D&D 1E Inquiry: How do fans of AD&D (aka 1E) feel about the Unearthed Arcana supplement?

[pming]

Hiya!

Comeliness was just dumb (and problematic, as has been pointed out).

"Problematic"...heh... yeah, because good looking people are treated exactly the same as average, plain or even ugly people.

Kate Bekinsale, wearing black lingerie, stockings and garter belt walks into the room with a ladder. "Hun? Could you hold this for me? I need to climb up it to clean the chandelier".
..
"What? Hold a ladder? How long is this going to take?", he thought to himself. 'Great...just my luck. Some lady in her underware wants me to hold a ladder and see nothing but her backside and under-boob as she jiggles around cleaning a chandelier'. "Sure. I guess. If I HAVE to. Just make it quick, ok? My favourite re-run is about to start on TV".



(for those so inclined, just replace Kate Bekinsale with Chris Hemsworth in a speedo if it makes the point better Personally? I don't see much difference... ).

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Stormonu]

I have to admit, our group of 15 year-olds got a lot more use of Comliness than we probably should have, mainly on return after a day of dungeon delving.

I think we stopped using it after the encounter I did with the 22 Comliness Medusa...

And the only way I could encourage my players back in the day to play Humans was to use the Method V generation for their generation; non-humans had to do the 4d6, drop lowest x 6 (or 7, if we were using Comliness), arrange to suit. I actually ended up with a Wizard in the group with an 18 Int and 18 Str, who actually benefited from Strength for the first couple of levels when he ran out of spells. Most memorably, he ended up in a Wizard duel around 5th level and when he ran out of spells (because his opponent kept countering them), he ran up and beat the hell out of his opponent (who couldn't cast his remaining spells as he was being pummeled by Weapon Speed 1 fists) and won that way.

As for the Barbarian, we ignored the Wizard hatred for in party casters - we assumed the character would be intelligent enough to put aside his mistrust to work with a known ally. On the Cavalier front, the Code of Battle kept most of my players away from the class, but I did have one bold enough to try the class, and it worked out well - until around 7th level when the Drow Ranger in party got an ultimatum from Lolth to get rid of the Cavalier or face being turned into a Drider, and decided to comply rather than resist (which was what the "story" intent was). After that event was when I banned Drow characters from my game, and PvP activity (partly my own fault for introducing the plot, but the Drow player had been playing up the "debt to Lolth" aspect that inspired it - it just went in a direction that was NOT cool for everyone involved).

Honestly, overall me and my group had a lot of fun with UA and I ended up using quite a lot of its content - just nobody ever decided to use the Thief-Acrobat for some reason. And the unarmed combat section was just ... too much.

 

[Azzy]

Hiya!

"Problematic"...heh... yeah, because good looking people are treated exactly the same as average, plain or even ugly people.

How droll.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

How droll.

Thanks! I'll be here all weekend. Don't forget to tip your waiter!


May be droll, but still true. Human nature and all that. shrug

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Lanefan]

I never played 1e so never saw this in play, but I borrowed a friend's UA book back when I played 2e to look through and thought it had some cool stuff, I really liked the cavalier and its ability to increase stats which I felt should have been an option for every class.

This is exactly what we did, pretty much as soon as we saw it.

It did require a rejiggering of how Fighters' exceptional strength worked, however, otherwise Fighters who put percentile increments on strength would gain it way too fast. What we did was split out each gradation achievable by the exceptional strength roll into its own integer, so 18.41 became 19, 18.71 became 20, etc. up to 18.00 which became 24, with Hill Giants at 25 and other Giants going up from there.

Once we did that, percentile increments for all classes turned out to work great; and we still use them today.

 

[David Howery]

I think I echo a lot of people here who thought it was largely unplayable due to not playing well with others and the amount of XP required was overly large

my biggest problem with it was that it was kinda vague in places... particularly the tertiary abilities, which weren't really explained well on which type of barbarian gets which one. The DM would have needed to work all those out ahead of time. Plus, when the idea of NWP came along, the whole thing about tertiary abilities was rather outmoded...

 

[ricks3]

In general, I like UA. When it came out, we use all of it. Now, over 30 years later, it's just another part of the game that we change and modify. We use the bits and pieces we like, and don't use the pieces we don't. I don't think I've ever used any of the new races. While initially we moved the paladin to the Cavalier, we eventually moved it back under fighter. It was nice to have an expended spell list, even if a few of them don't work quite right. The additional magic items are great.

And yes, the binding is terrible.

 

[Minigiant]

Like most game design before the internet brought criticism to designers faces:

Cool Ideas
Poor Execution

 

[ECMO3]

Piggybacking off of my other post regarding 4E and Essentials, I wanted to get a read on how fans of 1E feel about 1E Unearthed Arcana.

If you are a fan of 1E, did you like Unearthed Arcana? Did you hate it with the fury of a thousand suns? Were you ambivalent? Please include your reasoning behind your feelings if you can articulate them.

Personally, I hated Unearthed Arcana.

The new classes were so wonky: Barbarians had lots of interesting stuff but couldn't work with magic-users, tried to destroy magic items (IIRC) and needed ridiculous amounts of xp to level, cavaliers were so mount focused that they seemed pretty useless for most currently produced site based (often dungeon) adventures plus they had the weird mechanic of slowly raising their ability scores, acrobats were...just...lame.

Additionally, I HATED the inclusion of new, bizarre races like deep gnomes and drow as playable races. HATED it.

Unearthed Arcana dramatically diminished my interest in D&D and it was a precursor to even further changes which pretty much killed my interest in the game for a long time.

I liked most of the material. What I did not like is I purchased two of them (one new) and both of them fell apart, my friendds did as well. It is like they had some massive problem with bindings.

We never used the Barbarian for the reason you mentioned. We did not use the Cavalier either, although the Paladin with the new Paladin abilities was used a lot.

Acrobat I was neutral on. We liked acrobats better than default thieves, because Thieves were really weak and acrobats got a few more options, at the expense of never being great at the things thieves were supposed to be good at. Also we stopped only playing halfling thieves and started playing Elves and Half-Orcs so it added more flavor to the game as well.

We liked the new multiclass options and the revised level limits.

We used Drow extensively, Deep Gnomes some. The timing was wierd for a lot of the other Elf subraces since it came out about the same time TSR was pivoting away from Greyhawk and other than Drow all the elves were Greyhawk specific.

We used weapon expertise and liked it at the time, although to be honest it really screwed up the game. Fighters (and subclasses) were already by far the best class and this made them even more powerful.

I did not like all the new weapons. Regular AD&D already had too many weapons (mostly polearms) and they went and added a munch more for no real reason IMO.

 

[Tallifer]

We picked the cherries from it and adapted some of it. It provided great pleasure to read and much amusement in play. Like any roleplaying book. Certainly better than many of the later Rolemaster supplements I wasted money on at the time.