[Skarg]

There are as many different perspectives as there are gamers.

My own perspective started out as enjoying the idea of magic items, because they seemed shiny and cool and exciting and I'd seen them in fantasy books and films. At first, they seemed to contribute to characters and be fun to find and add new types of situations, and they enabled some characters to do far more than they could hope to without them.

That lasted maybe about three years of heavily playing TFT.

But what happened was that PCs and their allies got magic items one way or anothre, then met foes with magic items and looted them. And they sold them and commissioned more and better ones. In order to challenge these characters, there almost needed to be foes who also had magic items. Who would tend to get killed and looted, adding thousands and thousands more to the net worth and therefore the magic arsenals of the PCs.

In other words, magic item proliferation, wealth and power rose very quickly even after the GM tried to limit how much there was to loot.

And the result of PCs being so well equipped that they were overwhelming to foes without magic items just got greater and greater. Combat with foes who were not a group with strong magic tended to be extremely low risk, but combat with foes who had magic items either needed to kill PCs and/or destroy their items, or else they added more magic items to the PCs' ever-growing arsenals.

Players started voluntarily only bringing relatively light arsenals of magic with them, both to try to keep things more interesting, and to avoid attention from the world's toughest (most magic-equipped) foes.

And it did have a flavor for us at that point very much like David was saying: The characters' abilities were much more about their magic toys than about the characters themselves. And we did not enjoy that much.

Since then, I've tended to greatly prefer campaigns with low or no magic items, and/or rules which limit or add drawbacks to their use, such as fatigue costs or breakdown rules.