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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5605472" data-attributes="member: 42582">My own guess is that it's interesting because it interacts with the fictional environment, and forces gameplay decisions.I think it can become tedious to track too many tactical and fictinal considerations all at once, but in my experience as long as the information-handling is kept at a reasonable level, it won't be boring.Only in the way that finding a magic fountain of improving stats is exciting - it's a buff!Wheras the bane bow, or a flametongue, or an item that lets its wielder sacrifice hp to do more damage, or whatever, is more than a buff - it's flavour, it interacts with the fictional environment (a flametongue is stronger against skeletons than orcs, for example) and it actually feeds into player decision-making in an interesting and sometimes quite sophisticated fashion.This depends a lot on what your players are looking for. My players don't particularly care for exploration for its own sake (although one of them is more inclined in that direction than the others). They care about engaging the gameworld via the choices they make for their PCs. And they like items that encourage this.An example of this comes from my recent sessions:The PCs found a shortsword that, about 100 years ago, had been recovered from the Shadowfell by a wizard, andchristened "Truth" by him, with the intention of presenting it as a powerful gift to the wizard's king. As is so often the case for purely backstory NPCs, the wizard never got to give the kind the gift, the king died, the kingdom fell, and the item lingered undiscovered until the PCs looted it. The PC wizard, who is also an invoker of Erathis, Ioun and Vecna, used Arcana skill to investigate the sword. He suffered a severe psychic backlash and feelings of great animosity from the sword. He passed the sword to the party ranger, who in turn passed it to the tiefling paladin. The player of the wizard worked out that the sword must be the Sword of Kas, but wasn't sure about bringing that metagame conclusion into play. But with a +18 or so bonus in History, he didn't have much trouble with the check to have his PC work out what it was, and recollect various salient facts about it. So the PCs now know that it is a Vecna-hating sword that once belonged to a feared vampire lord. And the paladin is busy trying to persuade the sword that its goals would be better served if it were reforged as a khopesh (the PC has Turathi Weapon Training, but has been using the shortsword rather than his khopesh for the past couple of fights).This item has the "wow" factor because it is situated in the game's fiction, and opens up a space for the players to make choices that matter within the fiction.This is a story about a party doing crazy stuff to get good items. I've had players do this sort of thing too. The gameplay can be exciting when the stuff they're trying to steal is something other than a +1 dagger.This is a good point, that reinforces my view that, by the book, items are not that uncommon in classic D&D play, and finding +1 items isn't that spectacular an occurence.</blockquote>

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