer at WotC, as well as Critical Role's Matthew Mercer.
However, some players just couldn't quite imagine a magically-artificed wheelchair in their tabletop RPG with dragons and vampires and gelatinous cubes. We like to call those people "jerks."
I'd let this item play in any of my games, and hopefully Wizards of the Coast will canonize it in an official document in the near future. In the meantime, get ready for an actual plastic sculpture to be made available in the near future.
Source: Twitter, Bell Of Lost Souls