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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5461677" data-attributes="member: 1300">I suspect the DevTeam drastically underestimated the effect of magic items as motivation.Right now if I have two groups of players, at the same level, and run them through two adventures, you could not tell, looking at their character sheets afterwards, which party went through which adventure. They've turned adventuring into a Black Box.I think they did that to maximize character portability, but I think they went too far. Back when we had a robust network of players, which is to say the 1970s and 1980s, a player might say "Oh man Castle Amber! I want to go through that, there's a set of +1 FULL Plate Mail in there!" He knew about it, stories, maybe not entirely accurate accounts, because his brother had run it, or the older kids at school had talked about it.Which seems now a pretty good simulation of how actual adventuring would work. You hear legends, half-remembered stories, accounts that grew in the telling.But my point is; the players were motivated to go into dungeons. Go on adventures. Not because they wanted to be Heroes, they wanted the loot. Actual published adventures had some fantastic loot in them, unique stuff you couldn't find in the DMG (though much of it would end up in the UA).Different modules gained different reputations. Even two different groups going through the SAME adventure might come out with radically different XP rewards and items.The DevTeam seems to think this is a flaw. Content, now, no longer matters. Only play time. If two groups both play for 10 hours, the expectation is they'll both get roughly the same XP, level up at the same rate.Which means the only choices that matter now are the ones the players make when levelling up.This seems to me a serious problem. Content SHOULD matter, Content should be king! Adventures should provide lots of choices, branches, opportunities to negotiate, make choices. The players actions should matter, not just the choices they make when they level up.The players should think "I want to go in there because there's some awesome loot." As opposed to "I want to go in there because it's D&D night and that's what we do on D&D night."</blockquote>

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