Unearthed Arcana: un-sell me

[Plane Sailing]

buyer's remorse

Good term!

I doubt if I'll end up using anything much from it and if I could find someone to sell my copy to I'd probably do it in a shot. Off the top of my head the only ideas that I can still remember as being fresh enough that I might try including iare the specialist wizard variants, which were quite nice. I'm hard pressed to remember anything else that wowed me.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Good term!

Yep.

I buy lots of books I can't devote enough time to, in order to really feel I've gotten my money's worth (Midnight is a prime example). That's one thing; I can live with that.

Yet I have never felt the same kind of buyer's remorse as I did with UA.

Hey BG, if you *DO* end up buying this one, as a matter of science, let us know how long it is before you wish you hadn't.


Wulf

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Hey BG, if you *DO* end up buying this one, as a matter of science, let us know how long it is before you wish you hadn't.

Heh. Probably never.

I tend to look at my gaming books in terms of bucks-per-hour and not in terms of "how many prestige classes did I use". So if I spend an afternoon with the Draconomicon to stat out the baddest ancient red I can think of, that's fun I'm having. I'll never, ever use the critter in any game, but the book acted as sort of a conduit for happy daydreaming and it's the kind of thing I can do while still keeping an eye on my baby girl. Factor in some casual page-turning and skimming that my friends will do, and that's a good book.

Other books I use to add theme to a dungeon and then never use again. I'm taking a long look at Chaostech for that reason. The book is just enough to make the players go "what in the world is that!?!?" Which, to my mind, is worth it.

Which leads me to my dillemma. Obviously with my kind of criteria for book use, I'd be buying a lot of stuff. So I force myself to keep it down to $40/month. This month I'm buying the latest Magical Mideval Societies and I'm going to have a real hard time walking into the store and not picking up UA.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Don't listen to them...give in to the desire...buy it and your transformation shall be COMPLETE!...err, or not.

 

[Liquidsabre]

As with any good campaign, it wouldn't be advisable to use more than 20% of what's in UA. Soem of the synergy effects between variants in htere can get rather funky. We use racial paragons, out-of-turn-dodge, Urban Tracking, and found the Hex stuffs useful (we now switched to Hex! Counting every other diagonal square was SUPER annoying). That was it. There were a few variants that intrigued me like the spell point system for magic, spontaneous divine casters, and weapon group proficiencies but found many of these to be either poorly designed or not worth the effort (DR and dodge bonuses for example).

 

[robberbaron]

The only things that grabbed me, however lightly, were the racial Paragons.
Let's face it, your character finishes his/her 10-level prestige class and finds that he/she has a few levels to go before taking Epic levels.
What better than a 3-level Paragon class to fill in the gap?

My highest character is 12th so I've got a long time to wait, but I like the idea.

 

[milotha]

I think that some of the options received at best 10 minutes of playtesting. There are some great ideas, but many of them are poorly executed. It seems like someone was just filling their page quota, and not actually designing something for play. Some of the stuff is rediculously overpowered- Gestalt characters. Some of the stuff is useless. Most of it you will never use. It's just more rules.

I'd suggest just making something up yourself. It's just as likely to be balanced, and with all the reworks UA requires, it will save you time and money.

*Of course being the sucker that I am, I shelled out the money blind to support my hobby.*

 

[Bendris Noulg]

If you are the sort to reconsider every possible rule when provided with a new option, than I extremely recommend putting this off until you are planning your next campaign. If, however, you can control yourself to, at most, change only one or two things no matter how tempting everything in the book might be, then give up this foolish crusade and give in to the dark side...

Over all, though, I do encourage buying this book... It's the first OGL product WotC has produced; the better is sells, the more likely we could see more, which would be a good thing IMNSOBWDO.

 

[Edheldur]

The longer you wait, the more likely someone will post the relevant OGC to the web. That would be reason #1 to wait.

New poster, long time lurker. When I first read this thread I immediately thought of something I saw a few days back over at RPGnow (HERE )

Interesting to note that it is now not validated for sale. It reminded me of another thread here about posting the OGL parts of Unearthed Arcana.

 

[Plane Sailing]

FWIW (although it's outside your budget) I got a lot more ideas from the Conan OGL game by Mongoose for D&D than I did from UA (although I want to run Conan too )

Cheers

p.s. RobberBaron - the way that I'll be doing epic levels is quite different to the DMG/epic handbook suggestions, I'll tell you about it on Sunday.