Celebrim said:
Really, as far as the rules of the game are concerned, they are nothing more than mathimatical modifiers or occasionally grants to break ingame environmental restrictions - though according to the latest thinking apparantly all of the later 'suck' (and I'm beginning to see where this thinking comes from).
And as such, nothing more than really well made tools as far as the game is concerned.
I bet I could get quotes from each edition's DMG that suggests that the intention is otherwise.
And those quotes have been nonsense in every DMG they have been printed in. Gygax talked about how magic was supposed to be rare and wondrous back in the 1e DMG, and every edition has parroted this untenable assertion, but the rules of the game simply contradict this assertion. The rules of the game make magic items into a regular, predictable, and understandable element. The practice revealed in published adventures dating back to 1e days makes magic items as common as horseshoes. Sure, the DMG would say something like "a magic item is a benison beyond price", but that was clearly not supported by the actual rules of the game, or the prectice revealed by published works. Especially since they were given an actual price (listed next to the item in the DMG no less).
And the really funny thing about this assertion is that this has never been an area of frustration for me. In fact, creating wierd and wonderful magical items which sometimes become player's treasured possessions has long been one of the things I consider fun about DMing. No, the area of frustration is merely listening to people rant how this is basically impossible and how I can't have done it and so on and so forth, and the smaller area of frustration is the fear of dealing with a whole generation of players raised (IMO quite unnecessarily) to believe the same thing.
I've played D&D for three decades now. In my experience you sometimes have a PC who treasures a particular magic item as sepcial, but it almost never has anything to do with the actual item, but rather the story behind how and when the item was obtained. The item itself is almost irrelevant in this regard. Just like someone in real life can fall in love with a car, despite the fact that the car is a standard make and model, it is
their car, and special to them. This does not make cars mystical or wondrous, nor does it mean that cars are not a commodity, or that cars should not be treated as such. I think that, in this case, you are misidentifying the cause of the attraction the item has, seeing it as the "mystical wondrousness" of the item itself, rather than the circumstances behind the acquisition. But the fact that sometimes people get attached to cars is not a reason to regard cars as something other than tools that can be bought and sold. We don't go around saying if only we made cars impossible to buy, then people would treasure their cars all the more, and when they had two, they would always want to hand them over to valued retainers rather than selling them to their neighbor for thousands of dollars.
