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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4698004" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's largely considered an obselete notion these days.  I've found that younger gamers expect to be able to plan out there characters entire careers from 1st to 20th level, anticipating having these particular items at X level, and then acquiring this item at X+1 level just as if it was a feat or skill intrinsic to their character.  If you as the DM put some obstacle in the way of this, you will be accused of getting in the way of the player's fun, of not being fair, and even of breaking the games rules.  To be fair, this has been more the impression I've gotten from players at Enworld, but I've encountered bits of this when DMing younger players in RL as well.The current gaming climate is largely that a player is owed success, and that for a given level of character he is entitled to a certain amount of treasure and entitled a certain quantity and quality of magic items (usually of his choosing).  The idea that you'd have to work to obtain treasure and that treasure is present as a fair reward to overcoming some challenge is considered to be primitive and unfun or whatever.  "I killed the monster, where is my money?" is the culture that seems to prevail. It's not just that the player expects a Ring of Gaxx to be found in the dungeon if he wants one, it's that he expects that if he didn't find a Ring of Gaxx but wanted one, that DM will provide a friendly travelling merchant in the local village who will provide a Ring of Gaxx for fair market price in coins on demand, and that if the DM doesn't do this he is again being unfair and breaking the rules since the rules clearly state that such merchants do exist and do provide Rings of Gaxx.  In other words, the modern player believes that the rules force a DM to provide and abide by certain tropes in his campaign as part of the social contract, and that specifically the right to obtain whatever equipment the player desires is very high among these tropes.What you describe is very similar to the style of play I grew up with (from the DM's that taught me) and very similar to the style of play I tried to provide.  It is however considered to be something confined to 'cranky old grognards', and generally whenever I've brought up this style of play in the past, there have been a large number of people quick to point out how little fun you can possibly have playing in the way I've always played, to call me a cheat, and accuse me of various social failings.  It is a problem particularly acute at enworld, but based on my experience, EnWorld is probably fairly representative in this because I DMed a group of players in 3rd edition who had like 10 years of experience and they'd never seen or heard of anything like me and I came to them as something of a shock (and hopefully, eventually, a revelation).  Granted, they enjoyed it, because I more or less ended up taking the game over from the original DM, but ideas like what you've just described where outside of their experience whereas I thought based on my experience that they were the default way to play.I do think we are over systemed if the game imposes limitations on the sort of campaign you can have.  I never got that impression from earlier editions of D&D.  I wonder sometimes whether in an attempt to make things easy for novice DMs we've actually encouraged less than skillful design by DMs.  The players and DMs were just following the guidelines that they've been given, but they treated those guidelines as hard and fast rules when I didn't think they were rules at all.</blockquote>

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