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While reading a thread about player entitlement on choosing magic items, I began to wonder how strongly my believe that players should have the freedom to choose what they want for characters, especially magic items within reason(WBL guidelines), has been influenced by my playing of Magic: the Gathering. I thought it might be nice to explore how M:tG has influenced my feeling for both D&D 3.0/.5 and Pathfinder. I would not mind others posting other sources that influence their feelings on the game as well.
I played one game of D&D(2nd Ed back in 1995), not a campaign, a single game before playing M:tG. The inability to ever get a group together and stick together led me to play so many more games of M:tG before finally regularly playing D&D. I read and loved 2nd Ed products for years but never really had the chance to play. Finally, by the time I got a chance to play regularly, 3.0 was out and I had a very keen feel for being able to customize what I play.
With M:tG, I not only choose just a red or white deck, I even get to choose which specific direct damage spells to play, same goes with what variant of disenchant or the many types of counter spells. I can even choose different stratergies of deck within the same color or combination of colors. I guess these are largely responsible for why I expect the freedom to choose what I want(within reason). Weather that be class, feats, spells, skills, race(level adjustment races are NOT within reason), and especially equipment. The choice of deck archetypes coincides with classes. My distaste for type 2 and great pleasure for type one where cards from any set are allowed, strongly reinforce my desire to play old classes and subsystems instead of being restricted to a type 2 of only Paizo written material. In M:tG, I even have a sideboard I can use to customize against an opponent? I could deviate from a respected character build to handle campaign specific problems like low treasure, seaborn campaigns, or knowing the group does not have a cleric, so maybe I take the feat Godless Healing and buy a wand of CLW for the ranger to activate on me.
I eventually bought several of the very expensive cards since I wanted them for tournaments. Before that, I still played what I wanted via proxy cards of photocopies or computer printouts. The PRD and other _LEGAL_ Internet resources can arguably make playing what you want in RPGs even easier than what I did in casual M:tG games with proxies. Thus, I do not feel that real world cost has much to do with this. Sure, not everyone has a tablet with an app or a portable Internet connection where ever they go, for myself at least, I am covered as long as my stuff does not break, or get lost or stolen. Even if the bad stuff does happen, I bought several of the Paizo hardbacks before transitioning to PDFs and I still have my 3.5 library.
How have all of you been influenced in how you play by TCGs or other sources.
I am curious about MMOs in particular. Can you buy what you want or do you have to go on specific quests? Do you look up what each quest has and not bother if it's items are not right for that particular character play through? Are they at the mercy of random drops, or are those "random" drops at least somewhat customized based on what class opens the chest?