Things so dumb in pre-made scenarios, you should've beaten writers senseless.

[Mutation]

Have you ever seen something in a pre-written scenario that was dumb enough to fall into the "player/DM should be beaten senseless" category?

[jadarx]

The 'reveal' in Deadlands meta-plotastic 'Heart O' Darkness'

The guy whose having you rescue Stone from prison is in fact, Stone from the future!

[Elemental]

Blood Treachery: The Order of Hermes wages war on the Tremere by....breaking into their strongholds at night and having kung-fu fights. I can come up with a starting character who'd be better at vampire killing than those clowns. Oh, and they ally with the Tzimisce, because it's not like they're able to motivate or manipulate any fellow mages into fighting undead abominations.

Time of Tumult: An adventure for Solar Exalted that centers around a dungeon. With a no-save instant death trap, because that's just so Exalted, right? When I ran it, I realised the role of wandering monsters--if you don't have them, there's no reason for the rogue character not to check every 10ft square of floor for traps, a strategy the book encourages with a host of illogical "screw you" traps. And a bad guy who can be shut down within 10 seconds of meeting him by saying "I use Motive-Discerning Technique on this really suspicious character."

[seneschal]

Originally Posted by Mutation

Have you ever seen something in a pre-written scenario that was dumb enough to fall into the "player/DM should be beaten senseless" category?

Eek! Remind me never to let you play any of the scenarios I've written!

[That Idiot]

Disease of an Evil Conscience for Exalted was full of dumb things that made me want to beat someone. A seven dots of essence god that is 'rich in wyld magics' that forces the PCs follow the plot was the worst, but the whole thing was SO bad that beatings must be administered to those involved.

[Eurhetemec]

The utter predictability with which your employer tried to screw you over in a lot of the published Shadowrun adventures made me want the writers to be given a good telling-off, at the very least. It's like, guys, that's not even a twist after the second or third time, it's just Standard Operating Procedure.

I should be able to think of a lot of D&D adventures that fit in the category, but I seem to have erased the details from my mind. That's probably a good thing.

[Black Vulmea]

Any adventure that begins with, "Okay, your characters are in prison . . . "

[ShannonA]

Somewhere there's an Ars Magica adventure, I think by Ken Cliffe, where an important object gets stolen from the characters.

The adventure tells the GM to collect all the character sheets and (secretly) erase the item from the sheet of the character in question.

We still laugh about that, and talk about how if we found an item erased from our sheet, we'd think it was a mistake and write it right back down.

[kakita toshimoko]

Originally Posted by Black Vulmea

Any adventure that begins with, "Okay, your characters are in prison . . . "

Most of my characters would never be taken alive...unless that was the plan anyway.

[SuperGod2099]

I find that pre-written adventure often provide very few guidelines as to how the characters get from scene to scene, especially if the characters are too passive. The Scion and Feng Shui included adventures were both guilty of this.

I caught it in Scion and didn't run the adventure. I believe (IIRC) that the Feng Shui one assumed the characters would search their enemies and begin actively pursuing their bosses, despite having just defeated them in a restaurant they happened to be eating in, and having no real stake in the situation. I got around it by essentially going, "Hey, bare with me here, the adventures that way.", but it was a bit annoying.

It's a problem that I seem to see in a lot of otherwise good products, at some point scene 5 just happens after scene 4, without a good connection, or with just one way to get there. You just need to read it first and figure it out, but it burned me a few times as an inexperienced GM.