Pursuant to post #50, another thought has occurred to me. It's pretty funny that the edition that went out of its way to emphasize how totally unnecessary, even unwelcome, magic items would be...is also the edition that has made baked-in magic more prevalent than it's ever been. I think this is another one of those areas where WotC heard the words, but not the message. Though it didn't help that the message was unclear.
People told them they wanted magic to feel magical again, and that too many magic items were to blame. The first is too nebulous and ill-defined to be in any way useful. It is like saying one wants cheeseburgers to taste cheesy again, or for milkshakes to bring back the ice cream flavor. And the second is, quite simply, incorrect, at absolute best targeting a symptom rather than the cause, and IMO mostly just getting lost in the weeds.
Part of the problem is that heady combo of nostalgia and time. Things can't be bright-shiny-new more than once. A D&D that manages to feel familiar cannot be a D&D that manages to retain all the old "magic," that is the feeling of wonder, because part of the "magic" came from ignorance about what the game contained. I don't mean that in a disparaging sense; it is easier, more natural, to feel wonder about things that have not become familiar, categorized, quotidian. An awful lot of the proposals--make magic hard/dangerous, make it require sacrifices, make it rare, etc.--are simply trying to find a substitute for unfamiliarity. But none of those things will actually bring back the "I have no idea what this might be capable of" feeling, no matter how much we might want it to come back.
Another part, however, is that people mistake rarity for specialness. They labor under Syndrome's flawed logic from The Incredibles. He claims that, "when everyone is special, no one will be," but he's simply incorrect. Though the film tries very hard to make it seem like he's being incredibly clever, he isn't. Specialness is a function of appreciation; it is a matter of human evaluations. Rarity is, to some degree, a measurable property of something: natural fancy blue-green diamonds are rare, not because the color is particularly special (though I do quite like it myself), but because the specific processes required to form such a diamond are very difficult, because that color can only be produced by radiation, and natural sustained sources of the appropriate types of radiation are not common in places where diamonds naturally form. But to a blind person, whether the diamond is fancy blue-green or pink or black is completely irrelevant; there is nothing special about color to the blind, even though they would totally grant that the object is rare. Meanwhile, the thermos-cup my mother gave me is very special to me, because I use it essentially every single day, even though it's literally an as-seen-on-TV product; there is nothing rare about it, but I deeply appreciate it, and thus it is special to me.
People want magic to be special, to be appreciated, but they fall into the trap of thinking that making it rare, unpleasant, annoying, or complicated will ensure that it will be special...and it won't. The fact that magic had certain characteristics in 1e or 2e isn't what made it special. It was special because it was unknown, because the unknown could be painted with whatever colors you wanted. It was, in a very meaningful sense, the positive inversion of that classic horror movie/game trope, the fear of the unknown. That is, you can give someone a significantly greater fear purely by denying them information, by forcing them to remain ignorant of exactly what they're facing. The same works in a positive sense: when you don't know what can or can't be done, the world is your oyster, and every new discovery is a eureka moment unto itself.
But in an era of internet access and adult lives and public playtests, it isn't possible to replicate that. Even if those things didn't affect it, the fact that we want D&D to "feel like D&D" already makes replicating that specific source of wonder impossible. You can't have a game you're familiar with that you also have no idea what might be possible in. Inasmuch as you support the one goal you are necessarily abandoning the other.
The thing is...that doesn't mean magic needs to not be magical anymore. It means we need to start looking for the other ways magic can be special. We need to ask ourselves what it is magic can do that still gives us excitement and joy and wonder, even without relying on the ephemeral wonder that arises from ignorance about a system's contents.
