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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrozenNorth" data-source="post: 9361268" data-attributes="member: 7020832">To elaborate a bit further …1. The first adventure didn’t seem like it would interest the characters we were playing…despite the fact that we were all playing the adventure’s pregen characters.2. In multiple adventures, the adventure not only told us directly where to go, but directed us to take a particular path to get there.  It was painfully obvious that a particular path was necessary so we could face the pregenerated obstacles the adventure had prepared.3.  The adventure was a series of pregenerated encounters.  In the series of 5 adventures, there appeared to be a single encounter where any action we had taken up to that point modified anything. 4. In two adventures, canon NPCs tagged along.  We had no choice in the matter.5. Cut scenes in combat.  Literally.  In every single combat when you reduced the enemy to 0 hp, a cut scene would occur to rob you of the victory.  Several times the monster ran away (and you couldn’t do anything).  One time, the sun came up snd turned the monster to stone.  One time, the monsters just came back to life so they could be incorporated into the epilogue.6. As mentioned, we played pregen characters.  Multiple times, we encountered NPCs who should know our characters.  This had no impact on how the NPCs reacted to us.7.  Building on that last point.  We arrived at our f’ing home, where my character was the heir to the manor, and the first words out of the current master’s (my father) mouth “What business brings you to Buck Hall?”.  Another adventure involved a pregen interacting with both her mother and her fiancé.  The adventure did not seem to warn the GM that this might derail the adventure.8. The majority of encounters had minimal ways to solve them: roll the appropriate skill.  Even encounters where you could roll more than 1 skill, the consequences were the same regardless of the skill you rolled.9. Adventure 4 started with our characters arrested for actions we did in Adventure 1.  This is the case despite the fact that there were no witnesses or evidence we did anything wrong, and several months had passed between the adventures.Yeah, this did not feel like a neo-trad experience.  This felt like a trad experience done really poorly.Not related to the trad-neo trad issue, but…10. The pregens were created according to the One Ring rules.  However, since the characters were all hobbits, under the One Ring rules they all had virtually the same skills.  This was a major pain as all skills rolls were either “we are all trained in this at roughly the same rank” or “none of us are trained in this so why are we even rolling?”**Note: as with most things, in the hands of a capable adventure writer, you could probably take this element and make it suspenseful, or at least interesting.  That didn’t happen here.</blockquote>

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