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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5711412" data-attributes="member: 54877">Wishlists, in the somewhat hamhanded yet ambiguous way they are presented, are not my favorite thing. I'm not a purist about it, but it does smack a little bit over the line into player entitlement for me. It is much like the DMG excessive emphasis on finding a way to say yes to every request: Not bad advice for a person who tends too far to the other extreme, but pretty lousy advice for a fresh-faced new DM with no preconceived notions. It reminds me too much of all the high school English teachers that insisted no sentence be ended with a preposition, because they couldn't be bothered to explain the exceptions and/or had this misplaced desire to overemphasize a single school of thought on grammar. Again, not the worst thing in the world, but too dogmatic for insufficient reasons to gather much of my support. On the other hand, I've been asking the players what they wanted almost from the first time I started running games. I merely don't expect, and never get, a complete list. Rather, they have always known that this was a chance to list a handful of things that they really want to get--in addition to whatever else they scrounge and make good use of. One of my original players in high school loved playing halflings (and then halfling thieves in AD&D). Everyone at the table knew that he really wanted a ring of invisibility and a bag of holding. First one of each the party found, he got. To get that, he would happily take whatever else came his way. And if got the last magic weapon, a measly +1 dagger, so be it. There was no schedule. It might happen soon, or later--or not at all, if the character died first. In other words, no entitlement mentality whatsoever--merely a player communicating to the DM what he would like to see at some point. I doubt many DMs would have had any issue with his behavior, including most of the ones in this topic that don't like wishlists. Yet, "wishlist" is a perfect name for recording this kind of thing. The thing I dislike about the 4E wishlist the most is that it has appropriated a good name for a substandard procedure. Reasonable people can, of course, ignore the tenor of the 4E wishlist explanation, and go with the good in it.</blockquote>

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