I worry that this thread is turning into a battle of straw men.
In this corner, a whiny player who, if magical items were naturally buoyant, would bob to the top of a waterfall, but who throws his dice if his wand runs out of charges and would just DIE if anyone took his sword!
In THIS corner, a sadistic DM who gives a player a ring of fireballs and then throws nothing but fire elementals and red dragons against them until finally the DM gets bored and has a first-level commoner Sunder the ring after spending his life savings to get True Strike and Magic Weapon cast upon him and his shovel.
I think most of us are somewhere in the middle. I don't go out of my way to attack players' items. If I want to be a jerk, generally I go after the PC's families. Besides, few of my monsters have the firepower necessary to take down the PCs' favorite weapons.
But if a monster HAS Sunder, it is foolish not to use it.
Someone said that it was not fair for someone to get a dragonslaying blade and have it sundered. That they didn't get to use it. Well, um, pardon me for being dense, but when does stuff get sundered? In combat. So you DID get to use it. You just didn't get to WIN with it. You got to hit the dragon for a bunch of damage that first time, and the dragon went, "Dude, that's a nasty sword," and Sundered it. You used the weapon, did some damage, and then the sword was destroyed -- and if it was an intelligent blade, dying in combat with a dragon is a good way to go.
I've had, as I recall, two monsters that destroyed items in my campaign. An Ogre with Sunder, and a Nightshade. They each destroyed one weapon apiece. The players were bummed, but they didn't deny that the monster was well within its tactical rights to do so -- the weapons that got sundered had just hit the monster for loads of damage, and were the biggest guns on the table at the moment. Sundering them was smart. In the Ogre's case, he had been hit for more than half his hit points in one strike. The Nightshade had been damaged by nothing but that one weapon up to that point. The players went, "Dang, they're fighting with intelligence," and dealt with it.
I said it earlier, and no one really answered it: Saying that your characters have a special divine right to hold onto their weapons because they are the protagonists of the story is really really suspicious when many people have just finished saying in other threads that they hate it when the DM tries to shoehorn them through a plot as if it were a written story.
Arthur gets to hold onto Excalibur (except for when it breaks) because it's a STORY, not a game. If you all want to be Arthur in a game with me, then be my guest. You will wield a the most powerful sword in the world and it won't get taken from you ever, and you will win every single fight. Also, your buddy will have an affair with your wife, and you will sleep with your half-sister while under the effects of an enchantment that you will NOT get a saving throw to avoid, and the bastard offspring of that union will leave you mortally wounded several years down the line. You will have no chance to avoid any of that. Because it's PLOT. It's STORY. They didn't roll dice, and Arthur didn't decide to go off into the Ogre Cave instead of dealing with the Hydra like the story wanted him to. So don't tell me that you want the freedom to do anything you want in the game and not get led around by some horrible DM-inflicted plot, but at the same time you want the plot-based protection on all your items and equipment.
All that said, it varies from game to game. In a low-magic world, a +1 sword should be destroyed only if you really want to break the spirit of the players. On the other hand, in a low-magic world, how did that +1 sword get destroyed in the first place? If you dropped it into lava, sure. But you can't sunder a +1 sword unless you have a +1 sword yourself. And in that low magic world, a fight between two guys with +1 swords is an epic battle.
-Tacky
