• The system is prep-heavy. Not just mildly prep-heavy but enormously prep-heavy. Even though I've got a prewritten adventure I have to look each and every monster up, work out what all their abilities do, and this takes far more work than it should. I can stat a minion fight in SotC in about 20 seconds. Stating a fight with a ship full of pirates and two named NPCs for last session took the better part of 90 minutes.
• The character sheets are becoming increasingly complex, with more and more powers, point pools and strange rule sets which I need to understand, whilst managing to have nothing of any importance to the narrative anywhere on them.
• Combats are getting longer and longer as the game goes on. Player damage and monster damage are not scaling in line with each other, meaning that combats are now taking an inordinate amount of time. Meanwhile social conflict by the rules is taking seconds. This means the two non-combat characters are getting seconds of limelight compared to the hours the combat characters are getting.
• The adventure path is an implausible sequence of dungeon crawls - and I'm having to make extensive re-writes in order to produce a game with a sensible balance of delving and politicking. In fact I am spending much more time trying to re-write the adventure so that the various bits meet up than I would have to spend if I wrote entirely new material
• The level of railroading in the original adventure path is ridiculous. As an example one of the adventures ends with a storm and a shipwreck. The adventure makes it clear that this will happen, and the next adventure is dependent on the players having just survived a wreck and having to make their way across the island. One of my players is a mage specialising in weather, water and air magic, with the ability to predict and control the weather. Another is specialised in repair magic. There is no way they would have encountered the storm by surprise, if they had they could have calmed it, and even if they had been shipwrecked they could have repaired the ship far quicker than they could have walked across a 400 mile wide island covered in jungle.

To be honest I cannot understand why the players are happy with it. One of the characters is a political demagogue, another a confidence trickster, and neither of them is actually getting to do almost anything. I'm also disappointed that dispite several conversations with them they haven't taken the hint that I am not happy with it.

Anyway, In 2 hours I'm going to give them two simple choice: We will make our way to the end of the current adventure which we will consider the end of the season. We will then take a break from it.

The first choice: Do we either give the game up for good, or will they allow me to give the remainder of the adventure path an extensive re-write. In fact this rewrite will probably consist of working out who all the key players are and what their motivations are, and what's actually going on - i.e. putting me in a position where I can plan each session based on the players actions and not some pre-written script.

As for the second choice: If we rejoin the action do they want to do so using FATE or Burning Wheel.

I feel bad about this. I know from talking to them that they are enjoying the game - a lot, but I feel that is largely due to the sheer amount of work I've had to put in to work around the issues with the system and the to fix the adventure. The simple fact is I am not enjoying it, and haven't really been enjoying it for about half a year now. Its become a chore and I' have better things to be doing with my time.

I wonder how they'll feel about Shab-al-Hiri Roach next week.