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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9744953" data-attributes="member: 7052563">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.</blockquote>

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