D&D 1E Giving an AD&D feel to 5e

[Lanefan]

The thief-acrobat was one of those concepts that sounded great, and you wanted to be great, but was terrible.

Weirdly, everything else in UA was total power creep, but the T-A was actually underpowered, and considering it was based on the Thief ...

Not quite everything else. The spells were a real mix - some were crazy powerful, others were decidedly underwhelming to say the least. Ditto for the new magic items. And some other bits were in fact really good, or had the germ of something good in them.

I remember when UA first came out I and another DM went through it and did some judicious pruning. We kitbashed and adopted Cavalier but not the other classes (by this point Barbarian was already a Human sub-race in our games anyway). We adopted maybe 1/3 of the spells, some of them quite modified; and some of the magic items as well. We ditched Comeliness and the new roll-up methods. We significantly toned down weapon specialization but did adopt it.

The thing we took from UA that I think was the best addition to the game was the Cavaliers' percentile-increment system for stats: we gave this to all classes and still use it now.

 

[Lanefan]

Then again, AD&D is incredibly schizophrenic. If you played mostly modules in AD&D, you had a VERY different experience with the game than those who did mostly home-brew.

I think that might greatly depend on who was writing the home-brew, and how.

The modules, by and large, did not support this "avoid encounters" style of play because, well, in most modules, most encounters weren't avoidable. The maps were too linear, for one thing, to avoid encounters. And the modules were set up that you couldn't avoid stuff.

Some of them certainly were - particularly those based on tourney modules - and it's not a great reflection on them.

Some of them weren't. Sure there'd always be a few encounters you pretty much had to deal with, but some old-time modules were anything but linear in design, providing multiple means of entry and-or multiple non-linear paths to take once inside. L1 Secret of Bone Hill is a good example here.

Someone on this site once did schematic layout diagrams of various TSR-era modules, no idea where that is in here thoguh.

 

[teitan]

I remember when UA first came out I and another DM went through it and did some judicious pruning. We kitbashed and adopted Cavalier but not the other classes (by this point Barbarian was already a Human sub-race in our games anyway). We adopted maybe 1/3 of the spells, some of them quite modified; and some of the magic items as well.

Yeah that seems to be the closest to a universal experience. By this point, due to the nature of AD&D and D&D most people had a playing style and ideas established that was not at all in line with UA. Barbarians as a culture was pretty prominent. 2e, in trying to be a toolkit, seemed to really codify the D&D experience as we see popularized today in contrast with the DIY days of AD&D and B/X, early BECMI. It seemed a lot less encouraged anyway.

 

[Helldritch]

Yeah that seems to be the closest to a universal experience. By this point, due to the nature of AD&D and D&D most people had a playing style and ideas established that was not at all in line with UA. Barbarians as a culture was pretty prominent. 2e, in trying to be a toolkit, seemed to really codify the D&D experience as we see popularized today in contrast with the DIY days of AD&D and B/X, early BECMI. It seemed a lot less encouraged anyway.

Well, I still remember Conan Unchained adventure module and it's follow up. Before UA, Barbs were multiclassed characters and we took example on Conan... A fighter/thief... Conan was a simple fighter thief.... so were all our barbs before UA....

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You keep saying things like this and yet how you express indicates you don’t have much experience with 1e in it’s time frame. UA was a broken mess and every DM I played with didn’t allow it beyond some hand picked spells.

I think experiences varied quite a bit mate.

I wasn't familiar with US 1E groups. All the 1E people I knew were British or Israeli (quite an RPG scene in the latter according to my Israeli friends), and they all used UA, and almost universally had a positive opinion of UA, though people often sneered at one specific class - but which class that was varied.

So I think you telling people they don't know jack about 1E because their experiences were different to yours is maybe... a little bold? Overstepping? Something like that.

I mean, literally every 2E group I knew post-C&T used C&T, most of them heavily, but I wouldn't be so bold as to assert that anyone whose experience didn't match was full of nonsense.

 

[Upper_Krust]

As a child at the D&D shop buying D&D for the first time, the shopkeeper told me I really needed to get Unearthed Arcana... I think we used pretty much everything from it except the new chargen method with the 9d6-8d6-7d6 etc for human PCs. @Upper_Krust played a Cavalier who ended up the Lesser God of Swords. There was a Fighter-Assassin with weapon spec; I must have used the 2e PHB alongside it as I remember an evil wizard rendered invulnerable via 2e Stoneskin.

What you have to remember about Unearthed Arcana was that the classes were simply more powerful. So it was our first ever exposure to Rules Creep. On top of that, the classes (especially the martial classes) had more interesting abilities.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Not quite everything else. The spells were a real mix - some were crazy powerful, others were decidedly underwhelming to say the least. Ditto for the new magic items. And some other bits were in fact really good, or had the germ of something good in them.

I remember when UA first came out I and another DM went through it and did some judicious pruning. We kitbashed and adopted Cavalier but not the other classes (by this point Barbarian was already a Human sub-race in our games anyway). We adopted maybe 1/3 of the spells, some of them quite modified; and some of the magic items as well. We ditched Comeliness and the new roll-up methods. We significantly toned down weapon specialization but did adopt it.

The thing we took from UA that I think was the best addition to the game was the Cavaliers' percentile-increment system for stats: we gave this to all classes and still use it now.

I should have been more careful in my wording; yes, there were some spells/magic items that weren't power creep, and, in fact, were either useless or underpowered.

I was thinking more in terms of the new races, the raising/expansion of the level limits, the new ways to generate outrageous ability scores, the new classes (except for the poor thief-acrobat, which was merely okay and half-baked), the new class abilities, the weapon specializations, and so on.

The mistake that a lot of people made was that they didn't realize that most of this was just rehashed Dragon articles, and, like most Dragon articles, they needed to be viewed judiciously and skeptically before being introduced into a campaign; it was NOT some type of PHB2 that was supposed to be used without careful thought, consideration, and pruning.

(That said- the polearm section in Appendix T? SO GOOD!)

 

[Sacrosanct]

What you have to remember about Unearthed Arcana was that the classes were simply more powerful. So it was our first ever exposure to Rules Creep. On top of that, the classes (especially the martial classes) had more interesting abilities.

Indeed. D&D was pretty stable up to that point as far as game material and rules. When the game really took off (after publication of the PHB and DMG), no other main rulebooks had come out that changed things all that much. Then UA came out and it was radical for the time. Yeah, many of those things came from previous Dragon articles, but it was common knowledge that Dragon was to be taken with a grain of salt and things in Dragon weren't "official".

Then UA came out and it was the first real major change to D&D that most ever experienced. And wow, were there issues lol. Don't get me wrong, I think we all used stuff out of it, and I even tried the OP stuff once or twice myself. But it was quickly determined that much of the stuff just wasn't good. The first time someone showed up at the table when everyone else had legacy PCs and they had their dart specialized fighter with 18s in str, dex, and con, it was pretty obvious that unless you were playing Monty Haul, it was no good.

 

[grimslade]

UA for my group was mostly ignored but accepted. We used OA unabashedly in our campaigns, so there was quite a bit of overlap. I think we all rolled up drow characters, I used two as recurring villains but no one played one. We were all about that comeliness though. /s
My annect-data is that a lot of groups used bits and pieces of UA, there was power creep at tables but no worse than 5 years of weird house rules and lax rules to streamline play. Oriental Adventures is what impacted the tables in my area. Utterly changed the D&D landscape.

 

[teitan]

I think experiences varied quite a bit mate.

I wasn't familiar with US 1E groups. All the 1E people I knew were British or Israeli (quite an RPG scene in the latter according to my Israeli friends), and they all used UA, and almost universally had a positive opinion of UA, though people often sneered at one specific class - but which class that was varied.

So I think you telling people they don't know jack about 1E because their experiences were different to yours is maybe... a little bold? Overstepping? Something like that.

I mean, literally every 2E group I knew post-C&T used C&T, most of them heavily, but I wouldn't be so bold as to assert that anyone whose experience didn't match was full of nonsense.

My response and reaction was meant tongue in cheek in response to his own comments. Not at all serious. But to, ya know, call me out when his comments for quite a few pages were aggressive and telling people they were wrong without equivocation? Sure. That’s fair.