UO Second Age

I started playing a few months before T2A came out. I'm trying to recall the rules before the expansion came out. Some of the major things I can remember from my brief experience are:

- No thieves guild, you could create a brand new 50 snoop/50 stealing character and immediately start stealing from players
- Items weren't auto-returned if said thief was killed shortly after stealing

- Healers would heal grey players, this again goes back to thieves as I recall when a wandering healer was near a bank you would see 5-6 corpses of the same thief as they just kept ressing over and over again.
- You could "Resurrect with Penalties" which was a horrible option which would lower your skills significantly and guarantee that you would probably just get killed again right away

- You could cast spells with weapons equipped, no pre-casting or anything like that, you just kept your halberd equipped all the time
- No Meditiation skill, mages wore full plate without any mana regen penalty

- Evaluating Intelligence and Anatomy existed but were worthless skills that had nothing to do with augmenting melee damage/spell damage/healing

- Tents
- Looser house placement rules
- Much less secure housing; you couldn't change your locks or lock down items, if someone got ahold of your key you were screwed

- You could gate monsters. I seem to recall encountering houses on Moonglow filled with ogres, etc

- No "long term murder counts" only the 8 hour short term counter, and there was no "I must consider my sins" command

Are any of these wrong? Am I missing any big ones? Seems like T2A rules aren't so lax anymore once you recall what it was like beforehand.

I think you need more stealing, like 60, to join the thieves guild so you can steal from other players?

Dont forget the archers shooting on the run and you couldnt outrun the arrows.

Budner wrote:I think you need more stealing, like 60, to join the thieves guild so you can steal from other players?

He's referencing pre-T2A. There were several months when anyone could steal from anyone.


The earliest days of public UO were some of the best times I've had on the game, T2A is when it started to slope (for me anyway.)

Ulfrigg wrote:Dont forget the archers shooting on the run and you couldnt outrun the arrows.

Hehe how could I forget that? I don't think I ever equipped a bow after T2a came out.

It wasn't murder counts. It was reputation. Dishonorable made you grey always. Dark lord and dread lord were red. If you had higher reputation, you could pk and stay blue even when attacking.

And add, offensive spells castable in town. EQ summoned 2 guards per person per hit with it, causing interesting situations at

And recalling under placed houses, as well as towers with front doors blocked off by tents

Ulfrigg wrote:Dont forget the archers shooting on the run and you couldnt outrun the arrows.

This untrue.

Weapons, including archery, could be dodged from the game inception until UOR for melee weapons and pub 15 or 16 for archery.

Also, archery had the "plant and shoot" restriction since the official release of the game. There was never a point in the game that you could run and shoot.

Alpha could be an entirely different story but its definitely not the case for the actual game itself.

I remember being able to make runes inside homes.

You had to be inside when the home was re-deeded and you would be "floating" above the ground where you could then mark the runes.

Had a very nervous time when we demolished a tower to mark 20+ runes, in every room and the roof ... put the tower back and the runes worked perfectly.

We never used the door on the tower, we would recall directly from runes in the bank. When we had too many people and not enough runes, we made a "gate house" ... a totally locked and barracaded small house containing a tower rune.

Key security and paranoia were serious concerns.

(I've tried marking runes this way on T2A but it no longer works)

Anyone remember 1-hit weapons which are very over powered?

Downs wrote:It wasn't murder counts. It was reputation. Dishonorable made you grey always. Dark lord and dread lord were red. If you had higher reputation, you could pk and stay blue even when attacking.

Damn. I never got in on any of that, I started playing around July 1998 after the notoriety patch but before T2a.

Pac wrote:

Downs wrote:It wasn't murder counts. It was reputation. Dishonorable made you grey always. Dark lord and dread lord were red. If you had higher reputation, you could pk and stay blue even when attacking.

Damn. I never got in on any of that, I started playing around July 1998 after the notoriety patch but before T2a.

I remember many dishonorable grey people spaming explanations about their reputation status in dungeons, in the hope that other blues would leave them alone.

Then a group of Dark Lords come over wiping the dungeon from level 4 to level 1.

Faust wrote:

Ulfrigg wrote:Dont forget the archers shooting on the run and you couldnt outrun the arrows.

This untrue.

Weapons, including archery, could be dodged from the game inception until UOR for melee weapons and pub 15 or 16 for archery.

Also, archery had the "plant and shoot" restriction since the official release of the game. There was never a point in the game that you could run and shoot.

Alpha could be an entirely different story but its definitely not the case for the actual game itself.

This is entirely correct. I have done thorough research on this and have to say it's one of the bigger UO myths.

That just shows you guys dint play that era, i got killed by a pk named Stygia all the time that using a Heavy Crossbow in the era. I guess you had to be there to remeber these things and not go after what you heard from people.

Vavara wrote:I remember being able to make runes inside homes.

You had to be inside when the home was re-deeded and you would be "floating" above the ground where you could then mark the runes.

Had a very nervous time when we demolished a tower to mark 20+ runes, in every room and the roof ... put the tower back and the runes worked perfectly.

You couldn't re-deed homes back then. I don't think re-deeding came out until they added home owners, before that all you had was a key you had to double-click to lock/unlock your doors. Not trying to be like Faust and dropping "truth bombs" but well, I guess I am sometimes

With that said, you could use the gate under the door trick (when gates appeared in front of you, instead of under you) to break into houses, or to mark runes under floor boards.

RoadKill wrote:

Vavara wrote: With that said, you could use the gate under the door trick (when gates appeared in front of you, instead of under you) to break into houses, or to mark runes under floor boards.

If I recall correctly, if you could get a wandering healer near someone's home you could run inside as a ghost and trigger the res while inside their home to break in.