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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 3609793" data-attributes="member: 21169">It's a macguffin. A unique item used for a specific purpose. I don't see any difficulty in having macguffins and +1 swords coexist, they're just different varieties of magic item. Our previous campaign used normal magic items alongside frequent macguffins and I didn't see any problems with having the two together.Macguffins are vital in situation X and only situation X. Normal items, such as an amulet of health, are useful (though not essential) in many situations.Personally I prefer normal items to macguffins. A macguffin means there's only one solution to a problem, which smacks of railroading. I regard them as lazy plotting when used in fiction (even though they occur in classics like The Lord Of The Rings and The Maltese Falcon) so I resolved not to have any in the game I'm running. It feels too easy to create unsolvable problem X then create impossible item Y which magically fixes problem X.I think part of the issue with magic item shops is the meaning of the word 'magic'. One of its meanings for us is special or unique. But the problem is that in D&D universes 'magic' does not mean special, it refers to a universal force, like gravity or electromagnetism. You could argue that calling such a force 'magic' is misleading and it should have its own descriptive term, like 'The Ebb' in SLA Industries.</blockquote>