Rackhir said:
Sigh, did you actually read all of my arguments? My point was not that Excaliber (for example) should never be sundered. Nor did I even state at any point that it was unreasonable for the drow to have sundered that characters bow. What I was responding to were all the people posting saying "Yeah! Screw the players. Sunder everything, if they complain they're crybabies". I dislike that kind of abusive attitude from DM, having suffered at the hands of more than one DM who took delight in screwing over characters I'd worked hard on.
I thought you were enjoying a little hyperbole, after all it's what the internet was invented for. I don't hear advocates of armies of 1 HD kobolds running around with improved sunder.
I don't know about your monty haul monk, but my characters usually work hard to aquire their magic items. I don't usually have 15 other items sitting around in a portable hole to replace "Excaliber XXIII" once it get's sundered just like the 12 other swords I'd lost that week.
Progress quest, the latest in fire-and-forget in RPG technology. You can adventure in your sleep, literally. And for the record, Terence Phillip Michael Thomas only has one weapon, a +28 steely vicious bandyclef. And he's done all sorts of things in the pursuit of power (checking list), he's delivered lunch pales and cookies, fetched buckets and hoes, all kinds of stuff. Sir, I find your insinuations to the otherwise insulting and political!
Items are not the be all and end all of D&D, but they are an important part. Are you telling me that you aren't at least partially defined by the "stuff" you own? What kind of computer you have, car you drive, place you live in.
One of the things I have learned is one of the very few things that truly matters are the small kindnesses you do for people. Stuff is stuff. It wears out, slides into obsolesence, loses its luster. The small things that cost you little or nothing, those last and last and last. Stuff has a certain utility, but beyond that, and losing it might be a pain in the butt, it's just stuff. And a person being overly concerned with the loss of virtual stuff (beyond the normal outburst that could be attributed to surprise) well that's really, really wierd. When you think of the fun role-playing stuff from your days of yor, how much of it is "I had this and this"? None probably. Certainly in my case, it's "I did this, and then remember what Tony did? HAHAHAHA." When you're done playing the only thing that's really left is the story of the character(s).
