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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

UA was munchkin fodder flung out the door as a desperate cash-in.

There are only so many witches one can drop houses on.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Also, conversely, I'd argue that the 3E Unearthed Arcana book was the best book of that era. It still has good mechanics and ideas worth stealing today.

 

[cbwjm]

Also, conversely, I'd argue that the 3E Unearthed Arcana book was the best book of that era. It still has good mechanics and ideas worth stealing today.

I do like how unearthed arcana became the title of new rules and variants, even used in 5e for the playtest documents of new content.

 

[haakon1]

As was common for people around me, all my groups back then pretty treated UA like a collection of dragon magazines bound together. The DM said which bits would be used, and the expanded spells were great.

Same for my groups. The parts we used were the Nonhuman Deities, rarely the polearms, rarely the birth and class tables, and some of the new spells and magic items. I liked the cleric spell Ceremony, which made it to 5e 2014 as a Ritual, IIRC.

It was cool that it aligned with the D&D Animated Show, which had Eric the Cavalier (the rich whiny kid with the magic shield), Diana the Acrobat (with the magic pole), Bobby the Barbarian (the little kid with Uni the Unicorn) ... in addition to 3 kids with normal AD&D classes.

UA and OA (Oriental Adventures) were both transitional between 1e and 2e, but I got more use out of OA.

Likely or not liking UA might be the first twinkling of what would eventually become the edition wars, but I think most people never used all of it, nor rejected all of it.

 

[Moving Pictures]

The good: weapon spec for fighters; added spells/spell lists.
The bad: Barbarians. Was always stupid to have this as a class, and that hasn't changed; drow as playable character race. Comeliness (really?)
The meh: Cavaliers.
The "well, that turned out differently than I expected": Bards. Nice idea but turned into a shitshow with "I'm gonna seduce everything" bulltwaddle. That's partly GMs who don't understand how persuasion should work, but still. Blick.

 

[Bunch]

The good: weapon spec for fighters; added spells/spell lists.
The bad: Barbarians. Was always stupid to have this as a class, and that hasn't changed; drow as playable character race. Comeliness (really?)
The meh: Cavaliers.
The "well, that turned out differently than I expected": Bards. Nice idea but turned into a shitshow with "I'm gonna seduce everything" bulltwaddle. That's partly GMs who don't understand how persuasion should work, but still. Blick.

The comment about UA feeling like a collection of Dragon articles is dead on. I know probably most of you know it was but for the younger folks benefit, 80%(made up number but a lot of it) or so of UA actually did appear in Dragon before becoming UA. UA was surprisingly like a hardcover version of Best of Dragon.

 

[GreyLord]

I loved using UA, but I found that it was easier for class combinations to use Dragon lance Adventures for class and race rather than using the UA classes as they were written (aka, instead of Cavaliers we have Knights of Solamnia, and in addition, level 18 is a hard cap for EVERYONE...though demi-humans can still have level limits...some of them particularly high comparatively to the original PHB).

I liked that races still had limitations and level limits as well as class limits...more restrictive than WotC D&D (which I think detracts from flavor and not exactly my favorite thing to come out of WotC...but that's a highly unpopular opinion), but loose enough that almost everyone would normally be happy (afterall, how often are you really going to have a group reach those level limits listed...and if they do...that's a dedicated group that's been playing for a while).

Or, we'd go with OA, or combine some elements from OA (for example, using the OA version of the Barbarian made it easier to actually have barbarians in the group, though still particularly difficult if you consider Wu-Jen and Magic Users the same class restriction, at least we could have Clerics in the Party though!)

 

[Distracted DM]

It sounds like a lot of folk here have fond memories of it, and my table never used it, so the best I can do is try to answer your question from what I recall from various DnD history sources: Unearthed Arcana was a much-needed cash grab for TSR, and it was filled with untested rules- folk thought this was stuff that perhaps Gygax and co. used in there home games, but they were mostly just ideas that came to be in order to fill the book.

Turns out it really saved them when they needed saving- it was very popular.

 

[Emerikol]

I think as a group we never used any of the new classes but I liked some of the other stuff. I don't remember any widespread rejection of it though. In those days, D&D games were often the creations of the DMs in many ways. We removed what we disliked and added something if we felt there was a gap. D&D campaigns were not as uniform as they are today.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

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.