Unearthed Arcana, etc.

[zeraser]

grognardia.blogspot.com/2012/09/unearthed-arcana-reprint.html

As old-style D&D enthusiasts, my guess is that most of us aren't super-interested in books of rules addenda. Has anyone here gotten much use out of Unearthed Arcana or Unearthed Arcana-type publications that collect (and legitimate) optional rules?

(My unsolicited opinion is that Unearthed Arcana is mostly useful as an example of what one can do with the game, of how granular the subsystems are, rather than as a set of ready-made rules for actual use.)

[ffilz]

Back in the day I made use of UA for some bits. I know I used the additional proficiency bits, probably some of the magic items and spells. I really did not use the new character classes.

[Sean Michael Kelly]

I have a copy of UA, never used it, found some of it interesting, and keep in on the shelf merely to complete the 1e collection.

[Falconer]

UA is a grab-bag of stuff, some terrible some good. None of it is considered BTB/RAW even in my AD&D® games. The bad stuff is too numerous to list, so I’ll just mention what I DO use.

I may take the “Starting Hit Points for Player Characters” (p. 74) and apply it, not as a rule but just as me being a magnanimous DM.

“Weaponless Combat, System I” (p. 106) is totally fine, and I use it in all my games, albeit, again, as a guideline for how to adjudicate such systems, NOT as a formal rule. Supposedly this goes back to Gary’s house rules circa 1974 (see TD #67, p. 66).

I occasionally use spells from UA — mainly Illusionist spells. I will use a spell or item if a module mentions it, but otherwise rarely go to UA to look for stuff. I recently placed a magic quarterstaff (from UA) in my campaign, though, because the Monk in my game was always asking for something like that.

“Effects of Darkness” (p. 82) is a sound guideline.

“Spell Books” (pp. 79-80) also has some good ideas that I mostly abide by (I don’t use cantrips and I have never charged for spell books—I’m okay leaving that mostly vague).

[terrex]

After a brief stint with Holmes Basic as a young child, I've been playing AD&D 1e exclusively, ever since. We pretty much accepted UA as "core" when it was released. That's a decision I came to regret. It is composed mainly of material previously published in Dragon mags and TSR modules. I was a subscriber to Dragon and that was never considered core in our games. But, a harbound book with the name Gary Gygax on the cover threw us off! A few years ago, I removed it from play in my campaign and that's been a positive.

Many of the new demi-human races and the barbarian and cavalier sub-classes are somewhat destructive to traditional D&D play. We've had some good moments in our games with these classes, maybe even some of the odd races, etc. But, the net effect took us away from the dungeon and away from a game centered on dungeon exploration. Personally, I also loathe weapon specialization which is also added to AD&D in UA.

Most of the magical items are fine and in the same spirit presented in the DMG. I think the spells are mainly fine, especially for the illusionist which improve that class. As Falconer mentions, there are some good rules regarding spell books (i.e. traveling spell books), which make good sense. These parts of UA will probably gradually find their way back into our AD&D 1e campaign. But, I needed to kill the "UA as core" idea in our group, so I pulled the plug on UA completely when I re-started our campaign back in 2008.

Despite some of the negatives above, I look forward to its re-release. It was in play for the majority of my gaming life, and the bindings were never up to the quality of the original-cover MM, PHB, and DMG. So it will nice to have one with a tight binding. Additionally, I'm hoping the errata gets fixed in this release as there are a number of material errors in UA that were later corrected in the Dragon.

[owlorbs]

My group got great use out of it at the time. We incorporated a nice chunk of the modular material including characters, weapons, spells and magic items. It was well received in my group and I had no idea it was shunned until decades later.

[Chainsaw]

We use weapon specialization and some of the spells, but not much else that I can recall. In fact, I do not even know where my copy of UA is and can't remember the last time it was at the table.

Also, before I catch too much flak on specialization, let it be known that my crew experienced a 75% TPK in our first session in their very first fight, when some wandering orcs attacked the party on its way to the dungeon. The lone survivor only lived because he ran like hell. Since then we have had many situations where the party has had to haul ass to stay alive. So, specialization does not necessarily result in superheroic and unstoppable PCs in my experience.

[Deleted]

Sept 24, 2012 18:31:01 GMT -6 Chainsaw said:

The lone survivor only lived because he ran like hell.

Always a valid tactic!

[Chainsaw]

Sept 24, 2012 20:00:16 GMT -6 @dubeers said:

Sept 24, 2012 18:31:01 GMT -6 Chainsaw said:

The lone survivor only lived because he ran like hell.

Always a valid tactic!

Yeah, we all laughed pretty hard. It was a good moment. Then we rolled some new guys in about five minutes and kept truckin'.

[Finarvyn]

AD&D topic, so it gets moved.

I owned a copy of UA back "in the day" and never really used it much. Seems to me like UA was the start of "power creep" in AD&D.

[talysman]

Sept 25, 2012 4:13:31 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

I owned a copy of UA back "in the day" and never really used it much. Seems to me like UA was the start of "power creep" in AD&D.

Same here. I was immediately skeptical of the barbarian, worried about but more accepting of the cavalier (and paladins based on them.) I sort of accepted it as core in that I started writing variant AD&D classes based on some UA principals, but none of it got play.

Some of the spells are OK and might show up in the future, when I get an OD&D group back together. I'm OK with the cantrip idea, although I'm not liking the implementation.

[jmccann]

Sept 25, 2012 11:46:25 GMT -6 talysman said:

I'm OK with the cantrip idea, although I'm not liking the implementation.

Me too. I always was kind of interested in the articles in the Dragon, but never actually used them in play.

[aramis]

back when I ran AD&D 1E, UA was "Rules" in my games. I used the races, the classes, and the spells. I used the weapon proficiencies changes, too.

[zeraser]

All very interesting - thanks for the responses.

Did anybody take it as a model for making one's own rules variations, extra classes/spells, etc.? Maybe you were already doing that before UA came out, so it wasn't important to you in that capacity?

[aramis]

Sept 26, 2012 7:07:07 GMT -6 zeraser said:

All very interesting - thanks for the responses.

Did anybody take it as a model for making one's own rules variations, extra classes/spells, etc.? Maybe you were already doing that before UA came out, so it wasn't important to you in that capacity?

I didn't. I didn't start rules tinkering until much later... college. I instead tried to write wholly new systems... and failed. But then, when UA came out, I wasn't playing much AD&D anyway - so when I did, I did so to save time and effort of having to teach the game I wanted to run... in 1985, that would have been TFT. (I was running Traveller a lot.)

[talysman]

Sept 26, 2012 7:07:07 GMT -6 zeraser said:

All very interesting - thanks for the responses.

Did anybody take it as a model for making one's own rules variations, extra classes/spells, etc.? Maybe you were already doing that before UA came out, so it wasn't important to you in that capacity?

Yes. I still have notes from this period on a bunch of new stats similar to Comeliness and some classes like a Duelist (which, if I remember, was another Cavalier subclass.) But I never used them and now they seem like a bad idea.

[Deleted]

I find extra classes to be fairly useless, but more spells, magic items and monsters are always welcome.

[Baron]

We used UA for all our games, from when it came out. I don't think anyone used a thief-acrobat or barbarian, but we made extensive use of cavaliers and paladins, weapon specialization, extra spells and all the rest. It didn't motivate us to house-rule more than we already did, and we freely tried out Dragon articles, some of which stayed in use throughout. (Such as variant initiative and psionic rules.)

[Mr. Darke]

I wasn't big on the classes but, I liked the sub-races, spells and magic items from the book. I'm with the rest of you that used it as a grab bag rather than a full on rules update.