Firstly, I think one of the biggest issues of making quest rewards is really knowing how powerful is too powerful for a given quest. By pre-coding items, and grouping them into levels, this guesswork could be significantly reduced.
Secondly, we can bring in items with an FK interpretation of "faithful" to the tabletop items, at least to the point that they are recognizablr to the people who play, or played tabletop. I know I am trying, with my first area, to bring in items that are taken from, if not the DMG tables, then at least a Dragon item or supplement item. To add to the recognition factor once it's identified.
Thirdly, it gives a pool of items to draw from, saving the effort of coding the items per area. Yielding speedier building, consistency of an item from one area to another, and will surely speed up the building process for some areas...
I would say, IMO, that the items should still have plain names, like they do in many areas, because 1) it adds to wizards' revenue to identify items, and 2) the casual observer, when you see someone's gloves, shouldn't automatically know "Oh, he has gloves of thievery," as the gloves of thievery are now disguised with normal short names and long names. Now that we have the "I" flag for magic items though, the item's true name can be put in the "I" description.
I, personally, would be glad to contribute to the effort of building the items to fill out the tables. at least 25% of my fun in coding so far has been taking a book item and figuring out how to make the code turn it into something for the MUD.
