Reddit reviews Unearthed Arcana (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)

UA has recently become a way for WotC to crowdsource their playtesting while at the same time run some community building. It was a very interesting decision, influenced, I believe, by the boom in indie electronic gaming, with developers using devlogs and other stuff as a community building tool (a lesson, in turn, taken from the Lean Startup model, I think). I might be wrong though; I'm not exactly a DnD history buff. But up to 3/3.5e (as far as I know) it was a compendium of house rules used by their designers when running their games. Imo it is frankly what makes DnD bearable and I'm glad they turned it into a blog - though I think they've become a tad more conservative because of it and would enjoy seeing the crazier alternative rules that usually came up when UA were books.

Variant setting specific classes and rules aren't exactly 'hacking' when, as I mentioned in my reply to /u/Ghotistyx_, the system is as hermetic as DnD. While they are good gameplay alternatives and might provide some hacking insight in simpler systems, they don't exactly break down why the balance works the way it does. But this hermetism works in line with WotCs business model of selling tons of books, anyway. I'm not a fan, but doubtlessly 5e is way more interesting than previous editions in terms of making users less afraid to come up with new stuff.

Like the other guy said, Unearthed Arcana is an amazing official book of tested alternative rules for 3.5 D&D.


I know when I implemented it, the game got better. The two casters in my group dropped all their high-level spells for more mid-range and we totally lost the "I can't use this spell, what if the next room is worse?" mentality and combat was less spiky.