Did you use UA in your 1E games?

[Mark Hope]

next you are gonna tell me.. DSG and WSG are great too.

I really liked the DSG. The WSG (aka Big Book Of Ridiculous Weather Tables)... not so much.

 

[Lanefan]

I really liked the DSG. The WSG (aka Big Book Of Ridiculous Weather Tables)... not so much.

Ditto here, particularly since I'd already designed my own Big Ridiculous Weather Table and thus didn't need any more.

Lanefan

 

[Scarbonac]

Loved it. We used most of it, but saw very few PC barbarians (2, actually), no PC Drow or cavaliers, a couple of wood elves...mostly due to player preferences.

Cantrips, new spells, magic items, new level limits, weapon specialization, new weapons, Social Class and Comliness, however...

 

[Crothian]

Because some of the classes, taken straight from the book, are horribly unbalanced.

So??

It wasn't a balanced game to begin with. It was fun, things and adventures were still a challenge. We never had any issues with the book.

 

[Vuron]

So??

It wasn't a balanced game to begin with. It was fun, things and adventures were still a challenge. We never had any issues with the book.

I concur if balance between classes was intended (uncertain at best) then it seems that the random nature of ability score determination was the primary method for keeping some of the "unbalanced" classes from becoming dominant.

Given the default assumption of 3d6 in order it was often very difficult to qualify for some of the more powerful classes. Even with more generous ability score determination it was still fairly difficult to qualify for classes like the paladin.

While the fighter might be less powerful on paper than the cavalier it seems to me that in actual play the fighter with high strength + weapon specialization (+% to XP) was able to keep pace with cavalier.

 

[dcas]

next you are gonna tell me.. DSG and WSG are great too.

No, actually I think DSG and WSG are crap. Well, maybe not crap, but non-weapon proficiencies caused more problems than they solved IMO.

I think UA is the best non-core (by "core" I mean only the MM, PHB, and DMG) hardback ever published for AD&D.

 

[Henry]

Aw, yeah. We most certainly did use UA.

I saw a female Dark Elf Ranger/Cleric dual-sword-wielder played a full year before anyone had ever heard of Drizzt Do'Urden. I saw many many cavaliers played, many thief-acrobats pummel their way through a fight after pole-vaulting through trouble, I saw the various cantrips used to more greater effect than a o-level spell ought to have.

very fond memories indeed.

 

[billd91]

I really liked the DSG. The WSG (aka Big Book Of Ridiculous Weather Tables)... not so much.

My experience was very much the opposite. The WSG was far more useful to us than DSG ever was. We also did a fair amount of overland travel, though, and no so many dungeons.

 

[replicant2]

So??

It wasn't a balanced game to begin with. It was fun, things and adventures were still a challenge. We never had any issues with the book.

Neither did we ... at first. Then we began to exprerience the ridiculously overpowered barbarian. When you have a class that's so much better than one of the core four (the fighter) that it makes it redudant, you've got balance problems--even for a game as tottering as AD&D 1e.

The drow was equally as silly (a race that can't get along with anyone else in the party? Great), as was the cavalier (this dude can train up his stats, but my fighter, who devotes his life to martial training and skill at arms, can't? Okay).

I'm glad you had fun with the book, though, and it's not my intent to rain on your parade, but I think most who used it would agree it had some serious flaws.

 

[grodog]

Please list your experiance with using the book, and if you think it was a net positive or negative on the game.

When the book first came out we did. But after a year, we dropped it (only mining it for magical items and spells). I thought it had a negative impact on the game.

Much of the material published in UA was first previewed in Dragon Magazine, and we used most of the PC classes there first, along with many of the spells, new weapons, etc. In fact, I still prefer the Dragon 63 Barbarian to the UA version, and some spells from the original Dragon versions too.

Thus, we used those rules quite extensively before UA appeared. We adopted Weapon Specialization too, though in retrospect we were too generous with it (allowing multiclass PCs to use it, for example). Increased demi-human level limits were already being played with (and bypassed in cases where it really mattered in game play with wishes, tomes to raise levels, etc.), and we'd also already house-ruled additional multiclass combinations based on the fact that PHB NPC demi-humans could be clerics (and we didn't see a lot of reason to exclude clerics from availability as PCs). Drow, duergar, etc. remained NPC races for the most part, save in our party of mostly-evil PCs (where we'd been using such races before UA was published anyway).

All-in-all, the publication of UA itself didn't change our gaming much, other than the weapon specialization rules, and the large numbers of new magic items able to be found (a bunch of which were culled from already-published modules, as well).

In AD&D games I've run since back-in-the-day, I've been a bit more judicious in the use of the rules from UA---in particular specialization, the availability of non-PHB spells to casters, etc., but I haven't had a problem including most of the content, with tweaks where needed.