Better Ideas than 'Fantasy Wheelchairs'

 There's a colossally stupid idea floating around, and again its in the name of 'representation' championed by people that it doesn't represent.

<sigh>

Do a web search for it. 

Here's a Q&A Snippet: (DocJones took one for the team reading it)

"But it can float up and down stairs! Isn't that unfair?"

"No, unless you plan on making all the able bodied characters at level 1 also remain on ground floors only and never go up and down stairs and into dungeons. If you were planning on doing that then that's fair."

Short version - the article creator, and advocates of the idea, posit a high-power artifact level wheelchair for you to imbalance your game with.  Floats/flies up stairs, well-nigh indestructible etc.

Just the sort of thing a first level character should get for free.

RPGPundit goes into detail on why it isn't about what they say it is.

Grim Jim has an excellent video debunking it.

It's just a dumb idea under D&D rules.

Well, after a 'spirited' discussion over on theRPGsite, that spans over thirty pages spread over two topics, and quizzing my players, even the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal of which rattled off a half dozen better solutions.  Here's a top ten:  

1. A semi-sentient suit of armor, a la Iron Man
2. Flying Carpet
3. Modifed Tenser's Flying Disk spell
4. Master/Blaster, Yoda Backpack
5. Fancy Saddle and mount.  Especially if a gnome or halfling, use a big dog.
6. Necromatic spell, bone legged 'walking' chair. (Thanks Ghostmaker)
7. Animate Object on a regular (legged) chair.
8. Magic Gondola
9. Golem Carrying you around
10. Magical 'Cybernetics'

...and the obvious solution - Have it fixed magically.  If you're rich enough for the chair, you can afford the healing magic.

Resources and hangouts:

As mentioned, I'm going back Old-School.  Random tables to shake me out of ruts.  Roll and Shout over Stop and Look it up.  Most of these are going to be useful/interesting links to any GM.  I'll perma-link and update as I can.

theRPGsite - Holy crap, an honest to God forum.  This is the Stoa where I go to watch bad ideas die.  If you're at all thin-skinned, avoid.

Medieval Fantasy City Generator - watabou has an awesome one-click tool to toss a city down.  I recommend using it with some flavor of random city system like - Vornheim or grab the city crawling rules from Last Grasp; alternately use his Cörpathium system.
I mean, if you're a real psycho, you could expand the map and detail it.

While you're there, Last Grasp has generators for nearly everything.  If you can't find one, make it.  You can save the links in your bookmarks for the seat-of-your-pants DMing I prefer.

The Angry GM is good for getting my focus back, and solving problems I didn't know I had.  And creating new ones.  He's a dick.

The Monsters Know What They're Doing - and so does Keith Ammann.  I bought the e-book, by way of thanks but the blog is excellent.  While it is very 5e system specific, no matter what rules you use, his habit of deconstructing what a monster is, and how that should drive its behavior, should be studied.

I switched from Evernote to OneNote for the purely pragmatic reason of having been paying for it as part of Office, but then I discovered Cryrid's templates and it has been nothing but WIN.  Hands down this has worked out best for my scatterbrained DMing.

Goblin Punch has me half-convinced I've been doing it wrong for a lot of years.  Funny, insightful and awe-inspiring by turns, if you look at NOTHING else here, you must read why God Hates Orcs.  In fact, f*ck this blog and go read his.

Land of Nod is another good gaming blog, his bar fight rules well, rule.

Scribd is my go-to library these days.  Tons of books and audiobooks to mine for  inspiration - poke through the Appendix N reading list and go wild.



Currently, My Reclamation campaign is using D&D 5e rules, but I'll either be changing to some flavor of OST or FantasyCraft (depending which leads to less of a player mutiny) after the current campaign arc.