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

[Cadence]

Anti-paladins and witches come up often as well.

Maybe the purge of anything “naughty” in 2e was already happening for UA?

I have vague memories of the Bounty Hunter and Jester too.

Holy cow were there a lot of them: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24436

 

[timbannock]

Just out of curiosity, something I see mentioned from time to time was that unearthed arcana was considered bad or unusable. I remember reading it back in the 90s and liking some stuff about it, but I never used it in 2e (which I was playing at the time). I probably didn't have as critical an eye back then either and, since I never used it, may not have seen all it's flaws. I do recall thinking that it was a little unfair the cavalier could slowly increase some ability scores and tha barbarian seemed to need ridiculous amounts of xp and couldn't adventure with spellcasters (or something like that).

So for those who did use it back in 1e days, why was it considered so bad?

In my groups (about 2-ish at the time?), we loved some parts (the polearms!) and found some of the spells fun purely for roleplay potential (cantrips and others), but found a lot of the rest of the book to be overly fiddly. The new classes had way too many punitive restrictions and some of their abilities required such specific circumstances/campaign styles that we ended up just retooling them or replacing them with 2nd edition stuff (such as kits) to the point where the originals weren't used. In the end, that meant the book was rarely ever referenced in play.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

UA was a major release after D&D had surged in sales, so maybe? But the Anti-Paladin and Witch were NPC classes - I don't recall any of those appearing outside of Dragon magazine.

Witch was teased as being part of D&D as far back as having two illustrations for them in OD&D (including an obligatory hot one where she was wearing a see-through top) and the 1E DMG talks about them as though they're a class. So it seems like it was something they thought about doing. I suspect Gygax's religiosity (which seems to have made exceptions for all the stuff that he got up to out in Hollywood) prevented them from appearing as either official monsters or player choices.

And then the Satanic Panic happened and all bets were off for at least a decade.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have vague memories of the Bounty Hunter and Jester too.

Holy cow were there a lot of them: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24436

Best part of Dragon magazine, for my group. Some of them (like the Cloistered Cleric) really were almost useless as PCs, but most of them were clearly intended to be used by players, with the "NPC class" thing just being a fig leaf.