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

[g026r]

Originally Posted by Lord Apathy

Maybe the employer only plans on having to pay the snipers...

I said deadEarth, not Shadowrun.

I'm trying to think of a few real forehead-slappers that I've come across in Call of Cthulhu modules, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment.

[Coyote's Own]

Originally Posted by g026r

I said deadEarth, not Shadowrun.

I'm trying to think of a few real forehead-slappers that I've come across in Call of Cthulhu modules, but I'm drawing a blank at the moment.

Most that I read suffered from this

Originally Posted by Garlick

Any "mystery" where the PC's make or break it with their rolls to get clues. It made me a radical pro-GUMSHOE activist.

[zluth]

I ran a module once that if you removed the adjectives and adverbs from the first sentence it read; The tower towers like a tower.

[The Unshaven]

There were some bemusing decisions in the Cthulhutech modules in the core book.

Basically, as one example there's a plotpoint which only happens when the PCs hand over an Extremely Important book to someone for translation overnight.

...Which, you know, they would be entirely willing to do.

And then it turns out that the person they gave the book to was evil, and stuff.

The thing that confused me was that there's no discussion of what to do if the PCs don't hand over the book. There's no information at all, from memory.

So it's not a simple railroad, or the GM is on it as well.

EDIT: It's not 'beaten senseless,' which I tend to ignore as a framework anyway, but more of a 'Why would you DO that?'

- The Unshaven.

[g026r]

Originally Posted by Coyote's Own

Most that I read suffered from this

That was a common problem, but I'm not certain I'd call it "beaten the writers senseless" so much as an artifact of early game design that should have been replaced long ago.

Though one non-CoC one did pop to mind: The Campaign Book Vol. 1: Fantasy, White Wolf's first professional non-magazine publication (and pre-dating their merger with Lion Rampant) is a collection of skeletal scenarios/mini-campaigns that vary in detail from more of a campaign setting with story possibilities, to brief sketches of the setting combined with a number of events that occur as you guide the players from place to place in order to advance the story.

The first one in the book -- Astria, Realm of Faerie by Ken Cliffe -- is of the latter variety. It spends a decent amount of time in the scene and background descriptions talking up this one particularly baddie, making it obvious that he's the Big Bad which the PCs have to take down to save the land.

That all said, when it comes time for the final showdown with him, a treasure that the GM is told to make certain the PCs pick up and can't get rid of (going so far as to suggest adding it to their inventory without them knowing, IIRC) promptly turns into the plot's Gandalf/Eleminster-analogue (presumed dead following a previous encounter where he defeated the monster by GM fiat). This NPC then goes on to -- you guessed it -- defeat the big bad by GM fiat. At which the PCs are then dropped into a fight with characters who have had no real plot relevance/mention up to this point.

So: GM fiat of winning a fight, not once but twice (and there aren't that many important fights) -- including against the talked-up Big Bad.

(That mini-campaign also had some odd suggestions for how to start it off, which leads me to believe that Ken Cliffe may have indeed been the author of the AM scenario that Shannon mentioned.)

[olshanski]

I really liked the D&D 3.5 mega-adveture called "Shades of Gray" by Michael Proteau.

Except for one niggling thing:
Chapter 2 takes place in the town of Darnagal and the key NPCs involved are Donegal and Dorrestal.

There is no way my players would have been able to keep those straight. I could barely keep them stratight and I was the GM.

I had to rename 2 of the 3 and pencil in the changes.

[Max]

Originally Posted by Black Vulmea

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

...unless it's immediately followed by "Care to tell me how you got there?"

I've both played and run that variation a couple of times, and it works wonders to make the scenario more enjoyable.

[AmesJainchill]

There's a Star Wars free adventure where, for the climax, the PCs get caught in a four-way fight between some criminal scum, Imperials, and the locals.

In a sandstorm.

A magic sandstorm that stops radio transmissions.

Apparently the big thing about the fight is misidentifying your target, as the storm lowers your effective vision radius to 10' or so.

Which is, of course, so very Star Wars.

However, there's another adventure where it says:

Originally Posted by The First To Strike

Otherwise, they shoot first at any hero who doesn’t have cover, and then at any hero who seems heavily armed. If a character shows a lightsaber, that character is targeted with frag grenades until the stormtroopers run out.

Which is satisfying in sadistic anti-Jedi kind of way.

[Yodelero]

The Horn of Roland The first published adventure for Lords of Creation, begins with a murder mystery, so far so good, set in the modern day, ok fine, at a role-playing game convention- *facepalm*

[Professor Phobos]

I'm surprised I'm the first person to mention Songs of the Fantari in Fatal Experiments.

This is the one where the PCs are captured by Deep Ones, imprisoned and then basically raped to death. I mean the title of the book was "Fatal Experiments" but damn...