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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7752712" data-attributes="member: 29398">You find your keys, sure; but in process of looking you also discover an old photograph that you'd long thought destroyed had in fact slipped down behind the couch (thus, you find an unexpected thing of value to you).  Also while down there you find something else*, 'meh' to you but of possibly great value to someone else (equivalent to finding a magic item in game that you'll probably end up selling).* - I'm having a tough time thinking of an example of such an item for this silly metaphor - Bob's leather jacket that he thought someone stole from your party last summer, maybe? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The paladin's warhorse is an example that - pun intended - keeps getting trotted out in discussions like this, but it's a bad one; and here's why:With the pally's horse, the game rules insist that it must be found.  The whole quest thing is just a long-form version of having the thing magically appear next to the pally when she wakes up one morning - you quest, you find the horse...even if you don't want a flippin' horse to begin with!A wishlist skips the quest part.  You just keep playing, no matter what you're doing in the game world, and the items will eventually fall into your (PC's) lap.  When they do, you'll know what they are and what they do...no mystery there, either.A conventional item quest skips the auto-success part.  It's just another adventure, with the usual attendant risks of failure or death or whatever. (and, IME, it's rare that the item in question is intended for the PCs to keep anyway - they're usually trying to find it for someone else).  Further, unlike a pally's horse where it's well-known what it is and does even before the quest beings, with a typical item quest the PCs don't know much about the item until they find it and can play with it a bit, so at least there's that bit of mystery.Also, in a wishlist situation the DM can still put items out there that aren't on anyone's list which might prove of greater interest than the wished-for items anyway.Lanefan</blockquote>

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