AD&D 1E What was so bad about unearthed arcana 1e?

[LordBP]

Well my book fell apart with little usage, so it was bad in that sense.

 

[francisca]

Well my book fell apart with little usage, so it was bad in that sense.

Hah! Yeah. Somehow, my two copies have held together over the years.

 

[James Gasik]

I loved the book (in theory). It was full of some really new, experimental things. In practice, not all of them were good- if used as written, Comeliness is a massive buff to Elven PC's and obnoxious to deal with (especially with the section about Evil aligned people liking negative Comeliness....I need to mention that in my alignment thread...). Thief-Acrobats were a neat idea, but in practice only good for one thing, if you can parse how Dodge is supposed to work. Barbarians and Cavaliers were powerful, but the limitations on their behavior made them difficult to actually play (the fact the Barbarian gets so much of the stuff people seem to think are "Ranger" abilities never fails to amuse), and the new spells and magic items run the gamut from "neat" to "what the?" to "unusable trash", lol.

The polearms were just "whatever", but I have a friend who is enamored with the glaive-guisarme and bohemian ear spoon is so much fun to say, lol.

The expanded multiclassing was just incredible though, with some very creative options for PC's, like Halfling Druids, and I was sad to see these excised from 2e.

As for specialization...I never had a problem with it, the semi-random nature of what magic weapons you have mostly disincentivized you from sinking a lot of resources towards one kind of weapon. This was, strangely, the hardest thing for the people I played with (myself included) to learn. I would pore over the weapons available to select what I thought would be the "best" one, and then fail to find magical versions of it.

Even if you chose the perennial favorite of "long swords", if your DM used published adventures, those would always occasionally have really powerful weapons that nobody was proficient in, lol. +1 long swords might be plentiful, but some of the strongest weapons I'd ever encountered were bastard swords, tridents, warhammers, scimitars (both speed and the Flying Scimitar of Kusmit!), and lances.

But don't worry, Snarf will inevitably see this thread to tell us all how absolutely wrong we are to like UA, lol.

 

[cbwjm]

I loved the book (in theory). It was full of some really new, experimental things. In practice, not all of them were good- if used as written, Comeliness is a massive buff to Elven PC's and obnoxious to deal with (especially with the section about Evil aligned people liking negative Comeliness....I need to mention that in my alignment thread...). Thief-Acrobats were a neat idea, but in practice only good for one thing, if you can parse how Dodge is supposed to work. Barbarians and Cavaliers were powerful, but the limitations on their behavior made them difficult to actually play (the fact the Barbarian gets so much of the stuff people seem to think are "Ranger" abilities never fails to amuse), and the new spells and magic items run the gamut from "neat" to "what the?" to "unusable trash", lol.

The polearms were just "whatever", but I have a friend who is enamored with the glaive-guisarme and bohemian ear spoon is so much fun to say, lol.

The expanded multiclassing was just incredible though, with some very creative options for PC's, like Halfling Druids, and I was sad to see these excised from 2e.

As for specialization...I never had a problem with it, the semi-random nature of what magic weapons you have mostly disincentivized you from sinking a lot of resources towards one kind of weapon. This was, strangely, the hardest thing for the people I played with (myself included) to learn. I would pore over the weapons available to select what I thought would be the "best" one, and then fail to find magical versions of it.

Even if you chose the perennial favorite of "long swords", if your DM used published adventures, those would always occasionally have really powerful weapons that nobody was proficient in, lol. +1 long swords might be plentiful, but some of the strongest weapons I'd ever encountered were bastard swords, tridents, warhammers, scimitars (both speed and the Flying Scimitar of Kusmit!), and lances.

But don't worry, Snarf will inevitably see this thread to tell us all how absolutely wrong we are to like UA, lol.

I'd forgotten that comeliness was a thing in UA, I think I saw that and opted against porting it into my 2e games. Back when we played ADnD since it was 2e we just used the 2e classes and level limits, but thinking about it now, it seems weird to be so restricted, bring on those halfling druids, they seem like a great fit for the class.

Was specialisation not in the PHB or were there changes in unearthed arcana, was then when rangers and paladins could get it?

I remember in the old Icewind Dale PC game, if you had a paladin, you needed to pick up proficiency with bastard swords as I think that was sword type for the holy avenger.

Bohemian ear spoon sounds like some early ear cleaning device.

 

[Rabulias]

Unearthed Arcana was a mixed bag for us.

The new weapons, armor, magic items, and spells were largely well-received, but the new races and new classes were largely seen as overpowered. Additionally, Cavaliers and Barbarians had personality/role-play decisions baked into the classes (bad form!), and many of those choices made them not play well with most parties.

The Thief-Acrobat sounded cool, but was definitely underwhelming. I was going to play one, but once I made 6th level, I decided to stay a regular Thief. It was nice having Roger Moore's non-human deities from Dragon Magazine made official. Weapons specialization was a popular option, and while it was a bit of a power-up for players, it was easy to add a handful of more cannon fodder monsters to big fights. And I don't think we ever tried the new unarmed combat rules, so I don't know if they were any good.

Edited to add: Oh how could I forget Comeliness? Yeah, we rolled it, and used it as a general guideline of attractiveness, but never used any of the fascination aspects of it.

 

[Bunch]

I think we only really used the Cavalier and Weapon Specialization in my group. Maybe some of the spells.

We played Temple of Elemental Evil when UA came out. We had a Cavalier, a fighter, Me(Thief), a cleric(infrequent player/NPC) and a Wizard(DMs character/NPC).

The Cavalier and Weapon Specialized Fighter and two on/off NPCs meant I tended to get lots of random magic items the two fighters couldn't use either due to class/specialization limitations (and cleric/mage limits). It all felt very well traded off.

Overall I heard more complaints that UA was a huge power mismatch than I felt it was.

 

[cbwjm]

Overall I heard more complaints that UA was a huge power mismatch than I felt it was.

With the responses to this thread, I kind of feel like that might be the situation with me. I think I've seen a few posts in other threads here that have made me think that it wasn't well received. I can understand not all of it really working, but when I read it I didn't think it was terrible.

 

[Thagdal]

As was common for people around me, all my groups back then pretty treated UA like a collection of dragon magazines bound together. The DM said which bits would be used, and the expanded spells were great.

I ended up combining the thief acrobat with the normal thief class, as a way of buffing the class.

My pet hate with the book is fairly niche, that the revamped druid class didnt acknowledge the predating bard class in PHB appendix druidic powers, and what if any of the massive buffs should they get.

 

[Hriston]

Moving the paladin from fighter to cavalier seemed like a retcon and didn't sit well with me.

 

[James Gasik]

Moving the paladin from fighter to cavalier seemed like a retcon and didn't sit well with me.

Agreed- the resulting Cavadin was a hot mess to run for as well. I tried it once, and did not care for the results. I vastly prefer how 2e handled this sort of thing. You could be a Paladin Cavalier. Or a Paladin Wilderness Warrior. Or a Paladin Swashbuckler. There's more than one flavor of Paladin.

The UA change doubled down on the "Matter of Britain"-style Paladin and left no room for any other interpretation of the class.