Magic Items and the Exploration Pillar

[LibraryOgre]

So, I was thinking about something.

BTB AD&D, identifying items was a bit of a pain; you had only a couple spells that could do it somewhat reliably (the 1e Identify spell was a nightmare, and the 2e spell was only slightly better), and even potions required either a sip test or an Identify to truly name. You also had a fair number of cursed items, lending difficulty to finding and using magic items. Would this cloak let me fly, or devour me? Would it let me fly for a while THEN devour me? You were never sure, without taking some big risks, spending some big money, and taking some big time (qv Identify causing 8 points of Constitution damage each time you cast it, requiring days of rest). The other option was to pay to have it identify, which the P&P game made expensive and a bit rare (find a sage, give them money, come back in a month), but computer games made relatively easy (spend some cash at pretty much any store, "Improved Identify" of the SSI games, and even plain identify in the IE games). In 3rd edition and on, these were largely made the default.

But, I was thinking... is this one source of some folk's perception that the Exploration Pillar has become de-emphasized? It used to be, every magic item was a puzzle that had to be solved... a potential hazard. Now, magic items are loot... it might take a couple days and a chunk of money, but you'll know what every item you found is, and it's a lot less likely that they're going to try to murder you.

Now, I don't think we should necessarily go back to the days of difficult identification and cursed items... it made the game less fun, IMO. However, I do wonder if making it easy to identify the items made it less a matter of exploration.

[KorvinStarmast]

Now, I don't think we should necessarily go back to the days of difficult identification and cursed items... it made the game less fun, IMO. However, I do wonder if making it easy to identify the items made it less a matter of exploration.

I would use the term discovery rather than exploration. Finding the old tower was also exploration/discovery. Which leaves me with this thought:
Discover is the overarching pillar

Where is it?
What does it do?
Can I use it?
What is at the end of this hallway?

Are all sub elements of Discovery.

[Drakevarg]

I'd definitely say that your typical D&D world feels safer and more under control with knowable magic items. As you said, they're just loot now. More candy for baby. I think the problem with this is less directly related to the difficulty in identification (though it could certainly be related), and more the attitude that magic items are a known, quantified, and expected element now.

A much bigger guilty party in that respect is the entire concept of a "magic mart." If magic items are just something you can buy in a store for X coins and reasonably expect to get your hands on, it has to be a known quantity, and the party (and the community at large) just takes it as a given that you can have these things. They're barely even magic anymore, they're just products.

If magic items are solely obtained from ancient tombs, mad wizards, and mysterious and unreliable traveling salesman, then that potion you found could be anything. If it's something you found at the neighborhood pharmacy, it is a product with quantifiable and known effects for a set price that you can find on a shelf. The vibes are entirely different. It has a name, its effects are known, and the wider community knows well ahead of time what to do with it. It seems a lot less taboo in modern editions for players to just go through the DMG and pick out what they want. Hell, in Pathfinder it's not even a separate book anymore. The curtain is officially pulled back and any obfuscation in-game just becomes the DM refusing to give you a straight answer (unless it's a custom item and you can't just Google it anyway).

Just for a personal anecdote, my first-ever magic item was an enchanted sword I got from a little girl I met in a dungeon, who told me the magic only worked once. I carried that sword for ten levels and across three campaigns before I actually tried using it, saving a party member by instantly flash-stepping across a battlefield to cut their attacker in half. Afterwards it turned into a chainsaw sword. That remains, to this day, the coolest weapon I ever had in a game and no store-bought +whatever sword of whosits is ever going to remotely compare.

[Tohron]

I think the issue was that the 'discovery' part of magic items had a heavy element of "will this item try to kill me?" This pushed players not to use the loot they found, which wasn't fun. It would be more interesting if investigating magic items was more along the lines of uncovering additional features, i.e. if you say a command word, then your Cloak of Flying will let you fly at double speed for 1 round 3 times / day. That could make the process fun, rather than a cruel gotcha.

[KorvinStarmast]

I'd definitely say that your typical D&D world feels safer and more under control with knowable magic items.

That's a problem.

If magic items are solely obtained from ancient tombs, mad wizards, and mysterious and unreliable traveling salesman, then that potion you found could be anything.

That makes discovery interesting.

Just for a personal anecdote, my first-ever magic item was an enchanted sword I got from a little girl I met in a dungeon, who told me the magic only worked once. I carried that sword for ten levels and across three campaigns before I actually tried using it, saving a party member by instantly flash-stepping across a battlefield to cut their attacker in half. Afterwards it turned into a chainsaw sword. That remains, to this day, the coolest weapon I ever had in a game and no store-bought +whatever sword of whosits is ever going to remotely compare.

*applause*

[Pauly]

There are a number of issues with the ‘discovery’ aspect as traditionally done in D&D.
1) The discovery is A to B. Once you know what the things is, you know everything about the thing.
2) Because of risk players will avoid using items until they are fully identified. Not just the risk of the item being cursed, but the risk of using sub optimal strategies.
3) Players feel cheated if they are on a quest find a unidentified magic item, and not use it against the end boss, only to find out when they finally identify it later that it would have been really useful in the boss fight.
4) Players generally don’t have a huge amount of attachment to a thing. If you have a trusty +2 longsword and find a +3 longsword in chest you immediately start using the new item and sell off the old.
Basically in D&D discovery is ‘t fun and is very transactional - “is it more useful than what I have now” “how much is it worth”.

I haven't seen it done in an RPG but I like the anime way of treating discovery with magic items, well at least major items for the main characters.
1) The discovery is a long process, sometime A to Z.
2) Partially identified items are still useful, you are just locked out of their higher abilities.
3) The mini quests to unlock the upgrades are fun, especially when they tie in to the main quest.
4) Characters create genuine attachments and relations to their items.
The anime method is much more story oriented and rewards players for getting involved in the story.

[NichG]

I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...

There are so many items that could be amazing to have IRL but would have zero effect on the numbers that show up on a character sheet or in any dice roll that would ever happen during game. That gap has a lot of potential to be explored for ways to bridge it.

[Mechalich]

I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...

That only works if you cannot turn said items into cash, which is tricky to justify since there's probably someone who will spend money on mystical curiosities at a rate that would be more valuable to the player than actually trying to figure out how to use such a thing.

Getting around the looter-shooter problem in a dungeon crawler is tricky. There's a constant urge to try and turn everything into increased abilities on the character sheet, whether it's items, money, or even food (ex. recent iterations of Final Fantasy have chosen to turn meals into significant buffs, so that being good at the fishing minigame impacts overall character power). This seems to be related to the single objective problem: everything is being assembled for the sole purpose of defeating the BBEG at the end of the campaign and therefore more or less all other considerations are tossed aside. I think that root problem (which many players and tables don't see as a problem) needs to be addressed first.

[Tanarii]

I would use the term discovery rather than exploration. Finding the old tower was also exploration/discovery.

Agreed. Exploration is the act of making your way through the adventuring site, or possibly to/from the adventuring site if the outer world is wilderness.

Otoh, while exploration of that kind is definitely a form of discovery (and thus a subset), there's definitely different ... flavors of exploration discovery. Seeing what's there / finding loot is different from a seek and destroy mission against Team Evil or a specific BBEG.

And non-exploration discovery of what you find is separate from exploration. That part is what is supposed to evoke A Sense Of Wonder. What does this fountain do? What do these runes mean?

Identifying Magic Items has definitely changed from discovery fraught with peril that might give great power, to purely a reward. And for some folks, it's even viewed as an entitlement, that you're being punished if they don't get them in general. Or even fail to get the specific ones they want.

(Edit: the distinction between exploration discovery and discovery discovery is important to me, because I'm an advocate of modern D&D needing better exploration game structures.)

[Mechalich]

Identifying Magic Items has definitely changed from discovery fraught with peril that might give great power, to purely a reward. And for some folks, it's even viewed as an entitlement, that you're being punished if they don't get them in general. Or even fail to get the specific ones they want.

If a game has strong gear/ability interactions, then access to items that provide the relevant synergies is quite often essential to build viability, and characters who don't receive said access are in fact being punished - at least to the degree of not being allowed to have their build operate properly. This can happen without 'magic' being part of the equation at all. For example, something as simple as making a sniper build and then the game refusing to allow the character to acquire a sniper rifle.

[Bohandas]

If magic items are solely obtained from ancient tombs, mad wizards, and mysterious and unreliable traveling salesman, then that potion you found could be anything.\

Unless the evil wizard is, indeed, entirely insane, why would his lair be filled with cursed items? Even if his particular brand of villainy was to trick people into using cursed items one would think that in his own lair they would be set aside.

Similarly, why would you bury someone with a cursed item? Unless it was done as an insult or the cursed item killed them and nobody else wanted to risk touching it? And in those cases wouldn't it be likely to be a matter of public record and/or local legend

Also, why wouldn't scrolls and potions be labeled in some way? Or rather, why would they be unlabeled by default? I could buy that when found in ancient places that any non-magical marker affixed to them may be long gone - a labeled ribbon around a bottleneck long since rotted away or a wax seal cracked to the point of illegibility or whatever - but the default in the old editions seems to have been that they just weren't labeled as a matter of practice, which simply doesn't make sense, especially if identification is difficult

EDIT:
Also, on a different note, a lot of magic items are command word activated, and guessing a command word simply isn't realistic. That would be equivalent to figuring out how to do something in the command prompt of a computer without any prior instruction. (Maybe even worse because in the magic item's case you have no guarantee that the command word will be a real word, or even an acronym based on real words.)

[Satinavian]

BTB AD&D, identifying items was a bit of a pain; you had only a couple spells that could do it somewhat reliably (the 1e Identify spell was a nightmare, and the 2e spell was only slightly better), and even potions required either a sip test or an Identify to truly name. You also had a fair number of cursed items, lending difficulty to finding and using magic items. Would this cloak let me fly, or devour me? Would it let me fly for a while THEN devour me? You were never sure, without taking some big risks, spending some big money, and taking some big time (qv Identify causing 8 points of Constitution damage each time you cast it, requiring days of rest). The other option was to pay to have it identify, which the P&P game made expensive and a bit rare (find a sage, give them money, come back in a month), but computer games made relatively easy (spend some cash at pretty much any store, "Improved Identify" of the SSI games, and even plain identify in the IE games). In 3rd edition and on, these were largely made the default.

Now i only started D&D specifically (and not as my first RPG) with AD&D2, but we never used unidentified magic items. Those were always just carried back and identified in downtime.

We were even wandering what the point of all those cursed items in the book actually was. Surely no one would ever expose themself willingly to unknown magic, would they ?


And it took a very long time, only long after we stopped playing AD&D2 until i stumbled over the "sipping potion" idea. We always automatically assumed that that you either get the full effect of a potion or none at all if you drak part of it.

[Pex]

I hated those days of hard identification. It contributed to the DM adversarial relationship 2E promoted. Sure, give players magic items, but never let them know what they do and don't forget to curse them sometimes! I'm quite happy such a thing is in the garbage bin of history. This has nothing to do with the exploration pillar. Exploration is search your location, finding stuff, learning stuff. Turning magic item identification into Russian Roulette is making the DM the players' enemy.

[Drakevarg]

Unless the evil wizard is, indeed, entirely insane, why would his lair be filled with cursed items? Even if his particular brand of villainy was to trick people into using cursed items one would think that in his own lair they would be set aside.

Creation mishaps? Studying the nature of the curse? Maybe specifically to screw with potential thieves.

Similarly, why would you bury someone with a cursed item? Unless it was done as an insult or the cursed item killed them and nobody else wanted to risk touching it? And in those cases wouldn't it be likely to be a matter of public record and/or local legend

Perhaps the curse formed post-mortem. Plenty of items in folklore become cursed specifically because they were taken from a sacred place. Or to prevent someone from doing so. Mummy curses were part of popular culture long before D&D.

Also, why wouldn't scrolls and potions be labeled in some way? Or rather, why would they be unlabeled by default? I could buy that when found in ancient places that any non-magical marker affixed to them may be long gone - a labeled ribbon around a bottleneck long since rotted away or a wax seal cracked to the point of illegibility or whatever - but the default in the old editions seems to have been that they just weren't labeled as a matter of practice, which simply doesn't make sense, especially if identification is difficult

Maybe their color/shape was already distinctive enough for the purposes of whoever had it around. Or, like you suggested, they had a label and it just wore off centuries ago. Could be any number of reasons, it's the DM's job to answer those questions, not the book's.

[NichG]

That only works if you cannot turn said items into cash, which is tricky to justify since there's probably someone who will spend money on mystical curiosities at a rate that would be more valuable to the player than actually trying to figure out how to use such a thing.

Then let them get turned into cash. The point isn't to railroad people into using the items.

But the 'more valuable to the player' bit, that part is not going to be true for an optimally cunning player who gets it. But if you've been running something that's primarily a numbers game, your players may not be able to easily see even really unsubtle opportunities outside the numbers. It's helpful if someone utterly breaks the game using one of those items and you demonstrate that they don't only get away with it, but that it's fully encouraged.

Someone who can only see numbers might find that the Time Trap is worth a +2 to hit on their attacks. Someone thinking in terms of the scenario can use it to capture the moment of a BBEG's victory and basically negate an entire plot arc from the other side of the planet.

I had a campaign where a pen with a nib that could write on any surface ended up being insanely powerful because someone got access to a demiplane whose properties were determined by words carved on a conceptual firmament.

[Satinavian]

I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...

I actually don't think those topics are related.

Finding interesting uses for strange magic items is fun, but does require knowledge about what the item actually does.

Two of your examples (the bottle, the seed) seems to be one sue only and would be needlessly wasted when the players find out their function by experimentation. The stone might be a useful "sense sentient beings" item, depending what counts as "knowledge the wielder lacks", but might be always on, when the group is together. If anything, those are examples for why you should use identification magic instead of experimentation.




Also, while items you have to find creative uses for are fun to play with, they more often than not turn out to be pretty overpowered if such a use is discovered. Imho it is best to let them do only things that are similar to what the magic system allows otherwise. That makes it plausible how they were created and keeps the balance.

[Yora]

This seems to be related to the single objective problem: everything is being assembled for the sole purpose of defeating the BBEG at the end of the campaign and therefore more or less all other considerations are tossed aside. I think that root problem (which many players and tables don't see as a problem) needs to be addressed first.

Are we even exploring when we are following a story?

When the campaign is laid out in a way where the PCs need to collect certain items and reach a certain level to progress past various specific points, are your explorations really accomplish anything or make any kind of difference for what lies ahead? Is there anything that could be missed that you would actually have to work for to find?

The problem with "exploration pillar" is that it's not really defined. Common perception seems to be "walking around in dungeon corridors". Of course that's a really bland experience.

[Bohandas]

Perhaps the curse formed post-mortem. Plenty of items in folklore become cursed specifically because they were taken from a sacred place. Or to prevent someone from doing so. Mummy curses were part of popular culture long before D&D.

That's fair enough, but really the magic item is really either the tomb or the body in that case. The items the party are removing are not cursed ab initio and thus should not register as magic until removed

[GloatingSwine]

I'd definitely say that your typical D&D world feels safer and more under control with knowable magic items. As you said, they're just loot now. More candy for baby. I think the problem with this is less directly related to the difficulty in identification (though it could certainly be related), and more the attitude that magic items are a known, quantified, and expected element now.

A much bigger guilty party in that respect is the entire concept of a "magic mart." If magic items are just something you can buy in a store for X coins and reasonably expect to get your hands on, it has to be a known quantity, and the party (and the community at large) just takes it as a given that you can have these things. They're barely even magic anymore, they're just products.

That's because most D&D worlds are written with the assumption that magic in general is common. If wizards are sufficiently common that anyone who needs to find one can do so, then there's no reason magic items shouldn't also be common.

[Bohandas]

That only works if you cannot turn said items into cash, which is tricky to justify since there's probably someone who will spend money on mystical curiosities at a rate that would be more valuable to the player than actually trying to figure out how to use such a thing.

Well in that case you either get rid of the magic item mart type stores or else you double down on them and turn then imto proper stores that only sell things

[Slipjig]

Unless the evil wizard is, indeed, entirely insane, why would his lair be filled with cursed items? Even if his particular brand of villainy was to trick people into using cursed items one would think that in his own lair they would be set aside.

Similarly, why would you bury someone with a cursed item? Unless it was done as an insult or the cursed item killed them and nobody else wanted to risk touching it? And in those cases wouldn't it be likely to be a matter of public record and/or local legend.

Maybe the items weren't supposed to be cursed, but are failed experiments. This is especially appropriate for items that provide both a benefit and a drawback.

Maybe the item started as a standard item, but the magic has "gone sour" over time, and the curse is a malfunction. If the item is powered by a bound spirit, maybe decades in a pitch black tomb have driven it mad.

Maybe the bottles are labeled, but in the mage's shorthand, possibly an abbreviation in a different language. Does "CLW" stand for "Cure Light Wounds" or "Curses, Lamentations, and Wailing"? Whoever created it would have known, but there's no particular reason she would have put in the extra effort to leave instructions for anybody else.

And, finally, maybe the items were cursed BECAUSE they are grave goods, to discourage tomb robbers. The Mummy's Curse predates DnD. Maybe the curse can be avoided or removed. Perhaps the curse only kicks in if the items are removed from the tomb, allowing the PCs to use an item for the duration of the adventure, but then leaving them with a choice of either abandoning the item or braving the curse.

[LibraryOgre]

I haven't seen it done in an RPG but I like the anime way of treating discovery with magic items, well at least major items for the main characters.
1) The discovery is a long process, sometime A to Z.
2) Partially identified items are still useful, you are just locked out of their higher abilities.
3) The mini quests to unlock the upgrades are fun, especially when they tie in to the main quest.
4) Characters create genuine attachments and relations to their items.
The anime method is much more story oriented and rewards players for getting involved in the story.

On this, I think Earthdawn had a great way of doing things.

There were some relatively minor magic items that would just do things. But anything worth Naming could get weird, and you invested Legend Points (the equivalent of XP) into items to unlock more powers.

As to your point 4, that's something that I love, too. "This is my grandfather's sword" carries so much more meaning when you keep your grandfather's sword as you level, because it remains valuable in a mechanical sense.

[NichG]

I actually don't think those topics are related.

Finding interesting uses for strange magic items is fun, but does require knowledge about what the item actually does.

Two of your examples (the bottle, the seed) seems to be one sue only and would be needlessly wasted when the players find out their function by experimentation. The stone might be a useful "sense sentient beings" item, depending what counts as "knowledge the wielder lacks", but might be always on, when the group is together. If anything, those are examples for why you should use identification magic instead of experimentation.




Also, while items you have to find creative uses for are fun to play with, they more often than not turn out to be pretty overpowered if such a use is discovered. Imho it is best to let them do only things that are similar to what the magic system allows otherwise. That makes it plausible how they were created and keeps the balance.

The relationship between the topics is to reconceptualize what identification is 'about' such that rather than a binary 'we don't know what this is'/'we no longer have to think about this', you have spaces where getting information about the function of an item doesn't end the messing around stage.

And I'd say the opposite about what magic items should do - they're interesting only if they cover fundamentally different bases than you can cover with controlled character build choices. Magic items are the opportunity for things found during play and sought during play to be more relevant than preconceptions that can be brought in before the game even starts. That's fundamental to what exploration and discovery are about.

How did those items get made then? Well, many explanations are available. Spellcasting itself could be far broader than adventuring spell lists suggest. Why not have spells exist to customize the fit of clothing, make materials softer, etc - billions of 'uses of magic' that are specialized and nonmechanically relevant, so there's no need to pre-list them. Secondly, and more in line with discovery as fundamental gameplay, item creation could be more like chemistry where the reagents and raw materials and environmental conditions used are fundamental to the outcome, rather than it all boiling down to feat+gold+spell.

So the dwarves of Chimney Rock grow a certain fungus in still underground pools that through a combination of small amounts of dissolved mithril in the water and a nearby leyline, gains the ability to be refined down into a resin that causes magics used in the item creation process to become fused with the concept of recycling via consumption. A Winter Gap to the plane of ice nearby can be used to give the item it's potency. The item creator chooses to use magic missile as the base. The result is a rod that draws warmth from the wielder and sends it unerringly to a target in sight, allowing tiny things to be heated to incandescent levels in exchange for a mild chill, or to allow the user to keep themselves cool in hot weather, or to combine with a golem to make a perpetual motion engine, or ...

[Drakevarg]

That's because most D&D worlds are written with the assumption that magic in general is common. If wizards are sufficiently common that anyone who needs to find one can do so, then there's no reason magic items shouldn't also be common.

That's a shift to match the magic-mart, not the other way around. This is particularly apparent if you look at early-edition D&D art compared to later editions. In the older art, everyone is wearing fairly basic-looking arms and armor, where in later editions everyone looks like a Final Fantasy concept artist vomited on them.

Magic items went from mysterious artifacts to mere loot, and the worlds written around them changed to match. A dozen magic items dangling off your outfit became a matter of course, the art changed to match, and the perception of how the world should look followed suit.

This wasn't some grand, unassailable artistic vision of how D&D should look. It was a justification for what kind of world would let you buy magic items at Wal-Mart.

[Yora]

D&D isn't D&D.

There's no really clear cut to be made at any point, but 5th edition really has nothing to do with the original edition in terms of design. The table of contents for the Monster Manual perhaps, but from there they divert into completely different directions.

[Bohandas]

The dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomolies isn't really a fantastical world though, it's the dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomalies. What you're asking for is basically to take the kind of world that's more Call Of Cthulhu's schtick and present it as high fantasy.

[Drakevarg]

The dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomolies isn't really a fantastical world though, it's the dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomalies. What you're asking for is basically to take the kind of world that's more Call Of Cthulhu's schtick and present it as high fantasy.

Or just, y'know, Lord of the Rings. Y'know, the yardstick by which all modern fantasy is measured.

[GloatingSwine]

That's a shift to match the magic-mart, not the other way around. This is particularly apparent if you look at early-edition D&D art compared to later editions. In the older art, everyone is wearing fairly basic-looking arms and armor, where in later editions everyone looks like a Final Fantasy concept artist vomited on them.

Magic items went from mysterious artifacts to mere loot, and the worlds written around them changed to match. A dozen magic items dangling off your outfit became a matter of course, the art changed to match, and the perception of how the world should look followed suit.

This wasn't some grand, unassailable artistic vision of how D&D should look. It was a justification for what kind of world would let you buy magic items at Wal-Mart.

And yet the term "Monty Haul" also comes from the earliest days of D&D.

It's not really all that much of a shift, there were no halcyon days of magical scarcity, parties getting entire truckloads of magical gubbins has always been there.

[Drakevarg]

And yet the term "Monty Haul" also comes from the earliest days of D&D.

It's not really all that much of a shift, there were no halcyon days of magical scarcity, parties getting entire truckloads of magical gubbins has always been there.

I suppose it changes from game to game. My first three campaigns - and the only one I ever played in 2e - were very fantastical, with everyone being part-Fae and plane-hopping just for fun, but the concept of a "magic mart" was never brought up. All of our magic items were found, gifted, or custom-made. Didn't stop us from accumulating a lot of stuff over the campaign but we never literally got to go pick them off a shelf.

Magical scarcity might be MY preference, but there's a difference between experienced explorers accumulating a plethora of strange keepsakes over a long career (a well-established fantasy trope in its own right), and them being normalized to the point that you can buy them at a store. It's kind of the same principle as an argument I often see presented for low-magic campaigns: the rarity or commonality of wizards in the lore doesn't really affect whether one of those wizards winds up a member of the party. Same applies to magic items. Just because you have a ton of magical items doesn't mean everyone else does. And IMO, it's the public availability that messes with the perception of the mystery to magic items, not the actual number you have.

[Bohandas]

Also, "buying magic items from walmart" is an exaggeration. D&D characters are generally pretty well-to-do by mid levels, so it's not that every schlub has a bunch of magic items, it's that the guy whose living room is filled with gold has a bunch of magic items.

Even if something is rare and expensive it's not preposterous that a sufficiently rich person might have several. I read a news story one time about a guy who had about 93 rolls royces