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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 7649070" data-attributes="member: 2011">Although I understand your points, in experience I've found that some of this can be a bit problematic.The DM goes out of his way to craft these cool (and sometimes mundane) items and rewards, and the players often write them down on their character sheets and mostly forget about them.D&D is often a social event where some or even many of the players at any given table are not necessarily as deeply ingrained in a DM's world as the DM is. The important elements of a campaign to many players are the villains, the details of the current mission, etc. The story becomes important, but a bunch of strange or unusual details just bogs the game down into turning over every rock to try to understand those details.Minutia like weak magic items, junk, alchemical substances often fall by the wayside in the minds of the players. Even in a once per week game, too much time has often gone by for players to remember that a month ago, the DM handed out a coin that glows like a candle. Maybe they remember, maybe they don't, even if it is written down on someone's character sheet. The same type of problem can occur if the DM introduces too many NPCs.For many players, the important aspect of magical items are their mechanical abilities. Histories are all nice and well, but unless the DM hands out a write up on the history of a given item, then all but the basics of it quickly gets forgotten. If the DM does hand out a write up, then it is just one more note card or sheet of paper in the player's stack of stuff for his PC that he has to keep track of.Not that a little of what you suggest cannot be good for a campaign, I have just found in my experience that the more of this type of thing that gets introduced, the more the game bogs down with flavorful, but unimportant details. Magic item balance is really difficult, but having the players not really care when they find magic items is sometime better than them having to separate the wheat from the chaff in order to determine what is actually important to them. At least in the first case, their expectations might be met.As two examples of where this can be a little problematic:1) A DM can put a tapestry into a dungeon and describe the awesome fight scene on it. After listening to this, many players might just have their PCs roll up the tapestry and take it back to town, hoping to get cold, hard, cash for it. If the DM intervenes about the history of this tapestry, suddenly, the PCs change their plan (because the players now suspect that the tapestry is somehow important to the story). The very introduction of a history on the tapestry railroads the players a bit on their PC's actions. Not necessarily intentionally on the part of the DM, but it can happen nonetheless.2) Another aspect of having a plethora of "non-standard" rewards or useful equipment is that the DM sometimes revolves some aspect of the game around what he handed out or introduced, thinking that he added in a cool option, but the players might not see it. For example:DM after the fight: "Didn't any of you remember that there was a barrel of salt 3 rooms back? You could have much more easily taken out the Giant Slug."Player 1: "Yeah, silly us."All in all, although the ideas you listed can be fun, a DM should use them a bit sparingly. He can introduce a few of them instead of normal magic items and see how it goes. But, if the game starts bogging down on the PCs investigating mundane details, or focusing on thinking that a given item is overly special because of a cool picture that the DM showed on that item, then the DM should consider limiting how much he interweaves the mundane rewards with the magical ones.If it works out, then great. If not, the DM can back off.Note: Some DMs want most of the story to be heavily driven by the players. If the players start focusing on the "Washbasin of Cleanliness", the DM (or even a player) responds by adding in a story act on the fly about how it can be used to clean out undead. Other DMs want the world to be fairly consistent and not add on the fly strange elements driven by the players. In a campaign where the players just wing it and start introducing story arcs and game elements, then more of your ideas above can be introduced because the players might actually be looking for these types of hooks to hang their hats on. In a campaign that the DM lays out a lot of the story details ahead of time, maybe not as much in order to avoid going down dead ends.PS. Never just allow players to "buy anything magical" and some of the indifference to magic items due to other monetary solutions goes away because the DM decides exactly what magical items the players might acquire.</blockquote>

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