I ran my usual weekly Iron Heroes session yesterday. As usual the players were astounding, and the roleplaying moments were brilliant. They came up with some great ideas which are forcing me to rethink and rewrite the events which come next. Unfortunately the pre-written scenario expects the GM to railroad the players, but as a GM I like to allow the players all the freedom they can handle. As such they often head well of the beaten track. They gave me some great moments during this session - managing to implicate themselves as arsonists in a fire which destroyed several houses. The fact that they didn't start the fire is irrelevant - they implicated themselves.

Later on the scenario is going to bring them back to this part of the city, where the plot as written calls for them to get involved in an ongoing investigation. I knew this was coming so I gave them a good starting relationship with the watch. I now suspect things may go a little differently to how I envisaged. It should be lots of fun.

Now the down side - I'm getting increasingly annoyed with the system. It feels like the rules are getting in the way of the action. I know the players and I are on the same page when it comes to the plot and all the scenes where we don't actually have to rely on the rules, but the moment someone uses an ability it feels like the game comes to a grinding halt.

My initial response to this was to ensure all the rules for the abilities the players had were on the character sheets. I hoped this would mean that the players weren't always looking through rule books. Unfortunately this in turn means the character sheets are turning into multi-page novels - and we still need to look things up all the time.

So now I’m seriously thinking about changing the rule-set we use. Iron Heroes is definitely an improvement over D&D, but I’d like to go further. I’ve virtually figured out how to represent all the characters in FATE. I just need to figure out how to represent the Arcanist properly – and then I need to sell the idea to the players. It might be difficult. I think they’ve bought into the ‘crunchy’ bits from the system.