Well, after blogging about my initial steps to learn a system in Part One, and fully prepping the session in Part Two, I’ve actually run the one-shot of Runehammer’s Index Card RPG (ICRPG) for the Unconventional GMs channel. As promised, I’d like to take a look at what worked well, and what I’m not so sure about, after the action. The session itself is scheduled to be released in March 2024 – so for now you’ll just have to subscribe to the channel if you want to follow along!

Reviewing and revisiting our sessions is something that I think we don’t do enough of in the hobby, whether it’s just self-reflection while writing up a session report, or doing something like Stars & Wishes at the table. It’s a fantastic tool to improve your play experiences in future, and great to get other perspectives on it from your players.

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What Works

Firstly, the session, and the whole experience, felt very “weird west.” Having the same group of players that we played Deadlands, and Weird Frontiers with, helped; and the rules getting out of the way meant that players could generally narrate what they wanted for flavour and then resolve with a dice roll.

It’s a system with quick, smooth resolution – having a target number for the scene instead of opponents or other situations worked fine to take away some cognitive load from me as GM, and it flowed nicely when we got to combat. Explicitly taking turns in play is something I’m trying to do anyway in my games, but it was good to have this explained in the book as well.

And finally, the general structure of the adventure seemed to work well. An inciting incident, a bit of travel, and a final confrontation is a classic one-shot plot, and it didn’t let me down here.

What I’m Not Sure Did

This is a bit of an unusual one – it’s a simple straightforward system that gets out of the way and lets you concentrate on roleplay. And I’m not sure that’s entirely to my tastes. I think I want a bit of system friction to drive the narrative – either in terms of story-engaging rules (e.g. in FATE) or just system options (e.g. in Savage Worlds). 

While everything went smoothly, I don’t think I had a point where I was surprised by the actions of the dice or we had anything that wasn’t fairly predictable – there was jeopardy, certainly (everyone having 10 hp will do that) – but not narrative unpredictability. Ultimately, did the system add to the experience? I’m not sure it did. To compare it to both of the Western games we’ve played with the same players, while both are totally “trad” they had a level of randomness about it which drove some narrative – either from Savage’s exploding dice turning mooks into heroes, or from Weird Frontiers’ unexpected spell effects and criticals making conflict odds difficult to predict.

In Short

As above, this is a strange one. I’d wholeheartedly recommend Index Card RPG to everyone – it’s a great simple system, with lots of flexibility and some excellent GM advice – but I’m not sure if I’ll run it myself again. Maybe for people new to roleplaying? But I’m not sure I’d enjoy that as much as – say – Into The Odd, where I’d get surprised by outcomes.

Different strokes for different folks, though – yeah? We can’t all like the same things. Have you run or played ICRPG? Does your experience tally with mine? And what did you think of the episode? Let me know in the comments.