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

[Cadence]

Anti-paladins and witches come up often as well.

Maybe the purge of anything “naughty” in 2e was already happening for UA?

I have vague memories of the Bounty Hunter and Jester too.

Holy cow were there a lot of them: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24436

 

[timbannock]

Just out of curiosity, something I see mentioned from time to time was that unearthed arcana was considered bad or unusable. I remember reading it back in the 90s and liking some stuff about it, but I never used it in 2e (which I was playing at the time). I probably didn't have as critical an eye back then either and, since I never used it, may not have seen all it's flaws. I do recall thinking that it was a little unfair the cavalier could slowly increase some ability scores and tha barbarian seemed to need ridiculous amounts of xp and couldn't adventure with spellcasters (or something like that).

So for those who did use it back in 1e days, why was it considered so bad?

In my groups (about 2-ish at the time?), we loved some parts (the polearms!) and found some of the spells fun purely for roleplay potential (cantrips and others), but found a lot of the rest of the book to be overly fiddly. The new classes had way too many punitive restrictions and some of their abilities required such specific circumstances/campaign styles that we ended up just retooling them or replacing them with 2nd edition stuff (such as kits) to the point where the originals weren't used. In the end, that meant the book was rarely ever referenced in play.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

UA was a major release after D&D had surged in sales, so maybe? But the Anti-Paladin and Witch were NPC classes - I don't recall any of those appearing outside of Dragon magazine.

Witch was teased as being part of D&D as far back as having two illustrations for them in OD&D (including an obligatory hot one where she was wearing a see-through top) and the 1E DMG talks about them as though they're a class. So it seems like it was something they thought about doing. I suspect Gygax's religiosity (which seems to have made exceptions for all the stuff that he got up to out in Hollywood) prevented them from appearing as either official monsters or player choices.

And then the Satanic Panic happened and all bets were off for at least a decade.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have vague memories of the Bounty Hunter and Jester too.

Holy cow were there a lot of them: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24436

Best part of Dragon magazine, for my group. Some of them (like the Cloistered Cleric) really were almost useless as PCs, but most of them were clearly intended to be used by players, with the "NPC class" thing just being a fig leaf.

 

[Mannahnin]

Unearthed Arcana was, perhaps oddly, the first AD&D book I got. Having acquired Mentzer Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert in 1985, UA was the new hotness on the shelves when I went looking for more.

The additional complications and stats in the book confused and intrigued me. As a wee munchkin and soon a Drizzt reader, the new Demihuman options and magic items were awesome, but the weird and extreme power bumps combined with nerfs on the classes were a great puzzle to me, a newbie gamer taking it on faith that the great and powerful wizards at TSR knew better than 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.

More the Matter of France, really (which was also inspirational for Three Hearts & Three Lions).

And yeah, the suicidally brave & foolish chivalric code required by the Cavalier class doubled down on and made player horror stories about Lawful Stupid paladins look trivial by comparison.

When UA came out my group was famished for new 1e content. We were playing with material from Dragon but a new book was special and OFFICIAL!

In the end, we only really used weapon specialization, some of the new weapons, the expanded race/class options, and the new spells and magic items. The expanded illusionist spell list was especially welcome. The barbarian got some use but got dropped once players realized it only had defensive abilities and that a specialized fighter was kick ass. The cavalier got some initial love for the potential stat increases but no traction. No one in my group ever made an acrobat. Some of the lore was great but we already had it from Dragon.

Rules that actually made AD&D worse:

• Comeliness
• Subraces with better attributes or powers than the PH races
• Barbarian incentive to destroy magic and disrupt the party
• Paladin as a subclass of cavalier putting it even more out of reach and linking the holy warrior to social class
• Cavalier with an incentive to drag the party into TPK fights
• Forcing ranger and paladin/cavalier into specific weapon proficiencies for no good reason
• More complicated spellbook rules
• Forcing illusionists into the same naughty word dependence on read magic that MUs had to live with
• Weapon specialization locking in at 1st leveln and creating an incentive to not use magic weapons

Some of these are easily fixed. In my AD&D campaign I permit retraining weapon proficiencies, including specialization, along with training for a new level, and I don't permit double specialization. I've also considered just delaying it until after first level.

Yup. New multiclass options, spells and magic items were good. Weapon Specialization well-loved and extensively used at the time, though some people would raise balance objections to it (not taken seriously in my groups BITD).

I would argue that SOME of the spellbook rules/additional details in there were useful, but overall yeah, they're detrimental. Especially the insane monetary values which make them about the most valuable magic treasure short of an artifact.

Looking back, I think what I feel was... 'bad' is subjective, but I'd say hurt with UA, was the character creation variant, where, let's say, a Fighter would roll 10d6 keeping the highest three for Strength, etc.

I grew up with the old basic '3d6 in order', so UA allowed for some 'unnaturally' high stats. I do recognize now that the book served as an advancement in the gaming 'tech' - it was allowing people a better chance to play the character they wanted and have that character be mathematically better than they had been.

At the time we dismissed that variant as unbalanced nonsense, but in retrospect it made more sense. It was a cookie for the human characters to help ensure they could qualify for their cool subclasses and not be entirely overshadowed by demi-humans with all their cool abilities and multiclass options.

We never used 3d6 in order in AD&D, since the DMG discouraged it, the ability score tables clearly weren't designed for it, and Gygax explicitly advises in the PH that a character will normally need at least two scores of 15+ to be viable.

I remember quite liking it when it came back. Revisiting it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Barbarian and Cavalier classes were power gamer traps. Like, the Barbarian front loads you with a ton of abilities, but then saddles you with not being able to use magic items and an extremely slow rate of advancement. On the other hand the Cavalier also has a lot of abilities, but its code of conduct practically guarantees an early demise.

That's a fun theory. Hard to argue against, really, given what insane handicaps the required behavioral rules were for those classes. Though it made sticking poor Paladins under Cavalier a completely bewildering decision.

Witch was teased as being part of D&D as far back as having two illustrations for them in OD&D (including an obligatory hot one where she was wearing a see-through top) and the 1E DMG talks about them as though they're a class. So it seems like it was something they thought about doing. I suspect Gygax's religiosity (which seems to have made exceptions for all the stuff that he got up to out in Hollywood) prevented them from appearing as either official monsters or player choices.

And then the Satanic Panic happened and all bets were off for at least a decade.

There was also a clear shift in Gary's behavior and attitudes from around '79-'82, it seems. Between the game sales going gangbusters starting in late '79 and convincing him and the Blumes that they were business geniuses (getting featured in Inc. magazine, etc.), Gary's mother dying, and his disintegrating marriage. There was definitely a shift in him we see people talk about in When We Were Wizards, and Flint Dille's stories give more evidence of in The Gamesmaster.

 

[haakon1]

But the Anti-Paladin and Witch were NPC classes - I don't recall any of those appearing outside of Dragon magazine.

I think both appeared in adventures, though it might have more like a description of a character than the mechanics from Dragon.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Witch was teased as being part of D&D as far back as having two illustrations for them in OD&D (including an obligatory hot one where she was wearing a see-through top) and the 1E DMG talks about them as though they're a class. So it seems like it was something they thought about doing. I suspect Gygax's religiosity (which seems to have made exceptions for all the stuff that he got up to out in Hollywood) prevented them from appearing as either official monsters or player choices.

And then the Satanic Panic happened and all bets were off for at least a decade.

The Satanic Panic probably nixed the Witch, if it had at all been planned as an eventual class. I think the earliest official book release of it was in 1990's Complete Wizard's Handbook.

That's a fun theory. Hard to argue against, really, given what insane handicaps the required behavioral rules were for those classes. Though it made sticking poor Paladins under Cavalier a completely bewildering decision.

I suspect a lot of tables ignored the behavioral requirements of those classes. Which would net you some powerful characters. Heck, a lot of people had paladins with very skewed interpretations of a Lawful and Good alignment.

Part of me also wonders if it was an emergent design trend that was still being refined - if we would've seen similar designs in subsequent classes teased like the Savant, Mystic, and Mountebank. More complex classes, but with specific requirements outside of the mechanical parts.

 

[Cadence]

Best part of Dragon magazine, for my group. Some of them (like the Cloistered Cleric) really were almost useless as PCs, but most of them were clearly intended to be used by players, with the "NPC class" thing just being a fig leaf.

After picking up issue 63 I subscribed to issues 64 to at least the 120s, and had the five best of's... and have apparently long since forgotten most of them on the list

 

[Flying Toaster]

I consider druids to be quite powerful. Illusionists are too, but they do require a creative player and a DM who is willing to let them shine.

I actually think you are correct, but both classes seemed to be underrated and overlooked back then. They both had slightly quirky abilities that could be limited or even neutralized if the DM interpreted the rules in a particularly strict way, or if the adventure did not offer good opportunities.

The modern druid leans on wildshape and is generally considered a good class, but the consensus back in the 80’s (as seen in Dragon magazine reader letters and Forum editorials) seemed to be that it was a highly situational class that was only really useful on wilderness treks, but not so much in dungeons or towns. One of the biggest problems was that IIRC in 1E the equivalent wound healing spells were higher level for druids than for clerics, and since clerics were often treated as mere combat medics, this would make the druid much less effective in that role. The other abilities were a grab bag of pseudo-“Celtick” Stonehenge hippie tropes, and you had to get creative to use them effectively. Scimitar was always the best melee weapon choice (next best thing to a war scythe?). One point I rarely see in discussions of the 1E druid is the fact that their spellcasting could be significantly weakened if the DM wanted to be very strict about the rules for mistletoe as a material component, making adventures in environments where mistletoe does not grow very difficult.

My friends generally saw druids as second tier, but even back then I thought they had strong themes that were too much fun to not give them a try, so I played a human druid and had a good time with him. The new weapons and spells from UA helped a lot. The Goodberry spell eliminated many of the rigors of wilderness travel, but we never did real hex crawl stuff anyway. I had the Healing and Herbalism proficiencies from the DSG/WSG books, which boosted our natural healing from +1 hp to +4 hp each night, so obviously that made my druid popular with the rest of the party . We also allowed elves and half-elves to play NG druid/rangers and druid/ranger/mages because it just seemed like a natural fit, and there were several of those in our games over the years. We never bothered with material components for spells, so that alone was a significant buff for spellcasters.

 

[Zardnaar]

I actually think you are correct, but both classes seemed to be underrated and overlooked back then. They both had slightly quirky abilities that could be limited or even neutralized if the DM interpreted the rules in a particularly strict way, or if the adventure did not offer any chances for them to shine.

The modern druid leans on wildshape and is generally considered a good class, but the consensus back in the 80’s (as seen in Dragon magazine reader letters and Forum editorials) seemed to be that it was a highly situational class that was only really useful on wilderness treks, but not so much in dungeons or towns. One of the biggest problems was that IIRC in 1E the equivalent wound healing spells were higher level for druids than for clerics, and since clerics were often treated as mere combat medics, this would make the druid much less effective in that role. The other abilities were a grab bag of pseudo-“Celtick” Stonehenge hippie tropes, and you had to get creative to use them effectively. Scimitar was always the best melee weapon choice (next best thing to a war scythe?). One point I rarely see in discussions of the 1E druid is the fact that their spellcasting could be significantly weakened if the DM wanted to be very strict about the rules for mistletoe as a material component, making adventures in environments where mistletoe does not grow very difficult.

My friends generally saw druids as second tier, but even back then I thought they had strong themes that were too much fun to not give them a try, so I played a human druid and had a good time with him. The new weapons and spells from UA helped a lot. The Goodberry spell eliminated many of the rigors of wilderness travel, but we never did real hex crawl stuff anyway. I had the Healing and Herbalism proficiencies from the DSG/WSG books, which boosted our natural healing from +1 hp to +4 hp each night, so obviously that made my druid popular with the rest of the party . We also allowed elves and half-elves to play NG druid/rangers and druid/ranger/mages because it just seemed like a natural fit, and there were several of those in our games over the years. We never bothered with material components for spells, so that alone was a significant buff for all spellcasters.

I ran a 1E druid to level 12 in the 90s after reading a Dragon article.

That spell table lvl 3 spells at 3rd level and everything else was nice. Ended up with a scimitar of speed and -7 AC.

Loved it.