I hope 5E creates fewer items, but more memorable items and doesn't flood the gaming community with so many magic items that +1 weapons aren't even considered magical anymore. I would hope that special magic swords would be the exception instead of the rule
If special magic swords are the exception instead of the rule then it kinda sucks to play in the campaign in which they never come into play. I don't care whether the rules contain 50, 100 or 1000 worthwhile items (though more items calls for a better index). To some extent, the more the merrier - a bit like monsters, maps, races, etc, me and my players can pick and choose.
I used to make the GM's mistake of holding back all my best, most gonzo material because "if everything's special than nothing is". Then I realised that in good movies, good stories, good novesl the creators don't hold back. They give their best material. And I've changed my GMing correspondingly. The PCs in my game have special items.
The wizard/invoker wields the Sceptre of Erathis (3 parts, at present, of the Rod of 7 Parts). He also carries a mystical tome from which he reads during combat, and with which he once killed a gnoll when he struck it with the book and the book burst briefly into flame (critical opportunity attack with a Tome of Replenishing Flame).
The warpriest of Moradin wields Whelm, a dwarven thrower artefact, alternating between it and his halberd, and has plans to turn Whelm into Overwhelm (ie reforge it as a mordenkrad).
The paladin had, but has since lost, the Sword of Kas (Kas took it back). And he wears Meliorating Armour (granted him by his patron, the Raven Queen) so that, as a Questing Knight, the more he strives, the more resilient he becomes.
The drow sorcerer has sigils magically burned inside his eyelids by the Queen of Chaos, who came to him in a dream. From time to time the sigils blind him (next level, when he gets the 16th level feature for a Demonskin Adept, they will also from time to time blind his enemies); they also give him a strange awareness of the flow of chaos energy. In my session yesterday, this sorcerer stood atop the body of the dead firedrake Calastryx, Staff of Ruin in one hand (taken back, many levels earlier, from the goblin shaman who had stolen it from him), Wyrmtooth Dagger in the other (from the tooth of a black dragon killed by the PCs, carved by an elven crafter belonging to the same secret society as the drow), summoning a storm of fire and chaos and imbuing it into himself (granting the Gift of Flame) and into a carved elven horn the party recovered on an earlier adventure, transmuting it into a Fire Horn.
Those are all memorable items, for me and my players.
Now I don't particularly care how the game system models these sorts of things - although I think there can be good reasons, arising from the underlying system maths, to be wary of bonuses to d20 rolls (damage bonuses, on the other hand, are welcome!). In my game we don't use inherent bonuses, but most treasure gain takes the form of levelling up existing items rather than finding loot (as per the appendix in Adventurer's Vault), and even new items are as often the gifts of patrons (mortal or divine) as loot found in enemies' lairs.
But whatever the mechanics, I want the modelling to support the story, and I want the story to be one worth spending 4 hours a fortnight tuning in to.
It had all of these cool items listed. It went WAY beyond the Book of Marvelous Magic or other sources of magic items (because it was every item every published by TSR and then some).
