Where is it written that the DM has to give the PCs everything the players ask for?
And crafting feats aren't exactly a wish factory either- PCs still have to acquire the materials, wealth and time to make whatever it is.
Its a tradeoff: when you're crafting, you're not adventuring. When you're adventuring, you're not crafting.
When you play to high level, you get plenty of downtime. Our average campaigns go to 14 to 15th level. It's rare we don't reach 10th or 12th in a campaign that doesn't burn out within a few weeks. It doesn't take long to craft a key magic item that supplements the standard Christmas Tree items found in adventures. Most people only craft or purchase one or two items because all the standard
Rings of Protection and
Cloaks of Resistance are found or upgraded during downtime. Then there is the cherry-picking of key items like these pauldrons I can't remember the name of that allowed
enlargement at will and were very cheap. There is a lot to keep track of. Simple saying ban it all doesn't work. Each new book that gets released possibly had an item, feat, archetype, or something that created a balance problem. Players with access to all of them can pretty easily stay ahead of DM banning unless the DM is reading every book and every idea they are reading. Most are not. So pretending that banning is easy is pretty ridiculous in real play unless your players allow you to steamroll them. I pretty much guarantee you would not be able to do that with the group I play with. Now onto some info about that group.
Have you never been part of a long time group that decides things by consensus? Banning magic items, spells, and the like is not always an option. Sometimes players argue against those types of changes. Just recently we ended up in a big discussion over Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter and the impact of both feats on the game. One player refused to allow them to be changed. This isn't a simple, "Find another player." We've been playing with this guy for twenty plus years and we are friends outside of the game as well. It is not an option to "find another player" that will allow you to wield the DM heavy stick.
Maybe some of you move between groups and have the option to "find other players" or maybe your friends around the table say "do what you want." I don't know. That isn't an option at my table. We have four to six players that have been gaming together since we were in our teens and early twenties. Any major changes such as banning spells or items usually ends up in a heated debate. When you ban something, you might be ruining an aspect of the game that a player enjoys to create a situation that you prefer. It becomes a question of what does the group prefer?
Since we tend to switch off DMing, we like to keep our campaigns tied together in the same world meaning same rules for each campaign. That means we don't make changes unless the group agrees to the changes. It made the magic item crafting and purchasing rules of previous campaigns particularly bad for my group. I worried every time a new book came out that
Pathfinder would release a new magic item, feat, or archetype that would create a massive balanced headache my players would surprise me with. I knew if I tried to ban it, the group would have to agree to it or it wouldn't happen.
Not being able to rely on the game designers to produce a balanced game was a problem. I should be able to rely on them to produce a balanced game without having to wield the ban stick all the time. It's what I pay for. I have found over my three decades of playing is that magic items imbalance and create more problems for encounter design than any other aspect of the game. I'm glad they toned it down. Throwing in a combination of magic items with varying bonuses that provide immense statistical boosts was one of the worst things they ever introduced in 3E. Players would take major advantage of it quite often stacking magic items with enhancement, luck, dodge, size, and other possible bonuses together from multiple magic items. Horribly designed and hard to track everything that needed to be banned or controlled. I'm glad it's gone. I hope it never comes back as other than a third party supplement for those handful of people that seem to enjoy that play-style or don't mind that type of gear inflation.
Myself, I don't like to end up in arguments with long time buddies over game stuff. I know this is a unique situation to my group given many groups don't have the same kind of relationships or longevity. This new magic item system in 5E is making my life a lot of easier as a DM. The previous editions that allowed easy crafting and purchasing created a lot of problems around our table. They weren't solved by creating a massive list of banned items using the excuse of difficult to design encounters when combined with all the other capabilities of a given character.
The Magic Item Christmas tree is dead, may it stay so for every edition of D&D from here on out.
