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

[James Gasik]

Any time someone told me that 3d6 was the "intended" way to generate characters, I'd just grab any 1e module with pre-generated characters. They pretty much always had at least one 16-18 in the array, though granted, sometimes they were in odd places (Bone Hill has a Cleric with a 17 Charisma as his high stat...).

 

[mixmastashizz]

Any time someone told me that 3d6 was the "intended" way to generate characters, I'd just grab any 1e module with pre-generated characters. They pretty much always had at least one 16-18 in the array, though granted, sometimes they were in odd places (Bone Hill has a Cleric with a 17 Charisma as his high stat...).

Idk why you'd need to even do that. You can just show them the PHB and the DMG and tell them to read two pages where it says not to!

 

[James Gasik]

Idk why you'd need to even do that. You can just show them the PHB and the DMG and tell them to read two pages where it says not to!

Don't forget that 1) you're not supposed to be reading the DMG, and if you are, you're deserving of a less than honorable death (lol). And 2) nothing tops the human brain's ability to deny facts that don't fit their preferred version of reality.

 

[Moving Pictures]

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EDIT to add: Forgot about the new PC-playable races. All bad. Dumb ideas from which the game has never recovered.

Also forgot about the relaxed demi-human level limits and greater class options; those were good, and we'd largely already done that before UA came out.

Preach.

 

[Ron]

I was very excited when I got it, as it was a rules expansion. However, many of the new classes and races were overpowered. I really tried the Cavalier and the Barbarian in my game but I quickly dropped them. I allowed most of the spells, though.

 

[Flights of Fancy]

We used it a lot back in the 1E days and honestly everyone I knew loved the book.

We were teenagers of course, but I never heard complaints about it back in the day.

Ditto. Everyone loved UA in our games a lot. Cavalier, Barbarian, Thief-Acrobat all awesome. Weapon specialization was fantastic!

The only complaint was 90% of the UA's fell apart due to a poor binding process. I think I only ever saw one which didn't fall apart to one degree or another.

 

[Moving Pictures]

Ditto. Everyone loved UA in our games a lot. Cavalier, Barbarian, Thief-Acrobat all awesome. Weapon specialization was fantastic!

The only complaint was 90% of the UA's fell apart due to a poor binding process. I think I only ever saw one which didn't fall apart to one degree or another.

I still have spec in my game.

 

[Lanefan]

I still have spec in my game.

Same here, though it's toned down somewhat from the as-written UA version.

 

[DammitVictor]

UA was surprisingly like a hardcover version of Best of Dragon.

I was dropping in to say this, except there's also-- speaking in hindsight, using the CD-ROM collection-- there really wasn't a single year where UA 1E could have passed as its best Dragon articles.

Most of the book wasn't as aggressively detrimental to the game as people want to remember-- Barbarians and Cavaliers are a self-correcting problem-- but there's just very little in it that adds to the game, especially when compared to other Dragon Magazine concepts that became staples of D&D supplemental rules in subsequent editions.

It's just the least essential supplement in a short catalog that was mostly bangers. It's nowhere near as bad as the worst of the 2e and 3e runoff, but it wasn't nearly as mercifully forgettable, either.

 

[...m...]

...at the time we received every dragon magazine article as canon alongside the core rulebooks, so our group embraced unearthed arcana without complaint...

...it's important to remember that at the time, AD+D was cumbersome and unbalanced by design, so modern complaints about unearthed arcana were instead welcomed as more grist for ubiquitous tables which never ran rules-as-written anyway...