[semi-Rant] As a DM, does item creation ever get you down?

[mmu1]

I would submit that any DM who insists on running a game in opposition to the desires of his players *is* a bad DM.

There's usually one more person at the gaming table that's supposed to be having fun than the players realize.

Any players who are blind to the fact that the guy doing 90% of the work needs to have fun too *are* bad players.

Ideally, some sort of compromise occurrs, but I've met too many players who feel that the more rules they have to play with, the better their chances of "beating" the DM, and if the DM dares to house-rule, then he's not "playing fair." Hence the aforementioned "screwing".

For that matter, any player that bases his enjoyment of the game not on the DMs work as a whole but the presence or absence of some particular rule or feature is not a very good player.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Yeah, what he said.

First and foremost, a DM is suppost to provide a balanced game. It's far too often assumed that anything that isn't done by the standards of Core Balance isn't going to be balanced at all. Tsk tsk on them folks...

 

[Chrysoula]

In my GM's version of Faerun, there are a lot of adventuring parties. There are whole towns that cater exclusively to adventuring parties heading into dangerous locales. The basic theory behind magic item availability is

1.) Magic items are durable
2.) People have been making them for thousands of years.
3.) People are still making them.

He doesn't let us buy anything we want, but we can pretty easily stock up on basic potions and wands and if we ever wanted them, low plus-weapons (after all, we sell a lot of 'em; other adventurers are as well). I think one player has had a wondrous item crafted by an NPC so far. My bard is gonna be taking Craft Arms and Armor (she's an archer) eventually and he lets somebody else cast spells for the items if the crafter doesn't.

Of course, he also drains all our money away by having us be the guardians of a frontier town with a keep, and does the 'half-price for selling, higher-than-book-cost for buying'.

I DO believe that all magic weapons-- even the +1 ones-- should have names. SOMEBODY crafted them and spent months slaving over them, especially if they made the masterwork version themselves. I've tried to convince my GM of this (even wrote a tool ) and he sort of grudgingly agrees. Now that the tool is on the web, he may even use it.