What edition of Unknown Armies do you like best. I like the first ed rather good. But I find the second ed a bit more ordered and easy to find things in. Also hard cover helps preserve a book that often receive much handling during the course of the game.
hands-down, second edition is my favorite because of the thorough Mac Attax stuff, Break Today and To Go, especially
I do like the Goal and Progress rules in the third edition, as well as the cork board suggestion for cabal creation, which my group and I used, my GM said it made it very easy for her to figure out what happened next, but I'm not fond of some of the new setting material which is a bit more conservative than I enjoy fantasizing about.
...and I just noticed this is a 13 year old thread
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I really liked 2nd edition, but there are lots of improvements in 3rd edition.
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I like second edition (which is basically, a re-organized, clarified and expanded version of 1st edition) best of all.
In particular, I like second edition better than third edition. It's almost as if third edition ... is less inspired, trying too hard to be cool whereas second edition succeeds with natural panache. Third edition codifies a lot of stuff into a cumbersome set of very abstract rules which a) often fail to produce "sensible" results and b) detract from the visceral, intuitive feel of first/second editions -- basically, they hinder gameplay more than they support it.
I really like how 3e puts the madness meters front and center, and supports organic changes to a character as they are confronted by stress and trauma. While retaining and expanding on the DIY skills of 1e/2e in the Identity mechanics.
I also love Group Objectives and the Relationship mechanics. Iām less thrilled with many of the new Adept schools but I really like almost every Avatar path. I find it super easy to adapt content from older editions into 3e, and the Campaign Starter Kits make for really interesting One Shots which is what I used to use UA for most of the time, Jailbreak convention games.
Setting changes in 3e make the cosmology a lot more positive and humanistic than was the case in earlier editions. But no spoilers here.
I am almost a year into what started as an online Raiders of the Lost Mart game that has become a globe trotting Cosmic campaign as Tori Hill has become the Godwalker of the Captain.
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I have to admit, I do like the focus on the madness meters. I think the rules are more streamlined in 3rd edition and that's a good thing. One of the things I was most impressed about in 1st edition was the novel way it handled stats and, of course, the madness meters. And I did like the simplified role mechanics.
My group still clings pretty hard to the hardened vs flight/fight/fetal model. It works for us and we tend to pare that down to bare bones anyhow.
I just didn't like the setting very much. But that's okay. It's UA. You're going to make most of the setting up yourself anyway. We just ignored all the new world background stuff.
(For instance, in our game, I'm basically the ex-cop-turned-leg breaker from Syfy's Happy, my wife is a Mac Attax version of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmitt, the GM's husband is The Caveman from The Caveman's Valentine and the other guy in our group is a died-in-the-wool old man who gets magical powers of bureaucracy by keeping strict triplicate records and never using electronic filing methods. my PC calls him and his cabal The Paper Illuminati)
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I have a huge amount of affection for 1st edition, it really establishes all of the fundamentals and there's heaps of useful or good stuff in the sourcebooks. 2nd ed is nice and looks good, with a lot of material from 1st ed sourcebooks in the main rulebook, but doesn't really add a whole lot else. From what I've seen of 3rd ed I'm not sure if it's something I really need to buy and I'm not hugely keen on ongoing metaplots being worked into new editions WoD style. 1st and 2nd ed give us all these characters like Alex Abel and factions like TNI and leave GMs to decide what to do with them, and then in 3rd ed it's all been decided. Not too enthused about that.