Unearthed Arcana with 2nd edition logo
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 11:30 am 
 

For the most part I always like the Unearthed Arcana.  But I particularly hated the barbarian class.  If for no other reason than the ability at 8th level to summon THE BARBARIAN HORDE.

Pretty frickin' ridiculous.  :roll:

  

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Post Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 1:15 pm 
 

I hate the barbarian class in general....

Why special bonuses to AC?  When barbarians don't wear armor that makes them easier to hit....that's what is barbaric about them.

I also hate the Conan-in-a-loincloth feel of most barbarian rules...if only because the character Conan always wore the heaviest armor that was both practical and available.  In fact, the armor he is wearing is a factor in many of the Conan stories.

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Post Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 7:05 pm 
 

bclarkie wrote:I love the UA.  :D

Me too. I think it's my favorite T$R hardback.



  


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Post Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 8:29 pm 
 

You know I just realized something.  Anyone find it fascinating that this thing came out at least 2 years after 1st edition was supposedly done and at least 1 full year after TSR offloaded all the WSG & DSG overstock with the Wild Things and Dark & Hidden Ways supplements repsectively?


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Post Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 10:35 pm 
 

TSR did this with several items that were selling well.  In fact, there was even precedent from a decade earlier: the OD&D set was reprinted and sold for several years after it had been "retired".

Foul

  


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Post Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 11:11 pm 
 

For the UA fans, much of the original materials in UA were published in Dragon first, and in several cases the versions in Dragon differ from those in UA, and might be worth checking out sometime.  These include the classes, new spells, weapon specialization rules, and more.  There's a thread on this somewhere over on Knights & Knaves, IIRC (or ENWorld?), where I do a comparison between the Dragon 63 barbarian and the UA barbarian.


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Post Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 12:17 am 
 

Unearthed Arcana was essentially a half-solution forced upon the game by the informal rulebook that many players were already using.

Dragon magazine was essentially a magazine of rule variants, and the classes and rule suggestions in its pages were being widely photocopied and used as rules by all kinds of people.  

Unearthed Arcana was an attempt to round up some of those rules and make them official, as Gary Gygax perceived "official."  That way, we could all be "official" again.

Business-wise, it was a good decision.  A re-hash of previous material folded together into another best seller.

It is the kooky, out of balance nature of some of those rules that created problems.  Suddenly, Asmodeus became a fairly average encounter for 12th level or so adventurers...as the monsters received no corresponding upgrade.

The same problem crops up in every "option" or "complete" type book TSR produced.  In order to generate sales, the books had to give player characters some sort of advantage that was worth paying for.

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Post Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 9:45 am 
 

dcas wrote:Me too. I think it's my favorite T$R hardback.


Yeah, I like it too.  It's one of the few rulebooks that I return to every so often for a quick re-read.


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Post Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 4:44 pm 
 

Did anybody have a Cavalier, played well, that lived for more than a few sessions?

I used one as an NPC in a campaign I ran for a while.  The Players got so fed up with him that they tried to kill him off, so he left.


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Post Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 4:50 pm 
 

bombadil wrote:
Yeah, I like it too.  It's one of the few rulebooks that I return to every so often for a quick re-read.


I also like UA. Certainly more than the other books printed around the same time.


And I could've bought these damn modules off the 1$ rack!!!

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Post Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 8:56 am 
 

I just noticed I have the gold logo as well.

http://brute.acaeum.com/unearthed-front-1.jpg

12th printing, October 1991, ISBN below printing.

If there's something in this printing I can look up for you, just let me know!

I think it's an interesting book, and this one has no binding problems.

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Post Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 10:55 am 
 

I have been watching for these logo'd books on ebay lately and so far this year I have spotted 3 such copies of Oriental Adventures - none going for more than $10 so I think these are about as rare as a Deities & Demigods with Cthulu.

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Post Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 6:27 pm 
 

FormCritic wrote:It is the kooky, out of balance nature of some of those rules that created problems.

I think you had to pick and choose.  A lot of UA was decent -- some of the magic items, spells, and variant races.  The classes were horrible, in my opinion.

However, I don't recall anything being significantly unbalancing.  There was always this theory that <fill_in_the_blank_from_UA> would horribly upset entire campaigns with droughts and plagues and the foretelling of the apocalypse, etc., but it never seemed to actually happen in our games.  (The lame-ass drow cavalier just bit the dust, and we moved on with our lives.)

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Post Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2007 10:55 am 
 

I was prompted by this thread to break out my 2nd Edition PHB, and lo and behold it has the old angled T-S-R logo on it, not the gold "2nd Edition" angled logo.

Mars wrote:I have been watching for these logo'd books on ebay lately and so far this year I have spotted 3 such copies of Oriental Adventures - none going for more than $10 so I think these are about as rare as a Deities & Demigods with Cthulu.

Well, they might be more rare but also less collectible because they don't contain any "forbidden" content.



  
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