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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nightwyrm" data-source="post: 4587098" data-attributes="member: 75542">As I've mentioned on that other thread, one of the big reason why the number of non-combat magic items have decreased in recent editions is the increase in the player's ability to trade magic items.  Once players can sell items and then easily either buy or make their own items, wacky oddball items that have very narrow non-combat usage becomes "stuff we're selling at the nearest market so I can buy my combat gear." Most weird or non-combat oriented items are only going to be used very rarely unless your specific campaign requires that particular item (ie. cold resistance items in an arctic game or rings of sustenence in survival games).  Most of the time, players know they're going to be better off trading that stuff for general combat gear since they know they'll always be fighting stuff.  With the ease of making scrolls and wands in 3e, most of those specific situations where those odd items would come in handy could be better and cheaper handled by the party wizard scribing scrolls or buying/making a wand. This leads to books that contains only combat gear.  No one wants to write or buy a book with pages full of oddball non-combat items that are just gonna be sold at the earliest opportunity.</blockquote>