Magic items: Player tools vs. plot coupons

 Maybe it's a knock-on effect of coming pretty close to death recently, or maybe it's just normal reminiscence, but I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately for my very earliest days of acquaintance with D&D, back when I was first poring over the Moldvay Basic rulebook and taking in all the oddities and nuances of the game. For some reason, the scrolls of protection from the Magic Items chapter popped into my head. There was a scroll of protection from lycanthropes, and one of protection from undead. I think my players only ever acquired a couple of those in the entirety of our first campaigns, but if I recall correctly, they did get used.

Anyway, this gets me thinking about the differences between magic items as tools for skillful play, as they were no doubt originally intended, and magic items as plot coupons. 

A plot coupon is a thing a character or party must obtain to advance in a particular storyline, to pass some obstacle that would be either impossible or extremely difficult to surmount otherwise. It has a specific narrative purpose, even if it technically can be used in other situations or for other reasons. This, unfortunately, seems to be the most common way to use magic items in D&D, and has been for quite a while. If you find (or are given) a scroll of protection from undead, it's a virtual certainty there's some situation a short way down the (rail)road in which undead are a serious obstacle, and the party must overcome them to advance in the quest. Either it's blatantly obvious at which point they must employ the scroll, in which case the players have almost no agency, or they have to fret about whether the point has arrived and if they're using it prematurely, which I'll grant is some measure of agency, but hardly of an empowering sort. 

In contrast, that scroll of protection from undead can be a tool in the service of player agency if it is placed randomly, or simply because it tickles the DM's fancy, and has no specific purpose in this or any other adventure. Of course, there must be situations in which it would be useful, i.e. the presence or potential presence of undead in the setting, but beyond that, when and where to use it is entirely at the players' discretion. There is no "right" or "wrong" time. They could use it to get past a room full of skeletons to read the inscription on an altar. They might feel confident enough to crack open a sarcophagus they have a bad feeling about, knowing that if something jumps out at them, they have the scroll at the ready. They could use it to get out of a scrape with a nasty random encounter. They could also not use it in any of those situations. Maybe they'll find some other way to deal with those undead, or avoid them altogether, turning their backs on the inscription and sarcophagus to pursue other goals and keep that scroll for a rainy day. Whatever they do, it's their choice, and they get to feel the sense of accomplishment or disappointment for using it wisely or poorly, without ruining a storyline either way.

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