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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8228153" data-attributes="member: 42582">For what it's worth, I've never run an AP and I don't think that has hurt me as a GM.The only scenarios I've run whole cloth, at least in the past 20 years, are some Prince Valiant ones. These tend to be very short (a page or two) with a single situation and some notes suggesting a small number of ways that situation might evolve or yield complications.Because I got my copy of Prince Valiant via the Kickstarter a few years ago, it also came with an Episode Book. Some of these scenarios are more elaborate than Greg Stafford's original ones. It's interesting to see which ones work and which ones don't.When I initiated Jerry Grayson's The Crimson Bull I was a bit anxious, because the scenario sets out a series of about 5 scenes, and I wasn't sure that it would work without heavy-handed/railroad-y GMing. But it turned out that the design was really well done. Like many Prince Valiant scenarios, the whole things rests on the premise that the PCs are knights-errant and hence will provide aid to people who request it from them. Once that happened, the subsequent scenes really served as further framing of the initial situation rather than genuine decision points - in this respect the scenario takes full advantage of the fact that, in Prince Valiant, travel from A to B is typically just an exercise in free narration rather than something involving action declaration and resolution. It turned out that there was really only one moment prior to the climax which pushed things beyond framing and a bit of player response to the associated events, and while that could have turned into the climax instead, at our table it served as part of the rising action in what I think was the fashion intended by the author. I don't think I have anything else by Jerry Grayson, but on the strength of this scenario I would say he's a pretty good RPG designer.Mark Rein*Hagen also has a relatively intricate scenario in the Episode Book, and its contrast with Grayson's is pretty marked. Just reading it through was enough to trigger alarm bells: its scene descriptions begin with phrases like "The Adventurers must now scour the forest to find Quink" and "As soon as they enter the duchy" and "Bryce’s sister . . . receives the conquerors in the great hall . . . One way or another, the Adventurers should be in attendance of this meeting". When I used this scenario I took up most of its key ideas, and the NPCs, but used a different framing and just ignored Rein*Hagen's railroaded sequence of events.My general sense of APs is that they are closer to the Rein*Hagen scenario only longer and hence with even more railroaded sequences of events.</blockquote>

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