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

Had a lot of fun with it. My evil fat barbarian with a red beard was legendary.

We did play drow at times but were often fugitives on the edge of populated lands and had full sunlight effects.

I think one thing that was ponderous were some tacked on things like ability improvement for cavaliers. Tacked on additional rules are nothing now of course.

I think there were concerns about weapon specialization. We usually houserules only single specialization allowed…not the +3+3 stuff! Fighters were powerful in my day up to mid high level.

But UA was novel and fun to us…

UA was munchkin fodder flung out the door as a desperate cash-in.

cbwjm said:

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.

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I think for a lot of people it read worse than it played and most people didn't play everything to compare it.

Cavalier with it's lower AC but armor requirements meant they rarely got magic armor they could wear.

Barbarians couldn't use a lot of magic.

Thief-acrobat was useless in my group.

I don't think we ended up playing any of the non human races so they didn't cause us issues.

I think the most objected to thing was new ways to roll stats that seemed OP back then.

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.

from what I saw on groups who used the book, it was generally along the lines of 'ignore the new classes, races, comeliness; use the new magic items, spells, weapon specialization." Specialization seemed to give kind of an edge to beginning fighters, but at the same time, the DM could apply it to enemy NPC fighters as well...

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.

NN said:

UA was munchkin fodder flung out the door as a desperate cash-in.

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Well, that’s certainly an opinion …

Bunch said:

I think for a lot of people it read worse than it played and most people didn't play everything to compare it.

Cavalier with it's lower AC but armor requirements meant they rarely got magic armor they could wear.

Barbarians couldn't use a lot of magic.

Thief-acrobat was useless in my group.

I don't think we ended up playing any of the non human races so they didn't cause us issues.

I think the most objected to thing was new ways to roll stats that seemed OP back then.

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I'd forgotten about the rolling they came up with. Do you want to play a paladin? Roll 9d6 for charisma, 8d6 for strength, etc to ensure that you get the required stats. something like that right?

When I had friends that wanted to play something with ability score requirements, I normally just let them, but they had to match up their stats the closest they could. So an invoker wizard who rolled a 13 and a 15 as their highest stat would have to put that 15 in constitution, which would be bumped up to the required 16 leaving them with a 13 intelligence. Now if I went back to ADnD, I'm not even sure I'd use the stat requirements.

Bayushi_seikuro said:

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.

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I never thought it was that big of a deal because it wasn't just 3d6 for each, since the DMG had 4 of them and strongly recommended their usage.




That being said, I think the only of those we used was Method I (best 3 of 4d6 in any order). I have don't think I ever remember Methods II-IV and always think they are way too strong when I see them again. Method II was roll 12 sets of 3d6 and take the best 6 in any order, Method III was roll 6 sets of 3d6 for each ability and take highest, and Method IV was use 3d6 in order 12 times and take the desired one).

But the UA one was definitely strong for the important abilities for each class! (I'm tempted to look up or make the comparison of each number of dice there vs. doing what method III does).

I loved it as a middle schooler, but mechanically, it's a trash fire, even moreso than the rest of 1E. It just became clear to us, even in middle school, how much Gygax was just winging it when the book came out.

That said, grossly overpowered official classes? Yes, please. We ate that up with a spoon.

But by today's standards, it doesn't even have the great lore and flavor that the rest of the Gygax-era 1E books had, which are still worth mining decades later. (We already had the Roger Moore Point of View articles in Dragon. Best of the Dragon 2, which reprinted them all in one place, may have even been published by that point.)

It did have the best cover of any 1E book, period, though.