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

[jolt]

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.

This is exactly the conclusion that our group came to as well. The Barbarian only worked in a 1-1 game and it's slow advancement made even that a pain. The code of conduct for the Cavalier made playing one a death sentence. The acrobat abilities should have just been given to the thief whole cloth.

 

[fuindordm]

I remember quite liking it when it came back. Revisiting it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Barbarian and Cavalier classes were power gamer traps. Like, the Barbarian front loads you with a ton of abilities, but then saddles you with not being able to use magic items and an extremely slow rate of advancement. On the other hand the Cavalier also has a lot of abilities, but its code of conduct practically guarantees an early demise.

Players dig the barbarian, starry-eyed from the prospect of double Con bonus and huge hit dice, only to be let down in play when they realize they have no special abilities for offense.
Meanwhile, the fighter has specialization, the ranger is getting sick damage bonuses against most humanoid monsters, the cavalier starts stacking to hit bonuses and multiple attacks in their weapon of choice, and even the paladin has turn undead.
The barbarian is 100% defender and worse at it than a cleric.

 

[Flying Toaster]

When I started playing 1E c. 1986-87, UA was “the new shiny” and everyone was excited to own and read the book, simply because it was new official D&D content. In retrospect, we only consistently used weapon specialization, the spells and magic items, and the expanded class choices and multi-class combos for demi-humans. The new druid and illusionist spells in particular made those underpowered classes a bit more capable.

We never actually had an explicit conversation along the lines of “Hey, did you guys ever notice that UA is just a grab bag of Dragon magazine reprints and other stuff?”. There were never any arguments between a player who wanted to use some powerful option and a DM who said “No”. But in effect we tacitly ignored most of the material. We snickered a bit at the new Comeliness attribute and then completely forgot about it. Weapon specialization only encouraged us to pick long swords and stick with them. I actually rolled up a fighter who used some of the weird new weapons and armor but never played him much. We hated demi-human level limits and replaced them with XP penalties to slow but not stop advancement, which (somewhat ironically) was an idea we got from Dragon. In my opinion UA should have done the same.

Most of our group consistently played either human fighters, human mages, or multi-class elves. One guy only ever played one of three powerful non-human warrior types: half-ogres (from a Gary Gygax Dragon article, which I am surprised did not make the cut to appear in UA!), Krynn minotaurs from the Dragonlance book, and dark elf rangers. I did not really notice at the time, but looking back I was the one who was most interested in trying out all the different AD&D class and race options, but even I was not impressed by the new UA options. I was the only one who ever played a dwarf or a gnome (fighter and illusionist/thief respectively, two of my favorite characters), so we never used the gray dwarf and deep gnome.

With the barbarian and cavalier Gygax took his paladin concept of an overpowered class “balanced” by severe roleplay restrictions and cranked it up to “11”. We dismissed the barbarian out of hand on account of its unworkable antipathy to magic. In 5E characters get lots of special abilities and magic items are less important, while in 1E it was the opposite - finding good magic items was crucial. Every 1E party needed at least one “blaster caster” mage with hard-hitting damage spells, so a barbarian who hated wizards and tried to actually destroy magic items was simply unacceptable.

I always thought it was strange that AD&D did not have a feudal knight class other than the paladin, so I played a cavalier once but quickly abandoned the attempt. Besides the bizarre percentile ASIs, the UA code of chivalry forbade any kind of stealth and required cavaliers to scorn peasants and charge recklessly into battle against the most dangerous foes, risking TPKs.

Overall UA had some good material but you really had to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Players dig the barbarian, starry-eyed from the prospect of double Con bonus and huge hit dice, only to be let down in play when they realize they have no special abilities for offense.
Meanwhile, the fighter has specialization, the ranger is getting sick damage bonuses against most humanoid monsters, the cavalier starts stacking to hit bonuses and multiple attacks in their weapon of choice, and even the paladin has turn undead.
The barbarian is 100% defender and worse at it than a cleric.

If you look at the abilities, where the Barbarian really excels is outside of combat. They get so much stuff for when they're not in combat and traveling in the wilderness. But lots of people see the d12 HP and think of Conan.

 

[Flying Toaster]

The polearms were just "whatever", but I have a friend who is enamored with the glaive-guisarme and bohemian ear spoon is so much fun to say, lol.

The expanded multiclassing was just incredible though, with some very creative options for PC's, like Halfling Druids, and I was sad to see these excised from 2e.

As for specialization...I never had a problem with it, the semi-random nature of what magic weapons you have mostly disincentivized you from sinking a lot of resources towards one kind of weapon. This was, strangely, the hardest thing for the people I played with (myself included) to learn. I would pore over the weapons available to select what I thought would be the "best" one, and then fail to find magical versions of it.

Even if you chose the perennial favorite of "long swords", if your DM used published adventures, those would always occasionally have really powerful weapons that nobody was proficient in, lol. +1 long swords might be plentiful, but some of the strongest weapons I'd ever encountered were bastard swords, tridents, warhammers, scimitars (both speed and the Flying Scimitar of Kusmit!), and lances.

There was one UA polearm (fauchard-fork maybe?) that had a special ability to pull opponents off balance with its hook. The derro from MM2 used it as a standard weapon. As a DM I used them in a derro encounter I made, and as a player rolled up a polearm fighter who used a fauchard-fork, but it was underwhelming in practice. Recently I had a crazy idea for a polearm expert who is like a pro golfer. He has a burly henchman (ogre or minotaur maybe) who carries around a bunch of polearms like a caddy with a golf bag, advising his master on which one to use (“Yeah, I’d go with a voulge for this fight...”). Might work in a light-hearted campaign.

The expanded multi-classing for demi-humans was definitely an improvement over the PHB. We also added a few choices of our own. We figured that if elves and half-elves could be cleric / fighters (elvish paladin equivalent?) and cleric / fighter / mages, why not druid / rangers and druid / ranger / mages? I played at least one such character. The only problem was the alignment clash between druid “True Neutral only” and ranger “any Good”, but we just split the difference and required Neutral Good for such characters. It was pretty funny when 2E went even farther by shifting druids to any of five partially Neutral alignments,

In our games UA weapon specialization and especially double specialization only reinforced the ubiquity of the long sword, since that +3/+3 was actually better than the bonus of most magic swords you could find at low level. We just accepted that some magic weapons would get sold off because no one could use them. After we played the module S2 White Plume Mountain, we ended up with three powerful, intelligent, aligned weapons that we did not really want in the first place because of alignment differences and specialization (Trident of Aquaman Power, anyone? ). It seems fitting somehow for an old school TSR puzzle dungeon, as if the adventure itself were trolling us.